Customer Reviews

Tales of Pirx the Pilot

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This collection of stories by Lem is based around a chubby cadet by the name of Pirx. The character is plucky and gets into all sorts of fixes. I found the first short story the most surprising and fun to read. It's most vivid antagonist are two insects, and it's wildly creative. Another very good story is this one about a robot re-living over and over the last few hours before the death of an entire ship (this was before Pirx's time). A very haunting tale. Overall, a great collection!

By intelligently (and often humorously) deflating many conventions and cliches of sf, the author reminds us that it is, first and foremost, a literature of ideas and not an escapist genre. In this collection of short stories, we follow protagonist Pirx through his training as a cadet and go along with him on a few routine space flights, most of them plagued by red tape. Lem seems to almost take glee in de-glamorizing space travel, but the fact remains that something about it fascinates and terrifies us, as it does his character Pirx. The truth of the matter, as the author so deftly illustrates in these tales, is that space is a void. The only thing that makes it come alive as a place of adventure or peril is the human imagination, which puts our hero Pirx in more jeopardy than any naturally occuring dangers. _Tales of Pirx the Pilot_ ranks as a top-notch book because, like all good sf, it does not allow a reader to run away from reality but makes one confront it thoughtfully

Lem's Pirx is compelling and cool. The science is barely fictional and always thought provoking. The plots, however, are a little more predictable than the sequel. If you're going to read one of these, I'd recommend "More".

Tales of Pirx the Pilot, and More Tales of Pirx the pilot are two excellent sci-fi books! What is unique is that there is such a strong psychological edge to them. And the fact that Pirx is such an everyman - kind of unsure of himself, and from the outside, unassuming and apparently not especially competent. But Lem does something amazing with Pirx - with each story, he gains experience, confidence, cynicism, and most importantly, judgement and wisdom. Make sure to read the Pirx books, as well as The Invincible, and Solaris.

Lem is a master of making fantastic situations seem ordinary. "Tales of Pirx the Pilot" is no exception. Pirx could very well be any one of us and that is one of the things that makes this collection great. We can all relate to Pirx as he stumbles among the stars.

If you're reading this book you probably don't really need an introduction to Stanislaw Lem since this really isn't his best known work to American SF audiences. That work, of course, is "Solaris", which has now been made into two movies and while I haven't seen either one enough to comment on it (nor is this the place), all I can say is that George Clooney isn't starring in an adaptation of MY novel.

People are used to American SF and then find Lem may experience a bit of culture shock. He's not your typical SF writer. Oh, he writes about space and spaceships and aliens but he's consciously attempting to subvert what he feels are the cliches of the form and point out the easy ways out that everyone takes. The central premise of "Solaris", that there are times when you will just not be able to understand aliens no matter how hard you try, is probably one of the more radical SF ideas from a storytelling standpoint. So by reading a Lem work, you have to be aware that he knows exactly where you're coming from and he's out to show you why you shouldn't just settle for what you know.

Thus, we have Pirx. A dumpy, somewhat clumsy lad, at first glance you might think he's just going to bumble through his adventures and succeed purely on blundering luck but as it turns out he's got a bit of a keen mind that won't just accept the conventions that his peers just rely on without thinking. There's maybe five stories in this volume and when they start he is fairly green. But by the last story he's developed his own style of doing things, and even if they are utterly clutzy at times, you can't argue that they succeed.

What Lem excels at here is making the future both exciting and mundane. His space cadets and patrols feel like a natural extension of the world we know, where this type of thing is perfectly normal. And yet there's still a certain sense of excitement that "Hey, we're in space" . . . the notion that this is both possible and plausible. Pirx, for all his faults, doesn't accept the orthodoxes that everyone else just absorbs and rarely questions. Two of the stories involve people dying in space accident mysteries that serve the dual purpose of showing us that even though it's the future, technology isn't going to save us all and stupid accidents are still possible. Pirx only saves himself from the same fate by thinking outside the box slightly, where the people who die in the stories often perish because they can't accept that the technology would steer them wrong. It's both cautionary and revealing.

Each story is its own small wonder, gradually building to the final tale, a haunting story were Pirx buys his own ship with a past, complete with a robot who can't seem to forget. There are moments in that one that are sad and unsettling and spine-tingling, where the future feels both alien and right here.

When it comes to Lem, a lot of people just read "Solaris" and stop there. That is a book that should be read by any SF fan . . . but he's done others that are also worth your time as well. This is one of them.

This book contains several stories that are easy to penetrate and still gives the reader a good portion of humor. The humor is often satiric to the society under it was written. This book will give you a contrast to the books by Elizabeth Moon, Keith Laumer and other authours. (this doesn't mean that the other authors are bad, but this is like having a strawberry instead of chocolate)

one of his many social satires and critiques
masquerading as science fiction! superb!

Not my favorite Lem book, but still a good read, if for no other reason than as a kind of backstory for Fiasco, which I consider along with Solaris, as Lem's masterpiece, and which I read first. Fiasco begins on a ice-bound station on Saturn's moon Titan. There is an accident. And Prix along with his would-be rescuer are frozen in stasis. Decades later, the bodies are found, but there are only enough parts to rebuild on man. Moreover, there is memory loss, so we don't know for sure if it is Prix who is resurrected or his would-be rescuer.

I enjoyed this book, but it has more in common with the American space operas of the 1960s, which Lem proclaimed to despise. I'd still recommend it as light read, but you need to be something of a Lem fan to enjoy it today, IMHO. Read Fiasco first, which is truly "speculative fiction" in its highest form.

Also, there's a fascinating Wikipedia page on Stanislaw Lem, with links to in-depth synopses on many of his novels.

Throughout a dozen or so stories the reader is confronted with an evolution of sorts. Pirx, initially a cadet in some sort of a space pilot school, later becomes a full fledged 'space-man' with experience that others can safely and often rely on. Not much of his personal life is shown since the stories concern itself more with a particular plot of the moment. Because of that, Pirx sometimes appears to be a bit alien and emotionless and although what he does can be considered heroic by many standards the book underplays this aspect very well

Pirx is confronted with different problems (on earth and in different locales in the solar system), which he has to resolve or help to resolve. Some of them very mundane, some comical, the others quite heavy with ethical meanings.

Although the setting can be assumed to be far in the future, when space travel has become almost as common as a ride on a bus, the technology often seems like it's on a level of a steam-powered locomotive. The ship computers are mentioned, on-board nuclear reactors abound but all that somehow seems so amazingly ordinary and `everydayish' as an old car or a kitchen gas oven. It gives the stories quite a transcendent feeling