Bold adventurer Ijon Tichy zooms across the universe in his midget rocket ship as if zipping around Poland (Stanislaw Lem’s home country) in a midget racing car. Are we talking here about another Flash Gordon or Hans Solo? Hardly. Ijon is more like your prototypical college math instructor with his skinny tie, wrinkled shirt, corduroy pants, scuffed up loafers and nerd eyeglasses held together by tape. But, it must be admitted, Ijon Tichy keeps a level head as he deals with a string of challenges bizarre and Borges-like. The Star Diaries recounts a dozen separate kooky, bugged out, way-out voyages of our undaunted explorer. A batch of snapshots of Ijon in action:
IN THE TIME LOOP
The exterior of Ijon's mini rocket ship is damaged and must be repaired but unfortunately this is a two-man job and Ijon is flying solo.
That night, while asleep, a slightly familiar looking man shakes Ijon and demands he get out of bed and join him in repairing the rocket. Ijon knows he's flying solo and tells the intruder he's nothing more than a dream.
The next morning Ijon consults textbooks and maps to calculate his present location since his damaged rocket has veered off course. Looks like he could be ensnared in a heap of trouble - he's in a mysterious gravitational vortex with incalculable relativistic effects.
A misty human shape cooking an omelet appears at the stove in his kitchen and just as quickly vanishes. Mystified, Ijon consults another book on the General Theory of Relativity that explains how in certain gravitational vortices there can be a complete reversal of time causing a duplication of the present.
Following a trip to the engine room to produce a slight change in the rocket's direction, Ijon returns only to see himself asleep in bed. "I realized at once that this was I of the previous day, that is, from Monday night." Ijon tries to rouse his Monday self so they can both go out together to repair the ship. His Monday self gruffly informs him that he is only a dream.
The time loop expands over the next fourteen pages in ways of duplication and multiplication only Stanislaw Lem could imagine (apologies to Jorges Luis Borges but with this fictional doozy Lem outpaces the Argentine man of letters). One of the most zany, convoluted and imaginative tales a reader will ever encounter.
Stanislaw Lem's drawing of Ijon caught in the time loop
WATERY SOLUTION
Ijon has many confabs and dealings with a Professor Tarantoga, astrozoologist, a quirky genius credited with a string of phenomenal discoveries, including a fluid for the removal of unpleasant memories. A true psychic quantum leap! The ingenious professor will quickly put a number of psychiatrists and counselors out of business. Men and women will be able to live in the present without having to rehash all those times when they were slapped around by an abusive parent or picked on by the schoolyard bully or traumatized in a war zone or a thousand other painful experiences.
TARANTOGA TIME MACHINE
Holy H.G. Wells! Our stupendous astrozoologist invents a time machine Ijon can take on his next voyage to planet Amauropia. Along the way beyond the Milky Way, explorer Tichy encounters the Gypsonians who roam around the cosmos ever since they destroyed their own planet by continuous strip mining, turning the entire surface into one vast pit. I Tichy to the rescue! Ijon obtains a secondhand moon, fixes it up and, thanks to his stellar connections (no pun intended), upgrades it to the status of a planet. The Gypsonians are elated but it remains to be seen if they learned their lesson about greed and natural resources.
Once on Amauropia Ijon encounters a race of Microcephalids crawling around on all fours. Using his time machine, Ijon propels their evolution to tool using hunter gatherers and then to agrarian civilization. Of course, accelerated evolution contains both pros and cons - the Microcephalds alternately worship Ijon and send him off to be tortured. Ah, civilized society! At one point Ijon escapes and begins preaching love and universal brotherhood. Not long thereafter, a cult forms around his teachings. Predictably, the king and his royal court despise Ijon's revolutionary ideas and demand his Earthly blood. By the skin of his astronomical teeth, Ijon blasts off, leaving the planet far behind but his time on Amauropia provides Stanislaw Lem oodles of opportunities to make piquant philosophical observations about the universal tendencies of politics and religion, war and peace, customs and ideologies.
SAME O' SAME O'
Ijon travels to the remarkable world of Panta wherein all the inhabitants have identical smiling faces. As an elderly Pantan pontificates,"we have completely eliminated individuality on behalf of the society. On our planet there are no entities - only the collective." Turns out, the roles of engineer, gardener, mechanic, ruler, physician are rotated among the Pantans every day; in other words, there are no differences within their society, these Pantans have achieved the highest degree of social interchangeability. Ijon asks more questions and the elderly one is more than happy to provide answers, even how on his planet the reality of death has been transcended via the absence of individual identity. I'm sure you sense Stanislaw Lem poking a long, sharp satirical needle at the prevailing 1960s Communist states. Ouch!
HOMO SAPIENS OR SUB-NEANDERTHALS?
Ijon is present as a room filled with wise, peace-loving alien life forms from all over the cosmos debate if humans from planet Earth should be admitted to the solar assembly. After once speaker portrays homo sapiens as a species of monsters wallowing in an ocean of blood - massacres, wars, pogroms, crusades, genocide, torture - looks like the vote might be a mighty "NO." But an objection is raise - certainly the current human population is above not below the level of Neanderthal. All look toward Ijon Tichy. Can our outer orbit Odysseus come through for us?
QUICK ZAPS FROM MY REVIEWER RAY GUN
Many more voyages; many more encounters. Blast off with Ijon Tichy to read all about the metaphysics and magic of potatoes, robot theologians, how compassionate aliens make sure a missionary is granted his wish to become a saint and martyr and thus go to heaven, an electric brain with an infinite number of stand-up comic jokes that can be inserted into the wall of an astronaut's rocket in order to alleviate boredom (a sort of George Carlin/HAL) and a planet where travel is done by Star Trek-like beaming (the brainy Polish author's beaming predates the famous TV series). All written with a light, comical touch. Thanks, Stanislaw.
Stanislaw Lem, 1921-2006
Comments
Post a Comment