The Star Diaries – Crazily Imaginative Short Stories from the Masterful Sci-fi Satirist

“…..Notwithstanding all the hardship and pain it had occasioned me, I was glad of the outcome, since it restored my faith, shaken by corrupt cosmic officeholders, in the natural decency of electronic brains. Yes, it’s comforting to know when you think about it, that only man can be a bastard.”

Polish author Stanislaw Lem is best known for his philosophical first-contact story Solaris (1961). But Mr. Lem proved himself to be more than an utterly serious author of sci-fi (think, Arthur C. Clarke) through his satirical and profound stories, following the cosmic (mis)adventures of Ijon Tichy (the elaborately constructed puns also reminds us of Kurt Vonnegut’s works). The Star Diaries, Lem’s most substantial work(translated by Michael Kandel and published in English in 1976), is the first collection of short stories featuring the obstinate, 23^rd century space explorer, whose intergalactic trips in his rundown rocket brilliantly satirizes society, technology, and human condition (strongly recommended for ‘Rick and Morty’ fans). The book sets up its central conceit in the two separate introductions: that it’s an incomplete recollection of Ijon Tichy’s travels. The diary is allegedly edited by Tarantoga, a professor of Astrozoology and connoisseur of ‘Tichology’. He apologizes for the incompleteness of the diary entries chronicling Tichy’s voyages. This comic introduction perfectly foretells the wacky, free-wheeling tone of each upcoming parables.

On why the diary entries start with seventh voyage and some of the voyages are entirely missing, Tichy says, “…some of the journeys took place in space, and some in time, therefore there can never be a first; you could always go back to when there were none and set out somewhere; then the one that had been first would become the second, and so on, ad infinitum!” Moreover, this specific ordering of the stories in the expanded edition was not done according to the order in which they were written (Lem deliberately concealed the chronological order of his writing). Hence, we can find certain shift in the tone of Tichy’s subsequent adventures, i.e., in Lem’s writing, as he veers from goofy anecdotal stories to satires on Stalinism to profound ruminations on human nature. Lem opens the book with a playful time-travel story, where Tichy’s spaceship travels through a series of time vortices, leading to the creation of multiple copies of himself. However in the book’s biggest story (‘The Twenty-first Voyage’), featuring the oppressed robot monks of a planet called Dichotica, the zippy feel is wholly replaced by somber and deep discussions on religion and faith (“The vision of heaven as a bank account and hell as a debtor’s prison represents a momentary aberration in the history of the faith. Theodicy is not a course in sophistry to train defenders of the Good Lord, and faith doesn’t mean telling people that everything will work out in the end”, contemplates a transhuman prior).

Elsewhere, Lem sharply satirizes Stalinism in couple of stories – The Eleventh and Thirteenth Voyages. In one story, Tichy sets out to the planet of Circia that’s governed by a rogue computer and populated by human-hating robots. In the other story, Tichy lands on the planets of Pinta and Panta which is following the principles of Master Oh, the greatest sage in all of Cosmos. In Pinta, people are desperately trying to live underwater, whereas in Panta, the government has taken extreme measures to abolish individuality. Both these stories amply refer to paranoia, conformity, and persecutions in the Stalinist era (“The upshot was... that what was to be controlled, controlled us”.) The Eighth and the exhaustively detailed Twentieth voyage poke fun at human nature. The Twentieth Voyage of Tichy happens to be another time-travel yarn, in which the explorer is appointed as the chief of a secret programme that’s engaged in amending Earth and human history. Of course, the staggering human mistakes ruins everything, causing Tichy to exile the programme’s violators like Homer, Bosch, Leonardo da Vinci to different centuries in the past, who having ‘deprived of the opportunity to create real things, gave vent to their frustrations in vicarious, sublimated work’.

Lem expertly interleaves weighty stories with playful ones. For instance, the tale of Dichotica civilization is followed up with darkly humorous account of troubles faced by a priest evangelizing extraterrestrial civilizations. Then there’s the tale of a sentient spaceship-attacking 'potatoes' and the description about inhabitants of a tiny planet who economize living space by frequently reducing themselves to 'atomic dust'. What I find interesting about Lem’s perception of human follies is that he doesn’t present a decidedly dystopian vision, but a seemingly utopian vision to meditate on human limitations. Be it the evolution by ‘persuasion’ in the planet of Pinta or Dichoticans achieving corporeal and mental plasticity, Lem envisions how intelligent beings screw up things. In one case, a semblance of utopia is reached as the power structure cruelly twists people's perception of their surroundings, and in the other case, people despite having unbridled access to science & technology to self-enhance themselves (in myriad ways) still feel entrapped. Through these weirdly inventive creations, Lem pushes us to constantly think about the limits of freedom and nature of individuality, and for which parallels could be found in our own history. Overall, The Star Diaries is an alternatively joyful and thought-provoking collection of sci-fi short stories which ponders over humanity through truly bizarre concoctions.