By Stanislaw Lem

After reading the Cyberiad, I desperately needed more Stanislaw Lem science fiction satire. My late to the party discovery of Lem is nonetheless, now filling the void left by the death of Douglas Adams in 2001. I confess, I haven’t been able to get into the Dirk Gently series or Adam’s other non-Hitchhiker‘s series’. These days I need robots and space ships to hold my interest. Lem preceded Adams and most likely influenced him, however Adams reached my young mind first, at that time when I was ready to read. I had not heard of Lem until recently, despite having slept through Tarkovsky’s Solaris film in grad school more than 10 years ago. Regardless of all this I have found very little sci-fi satire to spark my interest in the intervening years since reading Adams. There have been a few TV series or films, such as Red Dwarf, Hyperdrive(BBC), Futurama, Spaceballs, Ice Pirates, etc., but nothing in print that could hold my attention, until now.

The Star Diaries is the first in a series of books that collect the varied adventures of the fictional rocket pilot, Ijon Tichy. Each story, or ‘voyage’ is numbered and they appear more or less in order but with a few numbers missing, such as the 9th, and 10th in the English translation. According to the translator, the voyage number order does not reflect the order in which they were written. Tichy travels galaxy in his one man rocket, sometimes on vacation, sometimes to satisfy his curiosity, and sometimes on contract from outside agencies.

Lem is funny and intricately cynical of human bureaucracy. He is a crafter of logical and verbal absurdities. He is a master of, if not inventor of that favorite sci-fi trope, techno-babble. Some adventures are smart, but long and dry; while others made me laugh enough to hurt my wounds from a recent surgery. Among my favorite voyages are the 7th, and the 11th.

Voyage 7, Sees Tichy and his rocket get stuck in several time loops. His frustration boils over when he tries to enlist the help of several versions of himself from different days of the week to repair his rocket and get them out of the time loop. Instead of working together, he is continually at odds with himself over the next course of action, even clobbering one of the versions of himself over the head. This story literally (and literarily) had my stitches in stitches.

Voyage 11 sends the pilot Tichy on a mission to find out what happened to a lost space crew, themselves sent to investigate a lost space crew and their mutinous computer on the planet Cercia. Word has it that the rogue computer, who hates wet and squishy humans has built an independent state populated by robots. Tichy goes to the planet disguised as a robot. He is told not to audibly breath, nor consume human food in the presence of the robots lest he be discovered and persecuted. There is much cultural awkwardness that ensues, including the robots’ outdated form of English, and their past time of torturing human dolls. There is a hilarious twist at the conclusion, when Tichy discovers what is really going on.

The Star Diaries are followed in English by, Memoirs of a Space Traveler, The Futurological Congress, and Peace on Earth.