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About this quote

What does it mean?
Lem recounts a line about Trurl building a machine that can create anything starting with the letter n.
In plain terms
A machine was made to build anything with the letter n.
What can you take from it?
Creative constraints can lead to imaginative inventions.

Where it applies

  • writing science fiction
  • brainstorming ideas
  • discussing engineering

Putting it to work

  • exploring design constraints
  • inventing fictional tech

Questions to consider

  • How do limits spark creativity?
  • What would you build?

Another view

The constraint limits the machine's usefulness to only certain objects.

More from Stanislaw Lem

  1. Finis vitae sed non amoris

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  2. Take a good look at this world, how riddled it is with huge, gaping holes, how full of Nothingness, the Nothingness that fills the bottomless void between the …

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  3. Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.

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