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Ijon Tichy is the only human who knows for sure whether the self-programming robots on the moon are plotting a terrestrial invasion. But a highly focused ray severs his corpus collosum. Now his left brain can't remember the secret and his uncooperative right brain won't tell. Tichy struggles for control of the lost memory and of his own two warring sides

Bringing his twin gifts of scientific speculation and scathing satire to bear on that hapless planet, Earth, Lem sends his unlucky cosmonaut, Ijon Tichy, to the Eighth Futurological Congress. Caught up in local revolution, Tichy is shot and so critically wounded that he is flashfrozen to await a future cure. Translated by Michael Kandel.

Ijon Tichy, Lem's Candide of the Cosmos, encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in space that serve to satirize science, the rational mind, theology, and other icons of human pride. Line drawings by the Author.

Ijon Tichy is an ordinary space traveler who always follows his extraordinary curiosity, especially when it leads him to scientists working on the fringes of knowledge. Their plans are grandiose, and the bargains they make too often Faustian, for the ends they pursue concern humanity's greatest obsessions: immortality, artificial intelligence, and consumer goods. By turns philosophical, satirical, and absurd, Lem's stories find Tichy both a participant in and an observer of strange experiments. One scientist has created artificial consciousness in black boxes, fooling machines into thinking they're human; another has created a gelatinous substance that shows disturbing signs of free will; still another has fallen victim to his own doppelganger. But there are triumphs, however temporary. The revolution in laundry brought on by rival manufacturers of intelligent washing machines gives way to chaos as ever more sophisticated machines seduce their owners or turn to crime. Faulty time machines, intergalactic tourists, intelligent (but suicidal) potatoes -- Ijon Tichy navigates them all with common sense and resourcefulness and in so doing shows why he endures as one of Lem's most popular characters.