The Futurological Congress
First English language edition
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| Author | Stanisław Lem |
|---|---|
| Original title | Ze wspomnien Ijona Tichego Kongres futurologiczny |
| Translator | Michael Kandel |
| Cover artist | Menten Ted (1st English) |
| Country | Poland |
| Language | Polish |
| Genre | Science Fiction / Black Humour |
| Publisher | Seabury Press (1st English) |
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Publication date
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1971 |
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Published in English
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1974 |
| Media type | Print () |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 11812537 |
| 891.8/537 19 | |
| LC Class | PG7158.L39 Z413 1985 |
The Futurological Congress (Polish: Kongres futurologiczny) is a 1971 black humour science fiction novel by Polish author Stanisław Lem. It details the exploits of the hero of a number of his books, Ijon Tichy, as he visits the Eighth World Futurological Congress at a Hilton Hotel in Costa Rica. The book is Lem's take on the common science fictional trope of an apparently Utopian future that turns out to be an illusion.
The book opens at the eponymous congress, a light-heartedly grim Malthusian parody of the state of the world. A riot breaks out and the hero, Ijon Tichy, is hit by various psychoactive drugs that were put into the drinking water supply lines by the government to pacify riots. Ijon and a few others escape to the safety of a sewer beneath the Hilton where the congress was being held, and in the sewer he goes through a series of hallucinations and false awakenings which cause him to be confused about whether or not what's happening around him is real. Finally, he believes that he falls asleep and wakes up many years later. The main part of the book follows Ijon's adventures in the future world — a world where everyone takes hallucinogenic drugs, and hallucinations have replaced reality.
Ijon Tichy is sent to the Eighth World Futurological Congress in Costa Rica by Professor Tarantoga. The conference is set to focus on the world's overpopulation crisis and ways of dealing with it. It is held at the Costa Rica Hilton in Nounas, which is 164 stories tall. Lem is fiercely satirical from the start, and absurdities abound at the Hilton with its guaranteed 'BOMB-FREE' rooms and the extravagances of Tichy's suite, which include a palm grove and an 'all-girl orchestra [that] played Bach while performing a cleverly choreographed striptease'.
The conference itself is no less absurd. Papers and presenters are too numerous to allow for full presentations. Instead, papers are distributed in hard copy and speakers call out paragraph numbers to call attention to their most salient points.
In the middle of his first night at the conference, Tichy drinks some tap water in his hotel room, and his wild hallucinogenic trip begins, though it never becomes any more or less absurd than the brief glimpse of reality Lem presents in the beginning of the book (if indeed the congress is meant to be reality). He realizes the next day that the government has drugged the public water supply with "benignimizers", a drug that makes the victim helplessly benevolent. Events spiral out of control at the Hilton, which was already so chaotic that charred corpses from bombing attacks would be covered with tarps where they lay while guests went about their business.
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