The robotic 'fauna', dubbed 'necrosphere', has become part of the planet's ecology, and would require a disruption on a planetary scale to be destroyed. Invincible's crew mounts an escalating series of attacks on the perceived enemy, but eventually recognizes the futility of their efforts. It lacks intelligence and cannot formulate attack strategies proactively. Condor's crew suffered a complete memory erasure as a consequence of attacks from these 'clouds'. These swarms display complex behavior arising from self-organization and can incapacitate any intelligent threat by a powerful surge of electromagnetic interference. When threatened, they can assemble into huge clouds, travel at a high speed, and even climb to the top of the troposphere.

Individually, or in small groups, they are quite harmless and capable of only very simple behavior. The protagonists come to speculate that 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. 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 ship which landed on Regis III a very long time ago. It was one of the first novels to explore the ideas of microrobots, smartdust, artificial swarm intelligence, and 'necroevolution' (a term suggested by Lem for the evolution of non-living matter).Ī heavily armed interstellar spacecraft called Invincible lands on the planet Regis III, which seems uninhabited and bleak, to investigate the loss of her sister ship, Condor. A direct translation into English from Polish, by Bill Johnston, was published in 2006. A translation into German was published in 1967 an English translation by Wendayne Ackerman, based on the German one, was published in 1973. The Invincible originally appeared as the title story in Lem's collection Niezwyciężony i inne opowiadania (' The Invincible and Other Stories').

The Invincible ( Polish: Niezwyciężony) is a hard science fiction novel by Polish writer Stanisław Lem, published in 1964.

The invincible by stanisław lem