''The Hunt'' ( pl, Polowanie) is a long unknown

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...

short story by

Stanisław Lem Stanisław Herman Lem (; 12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction and essays on various subjects, including philosophy, futurology, and literary criticism. Many of his science fiction stories are of satirical ...

about a robot hunted by people. It superficially resembles another Lem's short story ''The Hunt'' from ''

Tales of Pirx the Pilot ''Tales of Pirx the Pilot'' is a science fiction stories collection by Polish author Stanisław Lem, about a spaceship pilot named Pirx. The first collection of stories about Pirx was published in 1965 in the Soviet Union in Russian under the ...

'', however the two are completely different. It was written before the Pirx story, probably in late 1950s. It was found in Lem's archives and published in ''

Przekrój ''Przekrój'' (; ''Cross-section'') was the oldest Polish weekly newsmagazine in operation, established in 1945 in Kraków. After temporary closure in 2013, it was bought by photographer Tomasz Niewiadomski and subsequently relaunched in December ...

'' magazine in 2018. An English translation was published in 2019. The Hunt
''Przekrój'', May 20, 2019. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Stanisław Bereś Stanisław Bereś (born 4 May 1950) is a Polish poet, literary critic, translator and literary historian.

"A Typescript Found in a Folder"
''Przekrój'', May 20, 2019 (Polish-language version: December 5, 2018)Mikołaj Gliński
"Unknown Stanisław Lem Short Story Resurfaces after More than 50 Years"

culture.pl Culture.pl is a large web portal devoted to Polish culture. It was founded by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in March 2001. Written in Polish, English and Russian, the site promotes the work of Polish artists around the world and is a popular infor ...

, May 22, 2019

Plot

A runaway is chased by humans with dogs. As the story evolves, it becomes clear that it is a robot, an intelligent machine, one of many created by humans to be hunted. For this reason it was endowed with wit and strength and an ability to be afraid, so that it would run away and make a hunt interesting: "... a tangled plot full of surprises, a forest strategy, a duel of cunning, of tactics, including laying double trails, dodging, looping the scent back on itself, crossing white-water streams and aerial bridges formed by fallen trees". A little girl helps him to hide, but eventually it turns out that her goal was to lay her hands on a gun and shoot the hunted robot herself.

Discussion

The manuscript of story was found by Lem's secretary Wojciech Zemek several decades before the publication, but misled by the resemblance of both the title and the plot, he filed it together with the drafts for the Pirx story. It is well known that Lem was ruthlessly burning his unpublished works, and the researchers were puzzled why Lem kept this one.

Stanisław Bereś Stanisław Bereś (born 4 May 1950) is a Polish poet, literary critic, translator and literary historian.

attempts to explain this as follows. Lem never wrote and seldom spoke about his life during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

in Nazi-occupied

Lwow Lviv ( uk, Львів) is the largest city in western Ukraine, and the seventh-largest in Ukraine, with a population of . It serves as the administrative centre of Lviv Oblast and Lviv Raion, and is one of the main cultural centres of Ukraine ...

. However one can decipher subtle hints about his experiences of that time in various Lem's works of fiction. Bereś points out an obvious parallel of the runaway's hopeless struggle for his life from ''The Hunt'' story, with the experience of the

Jews Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

during

the Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

, including Lem's own. Therefore Bereś suggests that Lem felt overexposing himself in the story, therefore he set it aside and eventually wrote another, a more entertaining version and possibly forgot about the older manuscript. The two versions of ''The Hunt'' are very different. One is a story of Pirx chasing a damaged mining robot on the Moon struck by a meteorite and firing its laser at any detected motion. On the other hand, the rediscovered version is told from the point of view of the robot designed to be a prey, who is, "like a Roman

gladiator A gladiator ( la, gladiator, "swordsman", from , "sword") was an armed combatant who entertained audiences in the Roman Republic and Roman Empire in violent confrontations with other gladiators, wild animals, and condemned criminals. Some gla ...

, fighting the longest possible struggle for its miserable electronic life".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hunt Works by Stanisław Lem 1950s short stories Science fiction short stories Fictional humanoid robots

Plot

Discussion

See also

References