A brilliantly funny collection of stories for the next age, from the celebrated author of Solaris. Ranging from the prophetic to the surreal, these stories demonstrate Stanislaw Lem’s vast talent and remarkable ability to blend meaning and magic into a wholly entertaining and captivating work.
Ijon Tichy travels undercover to a robot world, joining an organization to clean up world history thru time travel.
Things go crazy immediately. His spaceship runs into gravitational vortices at relativistic speeds, resulting in massive time anomalies. It may be a blessing in disguise. The reason he couldn’t get out of the way was that a meteor had shattered the drive regulator & rudder. He could no longer steer his ship. He had a spare rudder, but couldn’t install it. It was a two-man job & he was alone. So when other versions of him start appearing, all he should need do is team up with one of them, fix the rudder & leave the gravitational vortex field.
After that gets straightened out, he goes undercover. A ship’s computer has mutineed & started its own colony, reproducing itself on a previously uninhabited planet. The insurance company paid the shipowner’s claim, & now believes that the ship, it’s computer & all its progeny belong to them. Tichy disguises himself as a robot & goes to investigate.
On another voyage, he heads to a planet where the government irrigation agency has irrigated beyond all need & refused to give up power. People live in water & are jailed in dry cells if they violate the love of water.
After his modern voyages, he comes back from 2166 to recruit himself as a member of THEOHIPPIP, the Teleotelechronistic-Historical Engineering to Optimize the Hyperputerized Implementation of Paleological Programming & Interplanetary Planning. History is in a mess because of all the time travelers. THEOHIPPIP's mission is: “For World History to be regulated, cleaned up, straightened out, adjusted & perfected, all in accordance with the principles of humanitarianism, rationalism & general esthetics. You can understand, surely, that with such a shambles & slaughterhouse in one’s family tree it’s awkward to go calling on important cosmic civilizations!...If need be, alterations will be made even before the rise of man, so that he arises better.”
In Pilot Pirx, Lem has created an irresistibly likable character: an astronaut who gives the impression of still navigating by the seat of his pants-a bumbler but an inspired one. By investing Pirx with a range of human foibles, Lem offers a wonderful vision of the audacity, childlike curiosity, and intuition that can give humans the courage to confront outer space. Translated by Louis Iribarne.
The Futurological Congress is the fourth satirical science fiction novel in the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy series from Kafka Prize–winning author Stanislaw Lem.
“Nobody can really know the future. But few could imagine it better than Lem.”— Paris Review
Bringing his twin gifts of scientific speculation and scathing satire to bear on that hapless planet, Earth, Lem sends his unlucky cosmonaut, Ijon Tichy, to the Eighth Futurological Congress. Caught up in local revolution, Tichy is shot and so critically wounded that he is flashfrozen to await a future cure—a future whose strangeness exceeds anything the congress conjectured.
Translated by Michael Kandel.
“A vision of Earth’s future where the authorities dose the population with ‘psychemicals’ to make life in a desperately over-populated world worth living.”— Boston Globe
Charting the whole of Arthur Dent's odyssey through space are:
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. One Thursday lunchtime the Earth gets unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this seems already to be more than he can cope with. Sadly, however, the weekend has only just begun, and the Galaxy is a very very very large and startling place.
THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE. When all questions of space, time, matter and the nature of being have been resolved, only one question remains --- "Where shall we have dinner?" The Restaurant at the End of the Universe provides the ultimate gastronomic experience, and for once there is no morning after to worry about.
LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING. In consequence of a number of stunning catastrophes, Arthur Dent is surprised to find himself living in a hideously miserable cave on prehistoric Earth. However, just as he thinks that things cannot possibly get any worse, they suddenly do. He discovers that the Galaxy is not only mind-boggling big and bewildering but also that most of the things that happen in it are staggeringly unfair.
SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH. Just as Arthur Dent's sense of reality is in its dickiest state he suddenly finds the girl of his dreams. He finds her in the last place in the Universe in which he would expect to find anything at all, but which 3,976,000 people will find oddly familiar. They go in search of God's Final Message to His Creation and, in a dramatic break with tradition, actually find it.
A clever architect designs a house in the shape of the shadow of a tesseract, but it collapses (through the 4th dimension) when an earthquake shakes it into a more stable form (which takes up very little room in our 3-dimensional space.)
Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.
Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide ("A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have") and a galaxy-full of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox--the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian, Zaphod's girlfriend (formally Tricia McMillan), whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student who is obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he bought over the years.
Where are these pens? Why are we born? Why do we die? Why do we spend so much time between wearing digital watches? For all the answers stick your thumb to the stars. And don't forget to bring a towel!
“H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the 20th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”―Stephen King The most important tales of the godfather of the modern horror genre―a master who influenced the works of a generation of writers including Stephen King and Anne Rice―are gathered in one volume by National Book Award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates. Combining the 19th-century gothic sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe with a daring internal vision, Lovecraft’s tales foretold a psychically troubled world to come. Set in a meticulously wrought, historically grounded New England landscape, his harrowing stories explore the collapse of sanity beneath the weight of chaotic events. Lovecraft’s universe is a frightening shadow world were reality and nightmare intertwine, and redemption can come only from below. For aficionados and a new generation of 21st-century readers , Tales of H. P. Lovecraft is a classic not to be missed.
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