Part satire, part imaginative play, and part thought experiment, The Star Diaries is a collection of stories—voyages to be precise—telling of the space man Ijon Tichy's adventures and encounters across the universe and through time. Tongue in cheek throughout, it's only a question of how much the cheek bulges in each.
The stories numbered, The Star Diaries kicks off with “The Seventh Voyage”. When Tichy's ship breaks down in the dark void of space, temporal fluctuations occur. During repairs, time twists reality and Tichy enters his own personal twilight zone of dopple-, triple-, quadruple-, and quintuple-gangers. Subtle intelligence and humor guide the story, but the substance remains weak. “The eighth Voyage” is a hilarious tale of Tichy being called to represent humanity at the United Planets meeting to decide whether Earthlings should be allowed in their august body. What starts as a standard piss-take on humanity's foibles, Lem evolves into something even more clever and amusing. The juxtaposition of tone and context is the cherry on top.
A immensely fun story, “The Eleventh Voyage” begins one ordinary day on Earth as Tichy is doing laundry when he is called on a special mission. A computer has run amuck on a far planet ,and all investigations which have been sent have disappeared. Tichy is needed. What he discovers in robot land is the stuff of pure satirical joy. Social evolution running at 10x speed, “The Twelfth Voyage” sees Tichy visiting a primitive planet with a time accelerator. Hilarity ensues, mostly due to tonal play with the help of a touch of wit. All the stories are wonderfully translated, but for whatever reason this one stands out. Kandel is phenomenal.
On Tichy's “The Thirteenth Voyage” commentary on the Cold War takes hold. The intrepid spaceman visits the planets Pinta and Pants, home to the magnificent, benevolent, sublime, intelligent Master Oh. There is no identity on Panta. Everyone is literally the same, and Pinta has people living in water up to their noses. On both planets people have gone out of their way to make life unnatural and difficult. From Kafka to Jack Vance, “The Fourteenth Voyage” is more light-hearted adventure than philosophical treatise. Tichy goes to a planet where the sentient life are glowing spheres who live among squamps, avoid meteor showers, and involve scrupts in their matrimony—but how. Awesome, dynamic fun.
“The
Twentieth Voyage” and “The Twenty-First Voyage” bookend one
another. Oscillating between hilarious and overdrawn,
Lem pjays with Asimov's time police idea in more erudite fashion.
Asked to join the time oversight committee, Tichy soons finds himself
in a world of trouble trying to correct history's errors in the
twentieth. In the twenty-first, Tichy returns to normal Earth,
normal time, but soon thereafter finds himself in a future wherein he
lands on an alien planet and is attacked by semi-sentient furniture.
Just the beginning, he ends up living underground in a cave with
reclusive robot monks hiding from an alien overlord. With echoes of
Wells' The Time Machine, Tichy explores the planet's bizarre
religious history and it's bizarre relationship to mortality and
physiology.
“The
Twenty-Second Voyage” is an indulgence, plot-wise and
a hilarious piss-take on catholicism otherwise. Tichy loses an object
of sentimental value and backtracks to the planets he recently
visited to find it. Running into a missionary along the way, life
lessons abound Lem-style. “The Twenty-Third Voyage” is a
fascinating idea but forgettable story about the Whds and their
atomizing machines. More concept than story, it needed more to be
fully fleshed, but otherwise is a sweet spot of brain candy.
What to say about “The Twenty-Fith Voyage” except predatory flying potatoes, planet hopping, skeletons with wheel feet, and evolutionary prowess. “The Twenty-Eighth Voyage” is the final story in the collection. More a collection of stories than single story, it goes through Tichy's rather odd family tree. With intentional echoes of the Bible, the tales of Tichy's illustrious (aka crazy) forebears closes things out in all too droll human fashion.
In the end, The Star Diaries is not Lem's greatest work, but it remains hilarious, witty, and philosophical all at once. While I think The Cyberiad captures this side of Lem's prodigous mind better than any other of his books, The Star Diaries offers a tantalizing apertif. It hits that sweet something for readers who want more of that <finger pointing>. If anything, such quality works in an author's back catalog only bolster the front end.
The following are the twelve stories contained in The Star Diaries:
The Seventh Voyage
The Eighth Voyage
The Eleventh Voyage
The Twelfth Voyage
The Thirteenth Voyage
The Fourteenth Voyage
The Twentieth Voyage
The Twenty-First Voyage
The Twenty-Second Voyage
The Twenty-Third Voyage
The Twenty-Fifth Voyage
The Twenty-Eighth Voyage
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