Review of "The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy" by Stanslaw Lem Item 16 - Finish 30 23 books

Ijon Tichy by Adoradora

This book was not my first experience with Stanislaw Lem, though it is the first book of his that I've read. I saw the 1972 Tarkovskiy film "Solaris" in college. And like everyone else that saw that particular film while in college, I pretended I understood it and discussed it with my equally unsure friends. The point here is not to self-flagellate for the delusions of adequacy of youth, but rather to give an idea of what my idea of Lem was going in to this book. I had always heard and believed (in no small part due to the obvious parallels between "Solaris" and "2001") that he was sort of the Polish Arthur C. Clarke. I have of course mentioned before my trepidation concerning these sorts of comparisons and rightfully so here as that reputation (at least as far as "Futurological" is concerned) is completely unfounded.

I've read a good number of Clarke's novels, I don't think it surprises anybody that I have always been a nerd. While Clarke was an excellent writer, the works of his that I've read all lacked a sense of humor or whimsy. It may be that he was a bit busy playing the Texas sharpshooter with his own predictions (try reading the introductions he wrote to some of his later works, it sometimes feels a bit embarrassing how self-congratulatory they can be) but he went in strictly for what people that I tend not to associate with would call "hard sci-fi". Lem on the other hand has a playfulness in this book that often crosses into the ludicrous. The artist who created the above picture of the narrator of "Futurological" said of Ijon Tichy (the star of "Futurological" and many other stories by Lem) that he is something of a "spacefaring Baron [Münchhausen]", which is as apt a description as anything.

Again, the danger in these comparisons lies in how limiting they are. For instance, Tichy's lineage includes equal parts of Alice as well Münchhausen: the bulk of this novel takes place in various dream states. It also has the sort of humor and social criticism that would make Vonnegut proud. And for that matter, there is an element of Dickishness (to steal a page from Robert Brockway) as well. Although it's probably more likely that Dick was influenced by Lem rather than vice versa and as far as I know it's just as likely that neither had any clue the other existed, I'm honestly not willing to put forth the effort at the moment to find out; to go back to Alice, I'd just as soon not go down this rabbit hole too far.

In the end, these comparisons really have no effect on my enjoyment of the work. At the same time I bought this book I bought another by Lem and can't wait to dive into it. I think I'll also have to see about getting Solaris out from Netflix to see if the intervening years have had any effect on it or me.