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| Original Title: | Kongres futurologiczny |
| ISBN: | 0156340402 (ISBN13: 9780156340403) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | Ijon Tichy #3 |
| Characters: | Ijon Tichy |
| Literary Awards: | National Book Award Finalist for Translation (1975) |
Stanisław Lem
Paperback | Pages: 149 pages Rating: 4.21 | 8880 Users | 523 Reviews
List Of Books The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy (Ijon Tichy #3)
| Title | : | The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy (Ijon Tichy #3) |
| Author | : | Stanisław Lem |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 149 pages |
| Published | : | October 28th 1985 by Mariner Books (first published 1971) |
| Categories | : | Science Fiction. Fiction. European Literature. Polish Literature |
Commentary As Books The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy (Ijon Tichy #3)
"Books are no longer read but eaten, not made of paper but of some informational substance, fully digestible, sugar-coated. A few grams of dantine, for instance, and a man goes around with the deep conviction that he has written The Divine Comedy.
-Stanislaw Lem, The Futurological Congress
A short novel narrated by cosmonaut Ijon Tichy, a kind of futuristic Alexis de Tocqueville who shares his travel report and diary beginning at a convention of world futurologists held at a space age hotel in Costa Rica where he has a room one hundred floors above the street. Tichy is as clearheaded as Thomas Jefferson or Isaac Newton, a well-educated gentleman with an impeccable moral sense. Too bad Tichy isn’t living in the eighteenth century age of reason rather than the twenty-first century of the future where the entire world has gone mad on mass ingestion of every variety and kind of weird pills to alter mood and even weirder chemicals to twist, bend, rotate and transform the mind.
This was my very first Stanislaw Lem and it certainly will not be my last. Did the author coat the corners of the book’s pages with hallucinogens for me to lick? Sometimes, as I turned the pages, I thought such a practice would have been most appropriate. In a similar spirit, below are a batch of psychic hits, eight strobe light flashes, of what a reader will encounter with Lem's spectacular, speculative loop-the-loop:
Kill the Pope: At a hotel bar, one where an all-girl orchestra plays Bach while performing striptease to the rhythm of baroque music, a burly, bearded bloke sticks his double-barreled rifle under cosmonaut Tichy’s nose and asks how he likes his papalshooter. Big Beard then goes on to explain how he is flying to Rome to shoot the Pope, what he terms “Operation P” in the spirit of Abraham and Isaac in reverse (rather than father killing son, he's son who will kill father). And, turns out, this guy is a devout and loyal Catholic! The sole reference to religion in the novel. Thank the Lord! – with devotion like this, who needs fanatics?
Future Writers: The hotel is also hosting a banquet for Liberated Literature, where loudspeakers play: “Now to make it in the arts, publicize your private parts! Critics say you can’t offend ‘em with your phallus or pudendum.” And later on Tichy bumps into Harvy Simsworth, a writer who turns fairy tales and classic literature into hardcore porno - Ali Baba and the Forty Perverts, King Leer, what Snow White really did with the seven dwarfs, what Jack really did with Jill. Just in case anybody thinks our current day degenerate literature couldn’t get any more debased and debauched.
Something in the Water: Back in his hotel room Tichy's good mood begins to soar higher and higher by the minute. Even though he cracks his head on the furniture, the lights go out and he can’t get the telephone to work, Ijon Tichy considers his hotel room one of the nicest in the world. He could hug, caress and kiss his worst enemies. But when he laughs with uncontrollable hilarity with how “the butter might splutter and make the flame gutter,” Ijon senses something is amiss. Ah, of course! The glass of water he drank from the bathroom tap. Our rational cosmonaut is given his first glimpse how those in power will attempt to manipulate and control the population – mind-altering chemicals.
Japanese Proposal: The futureologists are treated to Hayakawa’s plan for the house of the future: eight hundred levels complete with schools, shops, theaters, museums, sports fields, special gymnasiums for group sex, catacombs for nonconformists, rotating apartments to alleviate boredom, recycled food such as artificial bananas, gingerbread and shrimp made from, well, I’ll spare you Hayakawa’s detail. Oh, my goodness, living in housing like this (if you call this living), no wonder people eagerly reach for mind-expanding, feel good drugs. I think I’d do the same.
Kaboom!: A number of spectators in the upper seats listening to Hayakawa’s grand scheme evidently had a similar reaction: someone hurled a Molotov cocktail into the hall. Levelheaded Tichy flees to safety and reads the local newspaper the following day: “I was amazed to find articles full of saccharine platitudes on the theme of the tender bonds of love as the surest guarantee of universal peace – right beside articles that were full of dire threats, articles promising bloody repression or else an equally bloody insurrection.” Our cosmonaut reasons that some journalists have been drinking the water and some not.
Pandemonium: The violence escalates beyond the hotel. The government acts quickly, dropping LTN bombs on the undesirables. The results are not as anticipated – LTN stands for Love Thy Neighbor and some of the bombs hit their own riot police. Ijon Tichy witnesses: “Before my eyes policemen tore the masks from their faces and, shedding copious tears of remorse, fell to their knees and begged the demonstrators for forgiveness, pushing the billy clubs into their hands with fervent pleas to be severely beaten."
Escape: All hell breaks loose and Ijon and several other futurologists seek refuge down in the city’s sewer system. Among the many things they encounter are enormous sleek rats walking in single file on their hind legs. Ijon pinches himself, wondering if he is hallucinating. Nope – all of what he is experiencing is as real as real. Well, maybe.
Utopia/Dystopia: After a sequence of rescues from the city sewer system and the rats, after surgery and having been kept in deep freeze for years, Ijon is defrosted and wakes up in 2038. Ah, he can experience for himself humankind’s future New York City. Ijon quickly discovers chemicals to induce artificial worlds (psychems) are all the rage, how the city kids and teenagers are so considerate and sweet (that’s certainly a switch!), the weather is determined by vote, and how a plethora of words and expressions are new, new, new, new: threever, pingle, hemale, placize, cobnoddling, snthy and dozens more. If you enjoy language and wordplay, you will LOVE this Stanislaw Lem novel. On second thought, I think I’ll do a reread and lick the pages now and then. I’d advise you do the same.
Thanks to Goodreads friend Manny Rayner for bring this stunning classic of science fiction to my attention.
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Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006), Polish author of satirical essays and science fiction, a writer with boundless imagination, laser-sharp mind, lively sense of humor and an uncanny ability to play chess, volleyball, Russian roulette and hundreds of other games with language.Rating Of Books The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy (Ijon Tichy #3)
Ratings: 4.21 From 8880 Users | 523 ReviewsCriticize Of Books The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy (Ijon Tichy #3)
Over-the-top satirical. The Matrix meets Brave New World. Lotsa inventiveness and humor. Part of a subgenre that includes Stand on Zanzibar, R. Scott, Bakker, and others, a fantasy of demographics, say.The future imaginary of the settings updated Rip van Winkle dystopia offends narrators esthetic sense as well as my attachment to the irretrievable past (84). Very much a matter of solids melting into air, &c.AI laborers fuck things up, but it is no question of malice or premeditation on theStanisław Lem is my favorite science fiction writer; only Brian Aldiss, Samuel Delany and John Sladek come even close to his level of invention in ideas and language. But Lem is wittier than any of them and arguably better value too. The Futurological Congress is a short novel but packed to bursting with amazing concepts, original situations and hilarious wordplay. The action is multi-layered, reality proving to be nested inside other realities until it becomes unclear what is really real and
A frenetic, benzedrinical helter-skelter masterwork of neological loopiness and warp-nine schizomania, served in a tureen of insane, prophetic, and batshit prose that maintains a neck-snapping pace of breathless imaginative dizziness across 129 faultless pages.
This novel by Lem is a chapter of the astronaut IJon Tich memoirs series,it is with Ubik by Dick yet surpassing Dick(i dont know if there was some crossed influences between them) the most bizarre i have read,it is a hilarious,delirious,mind-blowing and outlandish nightmare.Writen in 1970 in the LSD era,it has the bigger number of nested realities ever described.After a satyrical and killing oneself laughing begining of a congress in order to foresse the future wold(with some ambiental concerns)
Stanislaw Lem outdoes Philip K. Dick on the latter's home territory. If reading this doesn't make you doubt the solidity of the world for at least a moment or two, you are an enviably secure person. I'm afraid I still feel apprehensive any time I notice I'm inexplicably out of breath after taking an elevator. Luckily that doesn't happen very often.
This book is often compared to the work of Philip K Dick, ostensibly because of its theme of drug-induced hallucinations, but I suspect its more so because of Lems admiration for PKD as the only worthwhile American science-fiction writer.For me, Im much more reminded of Brave New World by Alduous Huxley. The same, basic concept is behind the story, even though Huxleys work is a serious novel and this one is anything but. While The Futurological Congress has many deep ideas, its delivery is just
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