The last voluminous book about the adventures of Ijon Tichy tells a story that takes place in a near future. Earthly superpowers send their arsenals and arms factories to the Moon, so that they can evolve there by themselves, leaving the Earth in a state of peace and welfare. The fear of what had been born from these arsenals forces international organizations to send Ijon Tichy in a secret mission to the Moon. Once there, the protagonist suffers from a strange accident: his brain becomes callotomized, i.e. the two hemispheres of his brain are separated. Tichy – in his psychical duality – becomes a puzzle to himself and his environment; he is also a deponent of a mystery he remains unaware of, desired by all intelligence services of the world.
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The Bisected Brain
Reviewed by doomsdayer520 on
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Even at this late stage of his career, Stanislaw Lem was still delivering sharp satire that skewered not just the human condition, but also the archetypes of science fiction. Here, the droll antihero Ijon Tichy is the victim an enemy attack that has severed the connection between the left and right sides of his brain, resulting in the weirdest behavior you'll ever see from a sci-fi secret agent. Meanwhile, Tichy is assigned by Earth authorities to dig up some dirt on what's happening with proxy warfare on the moon. In the most biting aspect of Lem's satire, the nations of the Earth are self-righteously proclaiming "Peace on Earth" when they have merely exported warfare to the Moon, where it is conducted by self-replicating robots and nanotechnology. It turns out that these tech gadgets have evolved on their own in ways their human creators could never comprehend, and some portions of this book are mindbendingly surreal as Tichy tries to infiltrate bizarre mutant technological landscapes. How these technologies end up threatening their Earthbound masters, who had designed them for falsely peaceful purposes, allows Lem to ruminate brutally on the fallacy of war and the pitfalls of technology. The master of sci-fi satire strikes again.
doomsdayer520
Rating: 55
