Customer Reviews

PEACE ON EARTH.

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This is another novel in a series of stories about Ijon Tichy, space traveller. Ijon Tichy' stories are always fun to read, no exception here - some kind of combination of absurd and science fiction genres (of course, Stanislaw Lem has so much more than this). This is the later work by this master and I do believe it's not his strongest - but even so it is very good. At the same time, for somebody new to Stanislaw Lem I wouldn't recommend to start his journey here - there are better starting points. This book will be better appreciated by somebody already familiar with Lem books in general and with Ijon Tichy stories, in particular.

Even at this late stage of his career, Stanislaw Lem was still delivering sharp satire that skewered not just the human condition, but also the archetypes of science fiction. Here, the droll antihero Ijon Tichy is the victim an enemy attack that has severed the connection between the left and right sides of his brain, resulting in the weirdest behavior you'll ever see from a sci-fi secret agent. Meanwhile, Tichy is assigned by Earth authorities to dig up some dirt on what's happening with proxy warfare on the moon. In the most biting aspect of Lem's satire, the nations of the Earth are self-righteously proclaiming "Peace on Earth" when they have merely exported warfare to the Moon, where it is conducted by self-replicating robots and nanotechnology. It turns out that these tech gadgets have evolved on their own in ways their human creators could never comprehend, and some portions of this book are mindbendingly surreal as Tichy tries to infiltrate bizarre mutant technological landscapes. How these technologies end up threatening their Earthbound masters, who had designed them for falsely peaceful purposes, allows Lem to ruminate brutally on the fallacy of war and the pitfalls of technology. The master of sci-fi satire strikes again. [~doomsdayer520~]

This is a new book by one of the most important authors in the 20th century, but the above review is too slick to be trusted. Indeed, die-hard Lem fans will be thrilled by a new book and will no doubt enjoy seeing Ijon Tichy again. But this book, though magnificent on speculation and satire, will not be the one to explain to all the non-Lem fans why we Lem fans go bonkers over him. This book is for people with an acquired taste for Lem. If that's not you, don't despair. Try "The Cyberiad" or "Solaris" (his most famous book) or "Fiasco".

Ijon Tichy, our favorite clutzy hero, who has been subjected to "benignimizers," time machines, insane robots and who was responsible for creating the universe, stays a little closer to home in this mind boggling little masterpiece. Lem, although unknowingly, created a strangely prophetic story for Y2K worry worts. The idea of our quest to become more advanced, no matter how idiotic the advancements, leads to our undoing; or for the optimist, a new beginning. I'm intentially being cryptic, as not to ruin the story, but this book is definitly worth its weight in LEM.

Ever since I was introduced to Lem I've been nagged by the question "Why haven't more Americans been exposed to this master of SciFi?"

Lem's writing is frequently hilarious, unbelievably imaginative, and always thoroughly engrossing. The biggest exposure his work has enjoyed in the States was probably S. Soderberghs 2002 film adaptation of Solaris (which flopped) starring George Clooney, which itself was a remake of a 1972 film by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky.

In Lem's vision of the future the great nations of Earth have tired of endless and financially ruinous arms races and therefore collectively agree to suspend arms development on Earth. Unwilling to leave themselves entirely defenseless, they divide the moon into autonomous sections where computers and nanomachines continue weapons research without human interference or oversight.

The concept is ingenious. No nation has any idea whether their weapons are entirely inferior to those of another, or if they even have any weapons at all. Initiating an attack would be a perilous gamble, for no nation knows its own strength, much less that of the enemy. An uneasy peace falls over the Earth, and war is relocated to the moon, just within reach, should the fragile peace be broken.

Peace on Earth is told from the vantage point of Ijon Tichy, who features in other works by Lem. When contact with the moon suddenly ceases everyone assumes the worst. Tichy is sent to the moon on a recon mission to ascertain the status of the war machines. His mission ends in failure when he returns with a bisected brain and little memory of his journey.

As Tichy and the governments of Earth struggle to piece together the mystery the possibility of war draws ever closer. In addition, Tichy must contend with his bisected brain. The hemisphere that might remember what happened on the moon seems determined not to cooperate with the other hemisphere. To make things worse, the renegade brain halve has control of one of Tichy's hands, which does whatever it pleases, including punching Tichy repeatedly in the face.

You have to read to book to appreciate the extent of Lem's talent for bringing the technology of the future to life. The chapters describing the technology on the moon are absolutely mind boggling, the work of brilliant mind. So get one of his books, and join the club already.

Ijon Tichy, our favorite clutzy hero, who has been subjected to "benignimizers," time machines, insane robots and who was responsible for creating the universe, stays a little closer to home in this mind boggling little masterpiece. Lem, although unknowingly, created a strangely prophetic story for Y2K worry worts. The idea of our quest to become more advanced, no matter how idiotic the advancements, leads to our undoing; or for the optimist, a new beginning. I'm intentially being cryptic, as not to ruin the story, but this book is definitly worth its weight in LEM.

The thing to remember when reading pretty much any Lem story is that he had little patience for any of the accepted SF tropes, which can be disorienting if you're not ready for it because your brain is telling you that the story should be going in one direction (since that's how these stories always go) but the plot is veering off somewhere else entirely, often with a distinct note of sarcasm and the sense that if you didn't see it coming, then maybe you weren't trying hard enough. I always get the feeling that didn't have a lot of tolerance for people who felt that SF had to be a certain way, as if there was only six stock plots in the world and once you start introducing robots it has to be Just Like That Asimov Story or somesuch. And working deliberately against that can seem like a free jazz group suddenly showing up at your nice symphony performance. It's jarring at first, but eventually it may settle into a nice harmony when you get used to it.

Apparently his last work of fiction (or at least the last one translated into English, I see a couple of short story collections in his native Polish) before spending the rest of his life writing essays and philosophical tracts, this one proves that he hadn't lost any of his satirical bite or capacity for invention. Even the setup for the story is unconventional: longtime Lem character Ijon Tichy goes to a mission on the moon to explore what the heck the robots are doing on it now that they've stopped talking to people, and then promptly forgets what happened. But he's got a good reason for it . . . his left and right brain have become separate, and separate entities. He as the narrator is in control of one side but he's not capable of communicating with the other half, which has its own ideas and may contain the memories of whatever the heck he saw. Consequently, he becomes quite in demand by the government, who are starting to get a bit paranoid about all the lack of information. But other forces are interested, too, unlike Tichy isn't really sure who to believe, and is rather okay with not believing any of them, all told.

Lem has a nice deadpan tone, reminiscent of Barry Malzberg, that causes all the absurdity to make perfect sense. In the future the moon has become the repository for all the nuclear weapons because nobody trusts anyone else to keep them on the planet . . . except that no one still wants to fall behind and thus keeps piling more weapons onto the moon. This is supposed to keep all the other nations in check, which was why robots were created to watch over everything . . . except now everyone is convinced that the robots are making secret plans to invade Earth. Whoops. Tichy is caught in the events of this and none of it goes where you expect. The robots alternate between talking to him and examining him, but nobody seems capable of really talking to each other because nobody knows what their ultimate goals are. The right brain/left brain deal you would think would be the main thrust of the novel but Tichy takes it all in stride and only makes sporadic efforts to communicate. The people on Earth come up with more and more useless ways to get the mission done, all of which manage to either not work or simply prolong things. Everyone wants to know but nobody is quite sure what the knowing entails. What could be a war winds up being a discussion and all the discussions end up being fights, except when they aren't. There's no predicting how a scene will go, until even Tichy just decides to give up and go with it.

Its a Vonnegutian shrug of "So what?", and it's fitting that when the climax does arrive, it pretty much occurs without much input from anyone else in the cast, changing the world without destroying it, unless you wanted to destroy the world in the first place. It moves along in a zippy fashion and manages to come across as serious, even when the events could be construed as very silly. Lem is trying to convey a point he very much believed in, and if this was the way he had to do it, so be it. Not being a fan of ridiculous space battles (unless it served a larger point) or macho posturing, he instead concentrated on a form of science-fiction that was no slave to science or even fiction, nailing the point even while making us question why none of this was doing what it was supposed to be doing.

This really isn't my favorite Lem story. I do really like the idea of someone being two different people who have to find a way to communicate when the brain's corpus callosom is cut and therefore thoughts cannot be shared. The idea of putting all of the earth's weapons on the moon and have computers research and improve on them without humans was kind of a stretch of reasoning.

Though not as ample in the sheer fun category as Lem's earlier outings with Ijon Tichy, this book reunites us with one of the author's most endearing protagonists in a physiological and top-secret caper. The split brain/ double Tichy dilemna somehow does not fall flat, and will make you wonder what your left hand is doing while you're busy on that mouse....

It's disappointing that Lem can't get a better reception in the U.S. because his work is really first rate. Lem was writing stuff on aritifical intelligence in the sixties and seventies better than any of the now-fashionable tripe on the subject.