Review: The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy

The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Review of Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries

My headline for this review would be “Gulliver in Space.”

Not long ago I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven, and it disappointed me, among other reasons, because it put so much weight on the “science” half of science-fiction. I felt as if throughout the novel, she was trying to appease the doubters, the critics who question whether ‘speculative literature’ ever has a claim to be taken seriously.

Lem is doing the exact opposite. His space hero, Ijon Tichy, is a goofy stand-in for the free play of imagination. He’s a space explorer who, using technology as ever-changing as the campy Batman of the 1960s, ventures on one silly adventure after another.

The first of the adventures should be more than enough to hook anyone. Tichy is flying through a distant galaxy when he discovers that the equivalent of his space-rudder has jammed. He then finds that, to fix it, he will need a second pair of hands, one to hold the item in place and the other to tighten the wrench. Alone, and in despair, he takes a nap only to be awakened by himself – a version of himself from the future a day in advance. It turns out (with the sort of vague reference to science that LeGuin would have found beneath her) that his ship is approaching the speed of light as it nears a star, and that has put him into a time loop.

Lem might have left us to wonder at his cleverness, but he takes things much further. Tichy at first refuses to trust his future self. Then, when later opportunities arise, he constantly frustrates his efforts to fix the space ship. He gets into fights, ambushes himself, anticipates what he will soon want to do but guesses wrong, and finally forms a kind of parliament of all his future selves on the ship.

Silly as such a story is, though, it’s simultaneously allegorical in at least two dimensions.

The dimension that’s more readily accessible is biting. At the same time as the entire book is a celebration of the capacity of the human imagination (certainly as Lem exercises it), it’s a critique of our capacity to work together to solve our problems. The perpetual bete noir here is bureaucracy, the lumbering ways in which we attempt to order our mutual efforts. The second story for instance, has Tichy appointed as Earth’s delegate to an interstellar association of civilizations. When he arrives, though, the association has to go through a lengthy deliberative process, demanding reports on Earth’s good conduct.

That’s a consistent concern throughout the stories, and it’s easy to imagine Lem drew on frustration with the communism of his Polish childhood. Funny as the perpetual insight is – bureaucracy kills the spirit that makes us human – it clearly has an edge.

The other dimension of allegory here grows out of that notion, but – as I read this 40 years later and a continent away – I’m conscious of missing much of the historical, political, and social import. I sense it, but I feel a little as if I’m hearing someone else’s inside jokes. Even through translation, I recognize the rhythm of a master joke-teller, but I find myself a beat slow. I am aware, always, that this is coming to me second-hand, that I am watching the man perform and then pausing to read the subtitles before I can fully laugh.

You get some wonderful details here – aliens that our dim-witted Tichy mistakes for vending machines, or potatoes that, adrift in space, become predatory and rapacious – but I did find some of the later stories running together. Maybe because I was missing some of the barbs at the ends of the hooks Lem throws out there, I felt as if I’d gotten the best of this before it was over.

Still, I recognize a deep cleverness here. Aware that there are parts of this out of my reach without footnotes, I still enjoy it. This is science fiction as it was first born, as Gulliver’s Travels first showed it can be, and that – even before its other virtues – makes me recommend it.






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