Lem at Amazon
„Inspection at the Scene of the Crime” is one of the most original of Lem's novels. At first glance a political satire, best understood by the witnesses of the cold war, „Inspection...” is a serious intellectual attempt at creating a model of a future civilization. How to secure an equilibrium, safety and – for individuals – a meaning of existence? What technology should replace Nature or God? How to address the emptiness and suffering that even this protective, but „cold” and impersonal technology cannot remove from the life of planet's inhabitants? Ijon Tichy, getting to know the remote Encja, seeks answer to these questions – and many others.
This book was written differently than other ones in that it was born from frustration - from the inability to write the book I intended. Some five years ago, or maybe earlier, I decided to write a correction to The Fourteenth Voyage in which it would turn out that Ion Tichy mistakenly landed on a different planet - that was turned into a giant Disneyland-like amusement part. Hence I wanted to show that in reality everything was different. But since I didn't know what that "difference" might look like, I starting gathering information (from myself) - and these bits of information turned out to be scattered, inconsistent and fragmentary.