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The Futurological Congress |
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"The Futurological Congress" is one of the most daringly told stories about Ijon Tichy. Tichy is invited to a futorological convention in a Latin America republic shaken by revolution. Eventually Tichy is transferred to a world where in a grotesque convolution both the utopian and anti-utopian visions of the future have been realized. Mockery of futorology – as always with Lem – is accompanied by serious reflection about human disposition for discord with reality.
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 The Polish film director Wajda wanted to make a move based on The Congress. This perspective fascinated him - he imagined some monstrous hotel where he could set the plot... He even found a hotel of this kind... But in the end it came down to lack of funds, his vision was simply too expensive. That could have been interesting - to see how looking through this wonderful world one would start to see the ghastly one. I think this idea is still interesting, it would only require a Kubrick - in order to achieve a spiritual agreement between the author of the screenplay and the director. |
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 Tichy finds himself plumped into one of the conceptual futures that he and his colleagues are congressed to predict, inside a rebel-besieged Hilton. Well written and ingeniously translated, Congress yet has the feel of high-spirited finger-exercises: lots of ideas thrown off, a host of satirical targets, thin plotting. Like Dick, Vonnegut, and Barth, the book is one of those "fearless satires" of modern academic-government bureaucracies that SF course instructors will find more comfortable as assigned texts than some of Lem's scientifically demanding fiction.
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A Look Inside The Futurological Congress |
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 THE EIGHTH WORLD FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS was held in Costa Rica. (...) The Hilton soared one hundred and six floors upward from its flat, four-story base. On the roof of this lower structure were tennis courts, swimming pools, solariums, racetracks, merry-go-rounds (which simultaneously served as roulette wheels), and shooting galleries where your could fire at absolutely anyone you liked - in effigy - provided you put in your order twenty-four hours in advance, and there were concert amphitheaters equipped with tear gas sprinklers in case the audience got out of hand.
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