"The Cyberiad" by Stanisław Lem, translated by Michael Kandel. A masterfully crafted science fiction fable.
This is a collection of short science fiction stories, all with a lighthearted and humorous tone. First published in 1965, it's at least a decade earlier than "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" for having robots with genuine personalities, 35 years earlier than "Kino no Tabi" for having a society destroyed by telepathic awareness of each other's pain, and 45 years ahead of "Inception" for trapping a person inside nested dreams. It was a very impressive collection of novel concepts.
The concepts were more than just novel, readers with a bit of experience in computer science might find these concepts eerily familiar. There is a chapter where Trurl and Klapaucius debated whether the suffering of people inside a simulated civilization is equivalent to real suffering, a prerequisite to the relatively more recent topic of Roko's basilisk. Then there is the poetry writing machine that gained its abilities by modeling civilization from the very beginning, and training on works classical poets, acts that we would call "machine learning" these days. Because some of the predictions were quite accurate, yet the conclusion of those stories were quite surprising, much of this book feels like a fable. It was entertaining to read at first, but may be both enlightening and disturbing in many ways if you read too deep into them.
Besides very clever plot and concepts, this book also had very clever delivery in its playful use of words. Imagine a poem that matched these requirements: "a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!" And this amazing poem did appear on the next page. Even more amazing when you consider that it was translated from Polish to English, and the entire book was filled with gems like that. Some of the text are slightly difficult due to jargons in mathematics and physics, but mostly it's fine writing full of imagery.
This is a great book that I would highly recommend to everyone. You can get a good sample of it from this doodle:
https://www.google.com/logos/lem/
And if you are curious about that haircut poem:
https://www.google.com/#q=trurl%27s+electronic+bard
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