The "Cyberiad" is an incredibly great introduction too. For example, it contains an electric bard which produces a long poem about tensor algebra, starting with:

> Come, let us hasten to a higher plane > Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, > Their indices bedecked from one to n > Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

The whole thing is here: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Art/tensor.html

Needless to say, Michael Kandel's translation is also hugely impressive.

His Master's Voice is also a good entry point, especially if you've read Contact by Carl Sagan. Same conceit taken in two completely different directions.

HMV also is the best single book ever written about the process of science, and the way scientists actually think. I can't over-state this. I read first read it while an undergrad in engineering in early 80's and during my graduate work in physics slowly came to realize it was the only book I'd ever read that accurately described what I was learning to do as a scientist.

Even though the narrator is nominally a mathematician, his approach to problems is fundamentally that of an empirical scientist, and has nothing at all to do with the cartoon hypothetico-deductive nonsense that philosophers have foisted upon the world as "scientific method".

>it was the only book I'd ever read that accurately described what I was learning to do as a scientist

What, politics? ;)

I read it as truly brilliant and scathing social commentary about what's wrong with the "scientific process" as practiced (and corrupted) by academic and government institutions.

The initial premise of the book, how the message was discovered, is deeply hilarious: somebody was fraudulently selling some old computer tapes of raw space telescope data as truly random numbers, and then one of their customers got pissed off that the numbers were't random enough because they repeated, and demanded their money back.

His Master's Voice took the conceit in at least two completely different directions, itself: the "frog eggs" and the biophilic effect -- nobody could figure out how the same message could be interpreted to produce two such completely unrelated effects.

I wonder if Ijon Tichy would better be translated as "Ion Slow" - after all his name is a word-play (compare to Buzz Lightyear, haha).

Actually Tichy translates best to "quiet".