Stanislaw Lem’s “Star Diaries”

Lem’s “Star Diaries” have a special place among his story-cycles, since they span most of his career and reflect his changing concerns. Still, they have a common theme: the presumptuousness of the intellect. The cycle begins in the farcical mode of the Miinchhausen tales, parodying the typical attitudes of Earthlings claiming the status of general truth for their subjective opinions. Ijon Tichy here is Mainly the comic victim of these opinions: the true protagonists of the first “Star Diaries” is rhe spirit in search of a formula for defining reality. In the later “Memoires of Ijon Tichy.” Tichy discards the Miinchhausen costume, becoming the passive witenss mainly to misunderstood geniuses of cybernitic technology. Most of these tales revolve around the problem of the construction of artifical intelligence or the transference of humans personality to a machine. In its purest form—as in “profrssor Corcoran’s Boxes”—the tales lead to the idea that human beings can only achieve self-knowledge by repeating the act of creation, constructing a reality in the inventor’s own image, but absolutely separate ontologically from the creator’s world. In the subsequent Voyages—the 18th, 20th, and 21st—Tichy himself participates in trying to create a perfect universe, only to discover that error is a necessary part of things. Lem develops this theme again in the later tale. “Professor A.Donda.” The crowning point of the whole cycle is the “21st Voyage,” in which Lem writes a parable of the philosophical and civilizational consequences of technological omnipotence. Lem’s main targets in the “Star Diaries” are positivism and Hegelianism, which he attacks from a “scientific” variation of Schopenhauerian pessimism, in which chance and error create a necessary indeterminacy in the order of things. (IC-R)

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