Wilderness Tips

The title hooked me. I immediately wanted to see Atwood's take on such a Canadian subject, especially given her close association with the outdoors. In Negotiating with the Dead she writes:

At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown.

I found another of her books, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, to be a useful companion. It consists of four lectures she gave at Oxford in 1991, the same year Wilderness Tips was published. The lectures are on Sir John Franklin's last expedition, Grey Owl, the Wendigo, and women in CanLit.

Wilderness Tips contains 10 stories that portray a society morally adrift. All take place mainly in Toronto or in nearby cottage country.  The three I liked best all have an outdoor connection.

Wilderness Tips

There's a passing reference to the title story in Strange Things. Atwood says it includes a character who, like Grey Owl, wants to be an Indian, but in fact he's only a minor figure. The central character is a refugee named George who comes from a strife-torn European country. He speaks several languages but is still learning the finer points of English, as when he puzzles over a book with the name as the title of the story:

"Wilderness" he knew, but "tips"? He was not immediately sure whether this word was a verb or a noun. There were asparagus tips, as he knew from menus, and when he was getting into the canoe that afternoon in his slippery leather-soled city shoes Prue had said, "Be careful, it tips."

The setting is a summer cottage belonging to the family of George's wife. The cottage has the same name as a popular 19th-century Canadian novel, Wacousta, which Atwood discusses in her Grey Owl lecture. The title character in that book is an Englishman who disguises himself as an Indian in order to wreak revenge on his enemies.

George has come to Canada not to dress up as an Indian or to seek revenge. Rather, his masquerade as a charming and successful businessman hides a sinister past. The name he goes by, "George," is only an approximation of his difficult-to-pronounce given name.

George takes one more look at the paper. Quebec is talking Separatism; there are Mohawks behind the barricades near Montreal, and people are throwing stones at them; word is the country is falling apart. George is not worried: he's been in countries that were falling apart before. There can be opportunities.

The Age Of Lead

The main character has the same given name as Franklin's wife, Jane. She is watching a TV show about his last expedition. Forensic analysis of sailors buried on Beechey Island in the High Arctic revealed they were suffering from lead poisoning, the source apparently the solder used to seal their tinned food supply. It muddled the thinking of everyone on the expedition and contributed to its demise.

Jane's life has some disquieting parallels with the lost expedition. Her travels resemble the confused wanderings of the crew, and her material possessions are not unlike the useless items the sailors dragged along with them in their final overland trek and then discarded. Many of her friends are dying.

It was as if they had been weakened by some mysterious agent, a thing like colourless gas, scentless and invisible, so that any germ that happened along could invade their bodies, take them over.

"The Age of Lead" was inspired by the forensic discoveries described in Frozen in Time by Owen Beattie and John Geiger. In 2004 a new edition appeared with an introduction by Atwood and a quote from "The Age of Lead." In 2015 a book co-authored by Beattie, Franklin's Lost Ship: The Historic Discovery of HMS Erebus, includes quotes from Strange Things.

In Moving Targets, Atwood describes a visit she made to Beechey Island and how she carried away a pebble that she subsequently buried in Gwendolyn MacEwen Park in Toronto. MacEwen was a friend and author of a verse drama, "Terror and Erebus," which was broadcast on CBC Radio.

Of all the stories in this volume, "The Age of Lead" made the most appearances in magazines before being reprinted in Wilderness Tips: twice in the UK and once each in Canada, Germany, Australia and the US.  

Death by Landscape

My favourite story in the book begins by invoking the Group of Seven, whose landscapes are not done "in the old tidy European sense." They rarely include people or animals, and are often so stylized they are almost abstract.

The story centres around two girls attending a summer camp that encourages faux-Indian rituals. It's called Camp Manitou, and before a canoe trip they are urged to bring back "much wampum" and "many scalps."

Looking back on this, Lois, finds it disquieting. She knows too much about Indians: this is why. She knows for instance that they should not even be called Indians, and that they have enough worries without other people taking their names and dressing up as them. It has all been a form of stealing.

While on the canoe trip, Lois's friend disappears without a trace. The last that is heard of her is a shout: "Not a scream. More like a cry of surprise, cut off too soon. Short, like a dog's bark."

Possible explanations include suicide, foul play, and a bear attack. Another might be the Wendigo, a mythical monster discussed in Strange Things.

I doubt that I'll be able to look at another Group of Seven landscape without thinking of this story. 

The Other Stories

The ones I like best are:

"Isis in Darkness" - A man falls under the spell of a brilliant but mysterious poet whose work makes him feel “his own careful talent shrivelling to the size of a dried bean.” He ends up toiling fruitlessly in academia while she accumulates fame until her final unsettling appearance. (It's been suggested that MacEwen was the model for the poet.)

"The Bog Man" -  Another exhumed man, this time from a bog in Scotland. A woman has taken as a lover her archeology prof, "the first who did not treat sex as some kind of panty raid."

"Uncles" - The daughter of a war widow works her way up in a newspaper and endures snide sexual innuendo from male colleagues. After she makes the jump to TV and achieves fame, she is attacked in a book by the only former colleague she respected. The story ends with an imagined scene of incomprehensible misogyny.

Daydreams of Angels

Twenty stories with a focus on mistreated children, particularly girls, but made palatable by the use of whimsy, fantasy, striking images, and unexpected developments.

Many of the stories are set in the past, as though it's a more suitable location for odd goings-on. In Messages in Bottles a pair of twins survive the sinking of an ocean liner in 1913 by floating away on their mother's cello. "This cello made such a mournful noise as it rode over the waves that a whale fell in love with it."

A fairy tale element underpins several of the stories. In Bartok for Children, a Canadian soldier is killed in occupied France, but brought back to life by a lonely toymaker who longs for a son. The ungrateful soldier seduces a woman by telling her whatever she wants to hear. With each lie, it is not his nose that grows longer.

In The Wolf-Boy of Northern Quebec Pierre-Loup tours with another feral child, George LeCurieu, and meets a girl in a red coat.  “Why, that girl's so cute, I could eat her up.”

Sex is another major ingredient and several of the characters are prostitutes, yet there's nothing graphic or lurid. In Where Babies Come From the infants appear magically, washing ashore. “You would see their little bottoms peeking up from out of the sand, and if you dug them up quickly, they would be yours to keep.”

The title characters of The Gypsy and the Bear are left stranded in a story that a little boy is telling his tin soldiers. He is called away to lunch and they end up in a brothel.

Dreamlife of Toasters, in which two robots have sex and produce an unwanted child, reminded me of the skewed fables of Stanislaw Lem.  Other stories with science-fiction premises are Swan Lake for Beginners in which a Russian scientist creates batch after batch of Nureyev clones, and The Isles of Dr. Moreau where Grandfather dates a deer-girl, a lion-girl, a swan-girl, and a monkey-girl. 

Another aspect I liked is the way some stories take surprising changes in direction. In the title story, Daydreams of Angels, a shortage of senior angels occurs because they've been sent by God to a beach in Normandy. Consequently a cherub is assigned to a girl named Yvette in Montreal. After they sneak into her room at home, the story switches to her father as he lands on the beach in Normandy.

In The Man Without a Heart a black heroin addict steals from a single mother. When he gets out of rehab, he returns in order to pursue a relationship with her ten-year-old son. The story defies the reader's expectations.

One of the best features of the stories are the marvellous images. “We cover our ice cream in maraschino cherries. It's like clowns were caught in an avalanche and all you can see of them is their noses.” From the same story -- The Conference of the Birds, which features an unruly welfare family with quadruplets named Jay, Robin, Sparrow, and Turtledove -- comes the following marvellous bit:

Are you who you are when you are a teeny fetus? There are some people who will say that you aren't properly you yet. But of course you are.      You are you even long before that. You are you when your parents begin to get dressed in fancy clothes on Saturday night. You are you when your mother, who is barely twenty-one years old, puts on a pair of yellow lace underwear. When she plucks her eyebrows in the mirror and when she puts on a red dress that is cut really low and burgundy lipstick: that's all about you, baby.      You are you when your father, who is also twenty-one years old, pops a pimple on his forehead. When he puts on his fancy shiny shirt that was made by children in a sweatshop in Indonesia. When he isn't sure that he actually looks good—but he has been lucky twice before when wearing it.      They are both riding the subway in opposite directions to meet each other and you have already begun. That is your beginning. You have just as much right to be as anybody.

My favourite from this collection, "Daydreams of Toasters," I'm adding to a short list I keep of fantastic stories that have been indelibly etched in my mind. The others are:

"The Garden of Time" by J.G. Ballard
"Descending" by Thomas Disch
"Buffalo Gals" by Ursula le Guin
"The Heat Death of the Universe" by Pamela Zoline

The Jungle Books

Kipling's Jungle books are beast fables, the animals having names and able to converse with each other. The tales are delightful and impossibly romantic, especially the eight that concern Mowgli ("the Frog"), a toddler adopted by a wolf pack.

Mowgli is charmingly innocent and childishly brave, but sometimes rather imperious. Other animals, even Shere Khan the tiger, look away from his stare. Some of the wolves resent this and turn against him. He leaves the jungle and lives for a while in a village with a woman who may or may not be his mother.

The three Mowgli stories in the first Jungle Book are particularly good, being deftly told and having a satisfying organic unity. The remaining Mowgli stories are in the Second Jungle Book and add non-essential details that occurred within the span of the first three.

The stories are a little darker than the movie versions. There are other differences as well. Kaa the rock python is a wise and important friend, not an enemy. There is no King Louie in the books, he is a Disney fabrication.

Of the non-Mowgli stories, "Rikki-tikki-Tavi" is probably the most well-known. In "The Undertakers" there is an interesting Dickensian character, a crocodile called the Mugger. The tales I liked least are the two that take place in the Far North, one of them in the Canadian High Arctic.
 
Kipling was the first writer in English to win a Nobel Prize for literature, but is now somewhat out of fashion for his dated views on empire. Nevertheless, these stories are classics, and we cannot seem to get enough of Mowgli and his literary descendant, Tarzan. A new movie for each was released this year, and another version of Mowgli comes out next year.

THE JUNGLE BOOK

1. Mowgli’s Brothers

The wolves take in Mowgli despite the protests of Shere Khan. Ten years later years the tiger turns most of the pack against Mowgli. Forewarned by Bagheera the panther, Mowgli steals a glowing coal from a village and uses a fiery brand to drive away Shere Khan. “Up, dog!” Mowgli cried. “Up, when a man speaks, or I will set that coat ablaze!”

2. Kaa’s Hunting

When Mowgli is imprisoned by monkeys in the Cold Lairs (a lost city), a rescue attempt is led by Baloo and Bagheera, but it is only with the timely aid of Kaa that he escapes. It is the monkeys that Kaa hypnotizes with his eyes, not Mowgli.

3. “Tiger! Tiger!”

Mowgli spends time in a village with a woman, Messua, whose baby was taken by a tiger. When he learns that Shere Khan is planning to lie in wait for him at the village gate, he orchestrates a stampede of water buffalo that kills Shere Khan. As he skins out the hide, he is accused of being a shape-changing sorceror, and returns to the jungle. The story ends this way:

“Man-Pack and Wolf-Pack have cast me out,” said Mowgli.  “Now I will hunt alone in the Jungle.”      “And we will hunt with thee,” said the four cubs.     So Mowgli went away and hunted with the four cubs in the Jungle from that day on. But he was not always alone, because years afterwards he became a man and married.     But that is a story for grown-ups.

4. The White Seal

A seal in the Pribiloff Islands leads others to a place safe from hunters.

5. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”

A mongoose protects a human family from a pair of vengeful cobras.

6. Toomai of the Elephants

The son of a mahout, Little Toomai, accompanies elephants one night when they meet in the jungle to dance.

7. Her Majesty’s Servants

A man overhears a conversation by military pack-animals: a baggage-camel, a troop-horse, an elephant named Two Tails, a pair of gun-bullocks, two mules (and at the very end a dog named Vixen).

THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK

1. How Fear Came

During a drought, Hathi the elephant proclains a water truce. When Shere Khan boasts of having killed a man, Hathi tells a tale of how the First Tiger killed a man, thus teaching men how to kill.

2. The Miracle Of Purun Bhagat 

The Prime Minister of a state in India renounces society and takes up a begging bowl. He ends up in a mountain village where his friendship with animals -- “as often as not he would find a furry ape sharing his blanket” -- gives him advance warning of an avalanche.

3. Letting In The Jungle

People respond to the events in “Tiger! Tiger!” by planning to kill Messua and her husband. They are freed by Mowgli and escape to safety, after which he organizes the destruction of the village and its cultivated fields.

4. The Undertakers 

A very old crocodile reminisces with a jackal and an adjutant stork. He talks about the fat times during the Mutiny when the river was full of bodies, and longs to meet again a child whose hand slipped away unharmed from his bite. He gets his wish but the child is now a man and has a gun.

5. The King’s Ankus

Kaa and Mowgli visit an old white cobra who guards ancient treasure beneath the Cold Lairs (the once great “City of Twenty Kings”). Mowgli takes a bejewelled ankus, which as the cobra warned is cursed.

6. Quiquern

Set near Bylot Island starving Inuit are saved by what appears to be a two-headed eight-legged creature. (Kipling misuses the word "Inuit," which is plural, not singular.)

7. Red Dog 

Kaa and Mowgli execute a plan to stave off an attack by a large pack of dholes.  After much blood-shed, the dholes are defeated. Before he dies, Akela, the old leader of the pack, urges Mowgli to return to his people.  

8. The Spring Running 

Mowgli, now just short of 17 years old, is "strong, tall and beautiful, his long black hair sweeping over his shoulder" and "might easily be mistaken for some wild god of a jungle legend." By this time his wolf parents have died and Baloo is nearly blind. Unsettled by the spring mating season, Mowgli leaves the jungle and returns to live among humans.

 

Marcovaldo

Poor Marcovaldo. He's a debt-ridden labourer with a complaining wife, mischievous children, and a cramped home with stained walls.

He longs for decent food, better health, a good night's sleep, a glimpse of stars in the night sky, but his schemes to achieve such things inevitably go awry. Even the simplest tasks -- shovelling snow, collecting firewood, returning home from a movie, taking his family to a supermarket just to gaze at the food -- have ridiculous consequences.

Three times he ends up in hospital, and even when he takes his ailing children out of the city for fresh air, they end up on the grounds of a sanatorium.

Some of the stories have an almost cartoonlike quality, as when Marcovaldo steathily lowers a line from a restaurant's roof into a fishtank, only to lose his catch to a cat. Or when he is entrusted with the care of a potted plant and mounts it on his motorbike to chase after a passing raincloud.

In the final story Marcovaldo becomes a company Santa and delivers presents. When his children get involved, the Society for the Implementation of Christmas Consumption comes up with a new gimmick "to speed up the pace of consumption and give the market a boost" -- destructive gifts.

The book's 20 stories have a fable-like quality due to their beguiling simplicity, seasonal ordering, and presence of many animals. As we chuckle at Marcovaldo's foibles we come to realize that his longings are our own, and that no matter where we live -- city or country -- it's a chimerical world.

The book ends in this fashion:

There was a line where the forest, all black, ended and the snow began, all white. The hare ran on this side, and the wolf on that. The wolf saw the hare's prints on the snow and followed them, always keeping in the black, so as not to be seen. At the point where the prints ended there should be the hare, and the wolf came out of the black, opened wide his red maw and his sharp teeth, and bit the wind. The hare was a bit farther on, invisible; he scratched one ear with his paw, and escaped, hopping away. Is he here? There? Is he a bit farther on? Only the expanse of snow could be seen, white as this page.

Mortal Engines

A robot-themed collection (hence the title) selected by the translator, Michael Kandel, who in the intro divides Lem's work into three categories:

  comic-satirical fantasy
  realistic SF
  philosophy

About half the stories in this volume come from the Polish collection, Fables for Robots, which fall into the first category. They are light and silly reading, with titles like:

“Three Electroknights”
“How Erg the Self-Inducing Slew a Paleface”
“Tale of the Computer that Fought a Dragon”

They're sprinkled with whimsical terms: thinking powder, a knot in space, an ultradragon, an antimatter blunderbuss, a supernova extinguisher.

Characters plug their heads together to wrestle with a problem, and make remarks such as, “Something feels wrong inside, I must have blown a tube.”

The stories are very similar to those in The Cyberiad, though without (at least not in this edition) any of Daniel Mroz's delightful illustrations.

Consciousness Is Suffering

In the intro Kandel refers to his editorial strategy as being “a general progression from light to dark, from comic to tragic, from robot to human.”

This progression begins with the final three stories in the group mentioned above. They are more a little more weighty than the rest:

 "Automatthew's Friend”
  King Globares and the Sages”
 "The Tale of King Gnuff”

The next two stories, “The Sanatorium of Doctor Vliperdius” and “The Hunt” reunite us with two of Lem's favourite characters, Ijon Tichy and Pirx. “The Hunt” is a refreshing change of pace, as it not only falls into the category of realistic SF, but also features Pirx's distinctive voice. (It also appears in More Tales of Pirx the Pilot.)

The final story, “The Mask,” is the longest at nearly 50 pages, and together with “The Hunt” takes up more than a third of the book. Elements in it reminded me of Zelazny and Kafka, Alien and Terminator. I found it rather heavy going despite some fine turns of phrase. The ending is ambiguous, unsettling, and therefore typically Lem.

It is the most clearcut example of Kandel's remark that Lem is similar to Dostoevsky in the belief that “consciousness is suffering.”

t zero

A protean character named Qfwfq -- previously introduced to readers in Cosmicomics -- reappears in many of the stories here.

The book is divided into three sections.  The stories in the first are surreal, while those in the second address the reader directly with rambling, playful, convoluted discourses about identity, love, and cellular reproduction.  

The last section, which is the one I enjoyed most, approaches stories like problems in physics.

Part One – More of Qfwfq

The Soft Moon
Mucus-like biological matter drips from the approaching Moon and covers the Earth. When the Moon recedes it takes with it pieces of glass and steel captured from Earth.

The Origin of Birds
The sudden appearance of birds on Earth is described in comic-book form, and Qfwfq marries Queen Or after travelling to the Land of the Birds in the following fashion:

The frame is empty. I arrive. I spread paste on the upper right-hand corner. I sit down in the lower left-hand corner. A bird enters, flying, from the left, at the top. As he leaves the frame, his tail becomes stuck. He keeps flying and pulls after him the whole frame stuck to his tail, with me sitting at the bottom, allowing my self to be carried along.

Crystals
The sudden formation of crystals -- "an invasion of angled blossoming" -- creates a rift between Qfwfq and his wife Vug, who appreciate them differently.

Blood, Sea
Swimming through a primeval sea/driving with another couple in a Volkswagen, Qfwfq and Zilphia fall to "fertilizing with a will" to outcompete the other couple with "me-sardines" and "Zilphia-sardines."

Part Two – Priscilla

Mitosis

Qfwfq, in love with Priscilla, remembers his life as a cell in the grip of reproductive forces.

To tell you properly the way things proceeded I must remind you of how I was made, a mass of protoplasm like a kind of pulpy dumpling with a nucleus in the middle. Now I'm not just trying to make myself sound interesting, but I must say that in that nucleus I led a very intense life.

Meiosis
"Characters are multicellular organisms." In this case, camels.

Death
Reproduction and the desire to remain eternal is a battle that spills onto the printed page.

Part Three – t zero

t zero
A hunter with a notched arrow faces a leaping lion. "In a second I'll know if the arrow's trajectory and the lion's will or will not coincide at a point X crossed both by L and by A at the same second tx."

The Chase
A man is pursued by another man in heavy traffic. As he tries to plot his escape and anticipate the countermoves of his pursuer, it becomes unclear who is chasing whom.

The Night Driver
The narrator, who lives in A, quarrels on the telephone with his girlfriend Y, who lives in B. On being told she is going to call his rival Z, the narrator repents and jumps in his car to see Y in order to patch things up. On the way he tries to anticipate possible outcomes:

it would be terrible if I were to run to Y jealous of Z and if Y were running to me, repentant, avoiding Z, while Z hasn’t remotely though of stirring from his house.

The Count of Monte Cristo
Edmund Dantes is imprisoned (in a cell, of course) in an Escher-like Castle d’If. At one point a hole appears in the ceiling, and another inmate, the Abbe Faria, emerges and walks across the walls like a fly. Eventually Faria burrows into the study of Alexandre Dumas.

Ijon Tichy

The Star Diaries (321 pages)

Ijon Tichy is the hero of this collection of absurd, fantastic, playful, and satirical tales. Many are as cartoonish as the Jetsons or anything on Saturday morning TV. Indeed, one of Tichy's forbears has his head flattened by a steam roller.

Tichy flies about in a jalopy of a rocketship. It has a rudder, and needs new brakes and a paint job. He cooks his meals on the atomic pile, and when he passes too close to a star he climbs into the refrigerator to cool off. When he runs out of fuel he dives his ship into a volcano, causing an eruption which propels him back into space. Someone goes by riding on a meteor.

Some of the supporting cast are robot friars, feral furniture, intelligent potatoes, edible space ships, dogs in spacesuits, and "interstellar vagabonds known as Gypsonians" who hire themselves out for the cleaning of moons, and whose children throw stones at comets.

Time Travel

Voyage 7 – The ship becomes packed with so many versions of Tichy they have to form committees in order to make decisions.

Voyage 12 – He uses a time machine to speed up evolution on a primitive planet, but breaks off a knob and sets it in reverse, causing him to revert to a baby.

Voyage 20 - He is recruited by his future self to head up a project to improve history with disastrous results. Mars is burnt to a crisp.

Strange Societies

Voyage 13 – A political allegory about a repressive regime that convinces people they are fish, and another where everyone wears an identical mask and individualism is forbidden. People are interchangeable right down to the family level, with mothers, fathers, and children trading places every day.

Voyage 23 – The planet of the Whds is so crowded its people reduce themselves to their constituent atoms to order to get some sleep at night, and to travel by mailing themselves in a cassette. "Look out, you’re spilling my daddy," Tichy is warned by a youngster. When he tries the process, there is an error of some sort and he is reconstituted as Napoleon.

Memoirs of a Space Traveller
Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy (153 pages)

The rather convoluted publishing history of these stories is mentioned in a note at the end of Star Diaries, which appeared in English in two volumes, the second being this one, Memoirs of a Space Traveller. It contains two further voyages as well as several stories of the mad scientist variety.

Voyage 18 - Tichy creates the universe using a chronocannon. Two of the members of his team are Lou Cipher and Eve Addams. The universe, a scientist declares, "is an illegal loan of matter and energy." It is a "Debtor to Nothingness."

Voyage 24 – A planet runs into a multitude of civic problems when machines put people out of work. A Governing Machine is created to restore harmony, which it does by transforming people into "solid beautiful durable forms" and arranging them into "pleasing symmetrical designs."

Mad Scientists

Denser and more serious in tone, these stories are rather like thought experiments about the nature of perception and reality. Tichy visits a number of scientists whose misshapen appearance is representative of their unbalanced attempts at playing god. One creates a synthetic soul, another electronic brains in boxes ("Leibnizian monads") unaware of the true nature of their existence. A third has secretly been replaced by his own clone, and a fourth creates a fungoid creature that begins experimenting on the scientist.

The Washing Machine Tragedy

This story appeared in The New Yorker and describes the development of advanced washing machines. They mend and iron clothes, then progress to doing the children’s homework, interpreting dreams, singing lullabies, eventually becoming less capable of performing their original duties. Some are weaponized and associate with criminal elements. Others end up on the streets panhandling. Illegal parts factories spring up, and self-defence courses teach people how to defend themselves using a canopener or a pair of pliers.

Let Us Save the Universe
Ijon Tichy decries the ill-effects of cosmic tourism -- billboards and space garbage, graffiti on asteroids, comets without tails. Women exceed the speed limit because they will age slower. The impact on fauna in a Preserve is particularly harmful, and the story morphs into an illustrated bestiary of weird creatures whose lives have been disrupted by human contact. One is a bird called the sribblemock:

...the counterpart of the terrestrial parrot, except that it writes instead of talks. Often, alas, it writes on fences the obscenities it picks up from tourists from Earth. Some people deliberately infuriate this bird by taunting it with spelling errors.

The Futurological Congress (142 pages)

According to the translator's note at the end of Star Diaries, this novella was also part of that original collection.

It takes place on Earth and begins in Costa Rica where Tichy is attending a futurological congress. There is much unrest, which is combated by the use of a calming drug in the water of the hotel where he is staying, and which results in a hallucinatory experience involving giant rats.

When he comes to his senses he finds that he has been cryogenically preserved and resuscitated in the future where society has solved its problems chemically. It is a pharmocracy in which people vote on the weather and eat books instead of reading them. Poets use sonnetol and "children learn their reading and writing from orthographic sodas." Tichy is told, "We keep this civilization narcotized, for otherwise it could not endure itself."

Ijon Tichy appears in at least one other book: Peace on Earth.

Links

Tichy's adventures became the subject of a German TV series loosely based on Star Diaries. If you go to Youtube and do a search for Ijon Tichy, you'll find a few episodes with English subtitles. His rocket ship is a coffee press.

Lem's Official Site
Ijon Tichy Raumpilot

Tales of Pirx the Pilot

Unlike the whimsical fantasy of The Cyberiad, these five stories attempt to portray space travel realistically during a time of routine interplanetary voyages.

There are no aliens, no space battles. Instead the plots turn on malfunctioning equipment: a short circuit, a burnt-out condenser, a "loose charge" in a CRT screen.

Although the stories are more than 40 years old and often sound dated, the overall effect is not as negative as one might expect.

The attempt at realism has already been undercut by the author’s use of a likeable but somewhat bumbling hero, and by language that is often folksy and jocular, resulting in a semi-comic feel. At one point Pirx wonders:

"What were those rockets firing, anyway? Dumplings?"

It's an odd but interesting combination, and gives the stories a retro feel (e.g. a pilot smoking a cigarette on his acceleration couch, his ship "a relic of atomic architecture" with "scars of old radiation leaks") that goes well with the subversive use of humour, whose purpose (I think) is to camouflage a deep pessimism. If space travel becomes possible, it will only give us a larger stage on which to demonstrate our shortcomings.

The Test – The opening story is the most comedic, with Pirx a chubby cadet who must take a ship to the Moon and perform a series of maneuvers, during which he is tormented by a couple of flies.

The Conditioned Reflex – Pirx is assigned to a Moon station whose construction was marked by bickering and wrongheaded engineering decisions. Pirx and his partner are replacing two men who died under mysterious circumstances, and unexpectedly find themselves recreating their final moments. This is the longest story in the book and the Moon is described in great detail.

On Patrol – Two men are lost on patrol, and Pirx comes close to suffering the same fate.

The Albatross – While travelling in a luxury liner, a distress call is received and Pirx becomes witness to a disaster in space. In the middle of a botched rescue effort, the passengers want to know when they can resume dancing.

Terminus – Pirx is assigned to a rebuilt tub following an accident in which the entire crew perished, save a robot now suffering from post traumatic stress. It has "oily wrists" and is "so old it was almost blind and deaf." One of its duties is looking after the ship's mice, which are used as "live radiation gauges." The story and the book end with the following observation:

[Pirx] began thinking about the innocence of machines, about how man had endowed them with intelligence and, in doing so, had made them an accomplice of his mad adventures. About how the myth of the golem – the myth of the machine that rebelled against its creator – was a lie, a fiction invented by the guilty for the sake of self-exoneration.

More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

The original Tales of Pirx the Pilot was first published in 1966. The English translation arrived in 1979 but contained only half of the stories. The remainder appeared in 1982 under the title More Tales of Pirx the Pilot.

Pirx is now an older and more respected figure but the mishaps continue, mainly due to human foibles and a misplaced confidence in technology.

Pirx's Tale - While hauling space junk from Mercury to Earth, Pirx witnesses an abandoned alien craft making a swing through the solar system. Unfortunately his ship is so beaten-up that "every lift-off or landing was a violation of the laws of physics," and his crew has just come down with the mumps.

The Accident - In the only story that takes place beyond the solar system, Pirx is "stuck in the mountains of an utterly worthless planet" with two feuding colleagues. Just as their mission is coming to an end, a robot fails to return from a routine task. When they go out in search of it, Pirx makes surprising discovery, one that he keeps to himself.

The Hunt - Damaged in an accident on the Moon, a mining robot turns a laser on its makers. Pirx is one of several men sent out to destroy it, but when he comes face-to-face with it he finds danger coming from a different direction.

The Inquest - In the longest and most complex of the stories, Pirx is on trial for an accident that occurred on a flight to Saturn, during which he was to test a new model of robot -- in fact, an android indistinguishable from a human being. During the flight several crew members attempted to tip off Pirx about the robot's identity. One person even claimed that he himself was the robot, and gave reasons why he wanted to fail. Who could Pirx trust?

Ananke - The first of a new class of super-freighters crashes while attempting to land on Mars. Was it a freak accident or does the same fate await the next two ships already en route?

Pirx also appears in a later novel, Fiasco.

Official website

The Cyberiad

Tales for the Cybernetic Age

In this collection of whimsical nonlinear tales, vanity gets a pair of friendly rivals into a number of ridiculous predicaments, often at the expense of a good shellacking.

Trurl and Klapaucius are "constructors," but everything they build has unforeseen effects or does not work properly. Some of their contraptions are:
-an electrobard
-a kingdom in a box
-a probability amplifier for summoning up dragons
-a machine that can create anything beginning with the letter n.

While not all the tales are equally good, the language throughout is imaginative and fun. There are photon schooners, ion crumpets, antimatter sabres, and three Voltaic brothers. There is also a Battery Age and an Empire of the Cold Welders. Someone wears a semi-permeable cummerbund. Another is "innocent as a brand new fuse."

As the stories progress it becomes apparent that Trurl and Klapaucius are robots, and gradually a serious, if not bitter, undertone creeps in. In the penultimate story a philosopher describes the utter failure of robotkind's godlike powers to bring peace and happiness to the universe.

The last tale in the book (and the only one that does not include Trurl and Klapaucius) concerns a princess who spurns "every suitor who seeks her radioactive hand." She will marry no one but a human. Infatuated, a neighbouring prince dons a disguise that is "flaccid, drooping, doughy." His description of human customs is hilarious.

Misc

The Cyberiad was first published in 1967. This edition was translated by Michael Kandel, and illustrated with delightful line drawings by Daniel Mroz. There is no introduction or afterword, which could have illuminated some of the challenges in translating Lem's prose, which contains many made-up words.

The book's subtitle might easily have been Don Quixote in Space, for the tales take place in an "age of electric errantry." Indeed, Lem uses the same word as Cervantes when he describes these adventures as "sallies."

The author, a famous and prolific Polish writer of SF, passed away in 2006. His work has been compared to that Kafka, Vonnegut, and Douglas Adams.

Official website

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

Imagine Mark Leyner's brain as a blender into which he tosses a few basic ingredients -- science, entertain-

ment, consumer products -- then pauses at the array of buttons on the console.

Chop? Puree? Emulsify? Aw hell, he presses all of them. When the whirring stops, he tastes the resulting psychedelic smoothie:

a scented nuclear warhead manufactured by mcdonnell douglas in collaboration with estee lauder passes overhead, leaving in its wake a light, floral fragrance with a touch of citrus and spice...

Hmm, not bad, he thinks. His finger dips again:

tonight at madison square garden the new york rangers disembowelled the boston bruins' goalie, brought a hibachi onto the ice, roasted his intestines and served them on toast points to the howling hometown fans

Excellent, says Leyner, and pours the contents of his brain into containers of various sizes. Now for some titles. Let's see...

fugitive from a centrifuge
colonoscope nite
saliva of the fittest
i was an infinitely hot and dense dot
lines composed after inhaling paint thinner
yoo hoo! buzz called out. y'all got any creme de cacao?
in the kingdom of boredom i wear the royal sweatpants

Humming to himself, he packages them up and sends them off to various magazines. Some time later they appear in Esquire, Harper's, Fiction International...

Third Class Superhero

Every once in a while you take a chance on a book with a great cover and it turns out to be a fabulous choice. Third Class Superhero is that kind of book, chock full of the kind of stories I love, stories that are not just well written, but have an innovative or experimental bent. In fact, the book reminds me of one of my favourite literary movements, the New Wave.

If you've never heard of it, the New Wave was a long-ago movement that consisted of fiction whose form or content defied logic. Though published in SF venues, New Wave writers sought to sever ties with traditional SF.

Two of the most powerful stories I've ever read came from that movement. They are "Descending" by Thomas Disch, and "The Heat Death of the Universe" by Pamela Zoline. The former describes an event that could never occur, thus placing it in the realm of fantasy or allegory, yet without the obvious trappings of either. The latter is a story that is fractured in such a way as to reflect the narrative, a housewife's nervous breakdown.

It is "The Heat Death of the Universe" that the stories of Third Class Superhero most resemble. They tend to be plotless and fragmented, sometimes with numbered or titled sections, and often with doses of scientific or pseudo-scientific blather. Despite the occasional SF paraphenalia, the author's interest remains with issues of identity and existence rather than cosmic adventure.

The titles of some of the stories give a clue to Charles Yu's intent: "Problem for Self-Study," "The Man Who Became Himself," "Man of Quiet Desperation Goes on Short Vacation."

Stories like these are not easy to write, for they can easily become boring and pretentious. Only the concluding story in the collection comes close to suffering this fate. For the rest, the author delivers wry humour, great ingenuity, and darn good writing.

"401(k)" features a couple trying to find meaning in an existence defined by the products they consume. "We don't need the Good Life. The Pretty Good Life would be just fine."

"My Last Days as Me" is about an actor in a family sitcom whose members are constantly being replaced. The story is full of wonderful lines. "Just to get things straight. Me is sixteen years old. I am twenty-two. I have been playing Me for as long as I can remember."

"Realism" begins with the narrator's mother reading a book called Realism. The narrator asks, "What is a story in this kind of universe? What is character, what is plot?" A little later Yu performs a reverse Kafka by having an insect turn into a human being.

In "Florence" the narrator is trapped on a distant planet, alone and neurotic. His boss sends him messages, singing in the nude. A parcel arrives from his aunt Betty. Everyone is a recording.

Christians in the year A.D. 1,002,006 are few and far between. A lot of people don't even know what they are. Mainly because there are hardly any people left. Also, most of us stopped believing in God after black hole XR-97-ID got so massive it started swallowing itself over and over again in a recursive loop -- like some cosmic Escher print -- resulting in an object ten times the mass of the rest of the known universe. Personally, that did it for me.

"32.05864991%" refers to the statistical equivalent of the word "maybe," and the story itself is a crazy combination of probability, parallel universes, and the likelihood of a man and a woman making a connection through a telephone call.

"Two-Player Infinitely Iterated Simultaneous Semi-Cooperative Game with Spite and Reputation" begins by describing a game somewhat like The Sims, then morphs into something entirely different by offering a game cheat. Enter player 1's house, turn on the shower, and look into the mirror:

If you wait long enough, the game will give up and override its defaults. It will recognize your reflection in the mirror as a different player, Player 2. Now you are Player 1 and your reflection is Player 2. Now, say you are sorry.

The title story is the most conventional of the lot, featuring a superhero named Moisture Man, whose special power is the ability to condense moisture out of the air, which allows him to douse small fires and quench the thirst of his colleagues. A minor ability, to say the least. That's why he's stuck at being a third class superhero. After years of trying he's still unable to move up the ladder, and each year has to re-write a test to keep his superhero licence. This year he looks around and sizes up the other losers who are in there with him, writing the exam.

To my left is Itch-Inducer Boy. To my right is a pebble shooter. Over by the door are Malaise Man, The Fatiguer, and The Nauseator aka Slight Discomforto."

Charles Yu's intelligence, humour, and ability to craft great lines makes this one of the most entertaining short story collections I've come across in a long time.