未来学大会

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.