The Invincible
First edition (Polish)
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| Author | Stanislaw Lem |
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| Cover artist | Piotr Borowy |
| Country | Poland |
| Language | Polish |
| Genre | Hard Science Fiction |
| Publisher |
Wydawnictwo MON (original) Seabury Press (English-language) |
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Publication date
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1964 |
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Published in English
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1973 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages | 316 pp (first edition, paperback) |
| OCLC | 488362 (English-language edition) |
The Invincible (Polish: Niezwyciężony) is a science fiction novel written by Stanisław Lem and published 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 of the German translation was published in 1973.
It was one of the first novels to explore the ideas of microrobots, artificial swarm intelligence and "necroevolution", a term suggested by Lem for evolution of non-living matter.
A very powerful and armed interstellar space ship called Invincible lands on the planet Regis III which seems uninhabited and bleak, to investigate the loss of its sister ship, Condor. During the investigation, the crew finds evidence of a form of quasi-life, born through evolution of autonomous, self-replicating machines, apparently left behind by an alien civilization which had inhabited the planet a very long time ago.
The protagonists come to speculate that evidently a kind of evolution must have taken place under the selection pressures of "robot wars", with the only surviving form being swarms of minuscule, insect-like micromachines. Individually, or in small groups, they are quite harmless and capable of only very simple behavior. When they feel threatened, they can assemble into huge clouds, able to travel at a high speed and even to climb to the top of troposphere. These swarms display complex behavior arising from self-organization and can incapacitate any intelligent threat by a powerful surge of electromagnetic interference. Condor's crew suffered a complete memory erasure as a consequence of attacks from these "clouds".
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