โ Scribed by Stanislaw Lem
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Ijon Tichy travels undercover to a robot world, joining an organization to clean up world history thru time travel.
Things go crazy immediately. His spaceship runs into gravitational vortices at relativistic speeds, resulting in massive time anomalies. It may be a blessing in disguise. The reason he couldnt get out of the way was that a meteor had shattered the drive regulator & rudder. He could no longer steer his ship. He had a spare rudder, but couldnt install it. It was a two-man job & he was alone. So when other versions of him start appearing, all he should need do is team up with one of them, fix the rudder & leave the gravitational vortex field.
After that gets straightened out, he goes undercover. A ships computer has mutineed & started its own colony, reproducing itself on a previously uninhabited planet. The insurance company paid the shipowners claim, & now believes that the ship, its computer & all its progeny belong to them. Tichy disguises himself as a robot & goes to investigate.
On another voyage, he heads to a planet where the government irrigation agency has irrigated beyond all need & refused to give up power. People live in water & are jailed in dry cells if they violate the love of water.
After his modern voyages, he comes back from 2166 to recruit himself as a member of THEOHIPPIP, the Teleotelechronistic-Historical Engineering to Optimize the Hyperputerized Implementation of Paleological Programming & Interplanetary Planning. History is in a mess because of all the time travelers. THEOHIPPIP's mission is: For World History to be regulated, cleaned up, straightened out, adjusted & perfected, all in accordance with the principles of humanitarianism, rationalism & general esthetics. You can understand, surely, that with such a shambles & slaughterhouse in ones family tree its awkward to go calling on important cosmic civilizations!...If need be, alterations will be made even before the rise of man, so that he arises better.
All of these are parodies or satires of various political movements & social psychology. From the inability of Tichy to work together with others exactly like him, to the planet of the fearful robots & that of the out-of-countrol irrigation bureau, his visions of human madness are humorously instructive. Lem is a fascinating satirist. While not his best work, this is still brilliant.--Jerry Stratton (edited)
Library : Science Fiction
Universes : Ijon Tichy [01]
Formats : EPUB
ISBN : 9780826401588
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