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In A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem presents a collection of book reviews of nonexistent works of literature--works that, in many cases, could not possibly be written. Embracing postmodernism's "games for games' sake" ethos, Lem joins the contest with hilarious and grotesque results, lampooning the movement's self-indulgence and exploiting its mannerisms.

Beginning with a review of his own book, Lem moves on to tackles (or create pastiches of) the French new novel, James Joyce, pornography, authorless writing, and Dostoevsky, while at the same time ranging across scientific topics, from cosmology to the pervasiveness of computers. The result is a metafictional tour de force by one of the world's most popular writers.

Table of Contents:

• The New Cosmogony - shortfiction
• Non Serviam - shortfiction
• De Impossibilitate Vitae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi by Cezar Kouska - shortfiction
• Die Kultur als Fehler by Wilhelm Klopper - shortfiction
• Being Inc. by Alastair Waynewright - shortfiction
• Toi by Raymond Seurat - shortfiction
• Odysseus of Ithaca by Kuno Mlatje - shortfiction
• U-Write-It - shortfiction
• Idiota by Gian Carlo Spallanzani - shortfiction
• Pericalypsis by Joachim Fersengeld - shortfiction
• Rien du tout, ou la consequence by Solange Marriot - shortfiction
• Gruppenfuhrer Louis XVI by Alfred Zellermann - shortfiction
• Sexplosion by Simon Merrill - shortfiction
• Gigamesh by Patrick Hannahan - shortfiction
• Les Robinsonades by Marcel Coscat - shortfiction
• A Perfect Vacuum by S. Lem - shortfiction

These wickedly authentic introductions to twenty-first-century books preface tomes on teaching English to bacteria, using animated X-rays to create "pornograms," and analyzing computer-generated literature through the science of "bitistics." "Lem, a science fiction Bach, plays in this book a googleplex of variations on his basic themes".

Contains three apocryphal essays--"One Human Minute," "The Upside-Down Revolution ," and "The World as Cataclysm"