The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences (MP3)

Ijon Tichy, Lem's Candide of the Cosmos, encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in space that serve to satirize science, the rational mind, theology, and other icons of human pride.

The Polish sf writer's Star Diaries is a crazy-quilt collection of pieces written "over a period of twenty years" and published in 1971. They present the voyages of Ijon Tichy, an incomparable and apparently indestructible fathead. Tichy bumbles and stumbles around the cosmos running out of gas between stars, sneaking around in cybernetic drag on a planet of mad robots, trying to duplicate himself (in a tail-chasing time loop near a "gravitational vortex") long enough to do a two-man rudder repair job, botching up the course of human events in a history-salvaging operation. Lem veers between joyous slapstick, freewheeling satire, and insanely involuted logical paradoxes - with surprisingly serious excursions into issues of will and faith. Funny, unexpected, tantalizing. (Kirkus Reviews )