Books like The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy

Although Solaris is Stanislaw Lem’s most esteemed work, I believe The Star Diaries—the contemporaneous memoirs of star-pilot Ijon Tichy—to be a better representative of his genius, for it is ambitious in scope, inventive, and often profound.The Star Diaries, a series of interplanetary adventures ranging in size from mere vignette to long novella, was written over a period of twenty years, and therefore--no surprise!—these pieces vary considerably in seriousness and depth, moving from the playful to the satiric and eventually the philosophical. Yet even the earliest, like “The Twenty-Second Voyage”—the numbering bears no relation to the date of composition—are often surprising and memorable (part of its plot resurfaced, more than a decade later, in Borges’ “The Gospel According to Mark”).Although these stories are remarkably original, they also show a clear progression of influences. Ijon Tichy, who begins as the Baron Munchausen of space travel, soon resembles Swift’s Gulliver more closely as he begins to comment on the hypocrisies of society, but eventually Lem’s tone darkens and deepens as Tichy becomes less a star-pilot and more like the disembodied narrative voice of Stapledon’s Starmaker.The Star Diaries contains excellent examples of each type of story. “The Twenty-Second Voyage,” for example, is a very Munchausen-like tale, organized around Tichy’s search through the planets for his missing pipe. “The Eleventh Voyage,” a satire of the totalitarian state in which people dressed as robots inform on other people dressed as robots, is Lem in his classic Swiftian mode. Even better, though, are the later Swiftian tales where Tichy, still a hero, begins to explore more philosophical topics: “The Seventh Voyage” (a hilarious send-up of time travel tales in general, where Tichy attempts to travel back in time to help himself fix his damaged spacecraft), and “The Eighth Voyage” (in which Tichy, delegate to The United Planets, represents earth, a candidate for admission). Also worthy of attention are the later tales, of which a quintessential example is “The Twenty-First Voyage,” the last in order of composition and also the longest. I’ll admit I found it rough-going in places, but the startling difference between the two peoples presented here—nonreligious human consumed with a fad for body-engineering contrasted with robot monks who reverence the classic human form—was haunting and thought-provoking. It presented elements of the “pro-choice” and “right to life” philosophical positions in an extremely different context, and gave me much to think about.If you love science fiction, you must read this book. It is a classic of the genre, crowded with invention and full of ideas.