By Stanislaw Lem.
Begun 18 Oct 2006; finished 19 Oct.
Memoirs of a Space Traveller, by Stanislaw Lem is a collection of short stories narrated by the space pilot, Ijon Tichy. (I’ve seen his name translated as Ion the Quiet elsewhere.) This is the first Ijon Tichy collection I’ve read; the other stories are collected in The Star Diaries and The Futurological Congress. The stories in Memoirs have little to do with Tichy’s journeys in space, but rather about people that he meets. As far as I remember, all of said people are scientists or inventors of some sort, who first present their background and premises to a skeptical Tichy, proceed to reveal and demonstrate prototypes of their inventions, and then leave Tichy to muse about the consequences of those inventions.
Lem’s vision in these stories is dark and pessimistic, of a modernist vein. It doesn’t help that the inventors whom Tichy encounters are all presented as stereotypical “mad scientists”. On the other hand, their inventions are truly disturbing: all of them tamper with some aspect of consciousness, identity, sentience and reality, and there would be huge moral and ethical outcry against such inventions if they really were made in real life. (That in itself is a disturbing notion!) But I’ve found that Lem presents these subjects in such a radical light in order to force his readers to think about these subjects. What is reality; is it just a construct of one’s mind? What are the consequences of cloning? What is cognition, and how does one define communication between sentient creatures? These Tichy short stories are dark and somewhat unsettling, but it does compel one to face and investigate these subjects, and consider the more sinister motives and outcomes of tampering with consciousness and sentience. Once again, it is evident that Lem has thought extensively on cognition and artificial intelligence: these tales are thoughtful and very skillfully presented.
That’s why I love reading Stanislaw Lem’s stories; they aren’t just good stories, but they compel me to pause and consider the issues underlying his stories. I hope to get ahold of the other Ijon Tichy stories soon. And believe it or not, Lem thought of it first long before the Wachowski brothers: one of his short stories is the very model of The Matrix! Read it.