The Invincible
First edition (Polish) | |
| Author | Stanisław Lem |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Piotr Borowy |
| Language | Polish |
| Genre | Hard Science Fiction |
| Publisher | Wydawnictwo MON (original) Seabury Press (English-language original edition) MIT Press (English-language revised edition) |
Publication date | 1963 |
| Publication place | Poland |
Published in English | 1973 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages | 316 pp (first edition, paperback) |
| OCLC | 488362 (English-language edition) |
The Invincible (Polish: Niezwyciężony) is a hard science fiction novel by Polish writer Stanisław Lem, serialized in Gazeta Bialostocka in 1963 and published as a book in 1964.
The Invincible originally appeared as the title story in Lem's collection Niezwyciężony i inne opowiadania ("The Invincible and Other Stories"). A translation into German was published in 1967; an English translation by Wendayne Ackerman, based on the German one, was published in 1973. A direct translation into English from Polish, by Bill Johnston, was published in 2006.
It was one of the first novels to explore the ideas of microrobots, smartdust, artificial swarm intelligence, and "necroevolution" (a term suggested by Lem in the novel for the evolution of non-living matter).