First published 1971. Translated by Michael Kandel, Penguin paperback, 2016, pp 338, c.108,000 words.
This is a collection of twelve stories featuring Ijon Tichy, a space explorer. They are inventive genius, often very amusing, and all exploring the nature (and absurdity) of humanity and existence. The philosophy is lightened by the frequent need to outwit bureaucracy that crops up everywhere and by the undermining of Tichy’s heroic self-view when little things go wrong.
These stories were written between 1954 and 1971. They are published in numbered order here which does not reflect the order in which they were written or the chronology of Tichy’s life. It is also missing some of the stories Lem wrote about Tichy (see translator’s note at the end of this edition.) For all that it is still a coherent collection of stories that hang together better than most.
The first story (the seventh voyage) is a light-hearted riff on time travel. As is so often the case, Tichy is travelling alone and in a hurry to get to somewhere in deep space when something breaks on his spaceship. He has to don his spacesuit and go outside to fix it. He finds that the design of the craft requires two people to fix the problem: one to hold the nut and one to tighten the bolt. Fortunately he is passing near some vortices which distort time, so he is able to meet himself. Unfortunately he finds it very hard to cooperate with himself and there is only one spacesuit anyway. As he swings though the vortices, his time-clones multiply and chaos ensues, and he has a hard time deciding which one is he.
In the second story (the eight voyage), Tichy is representing Earth at some galactic federation of planets, to which Earth hopes to be inducted. It is another masterpiece of invention- this time of a collection of truly different aliens. Only, although they have very different body forms, they are only too human in their resorting to legal arguments, bureaucratic tangles and distortions of the truth. Earth, it seems, is totally unqualified to join the civilised. That too is a recurring theme: ‘Yes, it’s sad but nonetheless true, our Earth is in the boondocks of the Universe, obscure, ignored!’ [14th voyage, p134]. Tichy likes to puff himself up, but we see through to the ordinary and fallible. Nowhere is this more amusingly dealt with than in his description of his ancestral tree in the twenty-eighth voyage.
There are a few stories where the focus is on philosophy, and these are less light-hearted and rather heavier going. Lem is questioning what faith may mean in the far future and on distant worlds with different life forms and behaviours. These more philosophical tales were generally written later than the lighter ones according to the translator’s note. Lem wrote all these stories in Poland during the period of the Soviet Union. They speak of the recent repression of faith, and yet how deep-seated Christian philosophy was embedded there.
The translation is completely fluent to read. There are no odd out-of-place phrasings that can disrupt a reading. It must have been a real challenge to translate all the weird names, and in particular, the acronyms of the numerous scientific and governmental institutions and inject them with the sneaking humour that was surely there in the original Polish: they just seem right. It might have been tempting though to name the ‘Commission for the Coordination of Projects re Soma and Psyche’ COCOPOPS rather than COPROSOPS [21st voyage, p258].
Lem here demonstrates once again his extraordinarily fertile imagination, his sense of humour, and his joy at poking fun at the self-important and the bureaucratic. Also in common with his other work, such as Solaris, he explores deep questions of philosophy and what it means to be human. Brilliant stories.
Wikipedia biography of Lem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem
Wikipedia summary of the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries
Others’ reviews of the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/889418.The_Star_Diaries?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=yutxN0l83d&rank=1
© William John Graham, March 2024