The Futurological Congress
Sunday, March 19th, 2006 @ 10:08
From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy
by Stanisław Lem (1977)
Ijon Tichy (who has also appeared in many other Lem’s works) is ordered by Professor Tarantoga to attend the Eight World Futurological Congress held in the Costa Rica. Isolated inside the first-rate convention site (The Costa Rica Hilton) are the futurologists preparing their congress, alongside the Plenary Council of Student Protest Veterans, the Convention of Publishers of Liberated Literature, and a Philumenist (matchbook collector) Society meeting, while political troubles are brewing outside. Their “speculative gabfest” are interrupted as benignimizers–euphoria-inducing drugs — are slipped inside the city’s water system and hallucinogens atomized in air. The futurologists, Tichy included, escape underground (where they also find some Hilton staffs hiding, along with their secretaries).
Experiencing what seems to be a series of hallucinations and blurring of layered realities, Tichy begins to disbelieve and question everything. Written is how he gets critically wounded, frozen in liquid nitrogen for a future (bizarre) cure, and woken up in 2039 to see a “heavenly” world where realities are so thoroughly controlled with psychem (psycho-chemicals), with “catacombs for nonconformist subculture communities” and “procrustics” to satisfy baser desires provided (though Lem threw a jab at the “typical dystopian” novel where everything is monitored).
Although the idea of manufactured reality has been done to death (particularly after The Matrix), Lem penetrates deeper by his questioning of its often-overlooked multiplicity. Creating hilarious puns and inventive neologism, Lem — often dubbed as the “Jorge-Luis Borges of space galaxy” (mostly for A Perfect Vacuum, but the comparison I’d say holds true for most of his works), also has the gift of Swiftian scathing satire and deadpanned absurd humour.
