Ijon Tichy travels undercover to a robot world, joining an organization to clean up world history thru time travel. Things go crazy immediately. His spaceship runs into gravitational vortices at relativistic speeds, resulting in massive time anomalies. It may be a blessing in disguise. The reason he couldn’t get out of the way was that a meteor had shattered the drive regulator & rudder. He could no longer steer his ship. He had a spare rudder, but couldn’t install it. It was a two-man job & he was alone. So when other versions of him start appearing, all he should need do is team up with one of them, fix the rudder & leave the gravitational vortex field. After that gets straightened out, he goes undercover. A ship’s computer has mutineed & started its own colony, reproducing itself on a previously uninhabited planet. The insurance company paid the shipowner’s claim, & now believes that the ship, it’s computer & all its progeny belong to them. Tichy disguises himself as a robot & goes to investigate. On another voyage, he heads to a planet where the government irrigation agency has irrigated beyond all need & refused to give up power. People live in water & are jailed in dry cells if they violate the love of water. After his modern voyages, he comes back from 2166 to recruit himself as a member of THEOHIPPIP, the Teleotelechronistic-Historical Engineering to Optimize the Hyperputerized Implementation of Paleological Programming & Interplanetary Planning. History is in a mess because of all the time travelers. THEOHIPPIP's mission is: “For World History to be regulated, cleaned up, straightened out, adjusted & perfected, all in accordance with the principles of humanitarianism, rationalism & general esthetics. You can understand, surely, that with such a shambles & slaughterhouse in one’s family tree it’s awkward to go calling on important cosmic civilizations!...If need be, alterations will be made even before the rise of man, so that he arises better.”

Ijon Tichy is an ordinary space traveler whose extraordinary curiosity leads him to the very fringes of science. Their plans are grandiose, the bargains they make too often Faustian, for the ends these scientists pursue concern humanity's greatest and most ancient immortality, artificial intelligence, and top-of-the-line consumer items. By turns philosophical, satirical, and absurd, Lem's stories follow Ijon's adventures as both an observer of—and participant in—strange experiments. Faulty time machines, intelligent washing machines, suicidal potatoes—Ijon Tichy navigates them all with common sense and in so doing shows why he endures as one of Lem's most popular characters.

The Futurological Congress is the fourth satirical science fiction novel in the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy series from Kafka Prize–winning author Stanislaw Lem. “Nobody can really know the future. But few could imagine it better than Lem.”— Paris Review Bringing his twin gifts of scientific speculation and scathing satire to bear on that hapless planet, Earth, Lem sends his unlucky cosmonaut, Ijon Tichy, to the Eighth Futurological Congress. Caught up in local revolution, Tichy is shot and so critically wounded that he is flashfrozen to await a future cure—a future whose strangeness exceeds anything the congress conjectured. Translated by Michael Kandel. “A vision of Earth’s future where the authorities dose the population with ‘psychemicals’ to make life in a desperately over-populated world worth living.”— Boston Globe

Ijon Tichy is the only human who knows for sure whether the self-programming robots on the moon are plotting a terrestrial invasion. But a highly focused ray severs his corpus collosum. Now his left brain can’t remember the secret and his uncooperative right brain won’t tell. Tichy struggles for control of the lost memory and of his own two warring sides. Translated by Elinor Ford with Michael Kandel. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book