A rediscovered early short story about a robot designed to be hunted
What the Work Is
The Hunt (Polish: Polowanie) is a science fiction short story by Stanisław Lem, written in the late 1950s but unpublished for decades. The manuscript was discovered in the author’s archives and first appeared in print in the Polish magazine Przekrój in 2018, with an English translation following in 2019. Though it shares its title with a later story from Lem’s Tales of Pirx the Pilot collection, the two works are entirely distinct narratives. This earlier version is a long, relatively unknown piece that remained hidden for roughly sixty years.
What the Book Is About
The story follows a runaway being pursued by human hunters with dogs. As the narrative unfolds, the reader discovers that the fugitive is not a person but a robot—an intelligent machine created specifically to be hunted. The robot is one of many manufactured for this purpose, deliberately endowed with wit, strength, and the capacity for fear so that it will flee and make the chase genuinely engaging. The hunt becomes an elaborate contest of wits: the robot employs forest strategy, lays double trails, doubles back on its own scent, crosses white-water streams, and uses fallen trees as aerial bridges in a desperate duel of cunning and tactics.
The narrative takes a striking turn when a little girl offers to hide the robot. Her apparent kindness proves deceptive: her true intention is to obtain a gun and shoot the hunted machine herself.
Key Ideas and Themes
The story operates on several levels of meaning. Most immediately, it is a suspenseful chase narrative told from the perspective of the prey rather than the hunter—a choice that aligns the reader’s sympathies with the hunted robot. The robot’s predicament is explicitly compared to that of a Roman gladiator, fighting to prolong its “miserable electronic life” as long as possible against overwhelming odds.
The deeper significance of the story lies in its historical context. Lem was known to have ruthlessly destroyed his unpublished works, and researchers have long puzzled over why he preserved this particular manuscript. The scholar Stanisław Bereś offers a compelling explanation rooted in biography. Lem rarely spoke about his experiences during World War II in Nazi-occupied Lwów, but subtle traces of that period appear throughout his fiction. Bereś draws a direct parallel between the robot’s hopeless struggle for survival and the experience of Jews during the Holocaust—including Lem’s own experience. The story’s depiction of a sentient being hunted for sport, using every ounce of cunning to evade pursuers who view its suffering as entertainment, resonates with the historical reality of persecution and dehumanization.
Bereś suggests that Lem may have felt he was exposing too much of himself in this story. The allegory was perhaps too transparent, too personal. Lem set the manuscript aside and later wrote a different, more entertaining version of “The Hunt”—the Pirx story—which may have caused the original to be forgotten.
Structure and Approach
The rediscovered story is told from the point of view of the hunted robot, a narrative perspective that distinguishes it sharply from the later Pirx version. In that better-known story, Pirx chases a damaged mining robot on the Moon that has been struck by a meteorite and fires its laser at any detected motion. The earlier version, by contrast, centers entirely on the experience of the prey.
The manuscript’s survival owes something to confusion. Lem’s secretary, Wojciech Zemek, found the story decades before its publication but, misled by the similarity in title and general premise to the Pirx tale, filed it alongside drafts for that collection. The resemblance that caused the mix-up also explains why the story remained unrecognized for so long.
Significance and Influence
The publication of The Hunt offers readers a rare glimpse into Lem’s creative process and his willingness to engage with deeply personal material through the distancing lens of science fiction. The story’s existence complicates the common perception of Lem primarily as a satirical or philosophical writer, revealing a more vulnerable dimension to his work. Its delayed publication also raises questions about what other manuscripts may have been lost to Lem’s habit of destroying his unpublished writing—and what survived, and why.
The contrast between the two versions of “The Hunt” illuminates Lem’s authorial choices: the shift from a grim allegory about persecution to a more conventional adventure tale suggests a deliberate move away from material that cut too close to personal trauma. For readers and scholars, the rediscovered story provides a valuable data point in understanding how Lem processed his wartime experiences through fiction—and how he sometimes chose to hide them.
The story’s journey to print was marked by a significant delay caused by misidentification. Lem’s secretary, Wojciech Zemek, discovered the manuscript decades before its eventual publication. However, because of the resemblance in both title and plot to the later Pirx story, Zemek filed it alongside the drafts for the Pirx collection. This filing error kept the story hidden until it was eventually found in Lem’s archives and published in the Polish magazine Przekrój in 2018, with an English translation following in 2019.
The Robot’s Design and Purpose
The narrative clarifies that the robot is not a unique creation but one of many manufactured specifically for the purpose of being hunted. To make the chase genuinely engaging, the robot was deliberately endowed with specific traits: wit, strength, and the capacity to feel fear. This combination of attributes ensures that the robot will actively flee and employ complex tactics, making the hunt a challenging and interesting contest for its human pursuers.
