Beschreibung
Tichy drinks tap water & an hallucinogenic trip begins. Notably, it never becomes more or less absurd than the glimpse of reality presented at the outset. Next day he learns the government has drugged the water supply with Love Thy Neighbor, a drug causing helpless benevolence. Events spiral out of control at the Hilton, which is already so chaotic that charred bombing victims are covered with tarps while guests do business.
The government bombs the hotel. Tichy escapes to sewers where rats walk on hind legs. He's evacuated by the military, but the helicopter crashes. He awakes in hospital & finds his brain has been transplanted into an attractive young black woman.
Protesters attack the hospital. Tichy is nearly killed again. This time he wakes to find he's been transplanted into the body of a fat, red-haired man. His state grows increasingly fragile. He can't distinguish reality from hallucination. The staff freeze him until a time when medicine can help.
He awakes in 2039. Tichy keeps a journal to chronicle his experience. His future shock is so great that he finds he's being introduced to the world in small stages by the medical staff. In this utopian society money is no object. One can go to the bank, request a sum & borrow it interest-free. No effort is made to collect as most take a drug that instills a sense of pride & work-ethic, disallowing default. There's bias against defrostees. There are many words he doesn't understand. The talk's a mishmash of words with clear English roots, but he's mystified. Like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, mood is regulated. Whereas Dick's characters use machines to control their emotions, Lem's use drugs. He gets involved with a woman. She takes recriminol to make her combative in arguments.
Following their break-up, Tichy becomes disillusioned with the 'psychem' mentality wherein drugs regulate waking moments. He resolves to stop taking any drugs & confides to his friend, Dr Trottelreiner, that he can't stand the world. Trottelreiner explains that the everyday drugs he's tired of are only the tip of the iceberg. Narcotics & hallucinogens are trifles compared to 'mascons' powerful enough to mask whole swaths of reality.
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I read Stanisław Lem’s The Futurological Congress as an excursion into totally unexplored terrain for me—and I was frequently overwhelmed by it. The book’s opening barrage of crises at a Hilton in Costa Rica—overpopulation, insurgency, a kidnapped consul, emergency-proof hotel rooms—comes so fast that I felt unmoored almost immediately. That’s by design, but it still knocked me back.At the Eighth World Futurological Congress, the authorities lace water and air with psychotropics—“Love Thy Neighbor” pacifiers among them—and the story tilts into hallucination. Ijon Tichy dives into the sewers to escape the bliss, yet he’s swept along anyway. The novel’s term “cryptochemocracy” captures the idea: chemical management of perception replacing any attempt at solving problems. I found that concept chilling, and the pace amplifies the feeling of overload. And yet I laughed quite often. Lem’s set pieces can be very funny, like the academic who “lectures” in strings of numbers while everyone toggles recorders and pocket computers; the gag lands precisely because the information glut is absurd. Even the hotel’s conference-hall mix-ups and the cheery tarpaulin covering a Molotov incident play as deadpan, bleak humor. The humor didn’t lessen my unease; it sharpened it.Midway, the novel pivots. After Tichy’s long detour—surgeries, deep freeze—he wakes in 2039 to a “psychemized” world where drugs personalize reality on demand. Here I alternated between grinning and feeling out of my depth. Michael Kandel’s translation has to ferry a deluge of wordplay: books you “eat” from a “psychedeli,” shelves stocked with “opinionates,” “gullibloons,” and the like; robots practicing “mimicretinism,” “probots,” and “servos.” The inventiveness is dazzling, but the accumulation is intentionally disorienting, and I felt that disorientation acutely.For me, the through-line is Lem’s satire: a world that masks breakdown with abundance—of chemicals, of information, of cheerful packaging—until truth is hard to locate. That thematic argument is what kept me engaged even when I was swamped by the book’s density. And it is genuinely witty despite the bleakness; the humor isn’t a release valve so much as part of the critique. (The book’s satirical angle—and Kandel’s translation—also explains why Ari Folman’s hybrid film The Congress could spring from it.)Bottom line: I was overwhelmed, yes, but also repeatedly amused—and the combination feels exactly right for what Lem is doing. The book’s form enacts its subject, leaving me both dazzled and a little off-balance in ways that seem deliberate. It’s short, but it benefits from rereading; I suspect a second pass will turn that overwhelm into a sharper appreciation of the argument underneath the chaos.