A Satirical Psychemical Future
The sheer absurdity of Stanislaw Lem’s imagined future in “The Futurological Congress” (1971) is a revelation in-and-of itself. Just when you think you might have reached the limit of the convoluted logic of his world, there is another twist to drag you deeper into it.
The premise — chemicals as a way to manipulate our perception of the world — was once more common in science fiction (before virtual reality became a simpler, more straightforward way to live where you are and yet be elsewhere). For example, chemical utopias/dystopias are encountered in Brave New World, the writings of Philip K Dick, Brian Aldiss’s Bearfoot In The Head, and so on.
Lem takes the idea of a chemical utopia/dystopia to the extreme while keeping the structure and appearence of the chemically-tuned world under tight control. This is not some 1960s SF acid trip (cf. Bearfoot In The Head), but chemcials in the service of Power to mold the world into a “better place.”
All well and good. But, the chemical manipulation of people’s minds is done without their knowledge.
The satire in the book's first third is concerned with Ijon Tichy’s attendance at the titular futurological congress. Ijon Tichy is a recurring character in several of Lem’s SF tales.
Lem is out to skewer some of the more farcical aspects of academic conferences. I find his aim a little hit-and-miss, having experienced many myself, although in modern times. I presume Lem, who worked in a laboratory for a while, also attended such events, but in the Communist East. Perhaps the potential for absurdity was even greater there.
Nor did I understand the purpose of the setting of the congress. Was this to be a satire about scientists? Scientific gatherings? The highrise building of the conference location, so vast Lem refers to as an “organism” (a la JG Ballard’s Highrise)? Or any of several other false leads Lem throws at the reader?
Nonetheless, the increasingly slapstick shenanigans surrounding the conference are sufficiently bizarre that I felt impelled to read on, to find out where the story could possibly be going.
For example, Tichy meets and “pope killer” in the bar, and later stumbles into the evening buffet for a separate but concurrent conference in the same building, on “Liberated Literature,” where the food is carefully arranged to appear as human genitalia.
The attendees all receive “sex coupons” to be used during the meeting., and the talks at the conferences are so numerous that they must be delivered in numerical code in a minute or two so that all the speakers can have a moment at the podium.
I wonder whether Lem intentionally obscures the main theme of the story by underplaying it until some way into the book, leaving me wondering about the point of the crazy over-the-top action during the congress.
However, towards the end of the congress sequence, once the armed insurrection has started in earnest, there is a clever, funny-peculiar and clear foreshadowing of the latter part of the book, which had me scratching my head about what, exactly, was real in the world that Lem was creating.
As an aside, During this curious reality/unreality merry-go-round, Ijon wakes up as a black woman. There is a “logical” explanation for this nonetheless unexpected occurrence. For a moment, I thought Lem was going to take on the interesting and complicated challenge of writing the rest of the book from Ijon-as-a-black-woman perspective. However, he does not, probably sensibly so. That would have been a book with a different theme.
The story comes into its own once Tichy, preserved in ice and body-transplanted for a second time, has been unfrozen in the psychochemical-fueled future of the bulk of the book. There is a switch in narrative style, and we see the world through entries in his diary during his sojourn there.
The apparent reason for the future being “psychemized” is to suppress the old, evolutionaily derived mental trails inherited from our animal ancestors (impulsive, irrational, egoistical, stubborn, etc) for the higher cerebral functions — the pharmacies are the new cathedrals, the pharmasists the priests.
Materially, the world seems a paradise, free of war (despite still having nations and a population of 30 billion). New York is a series of high-rise gardens, children are charming, the weather is controlled, and books are eaten rather than read. Indeed, the right pill can make you a mathematical genius (not unlike the recent fad among students of “study drugs”).
Part of the joy of the book is Lem’s joy in creating the empherma of this drug-controlled society. Perhaps the most obvious feature is his creative use and abuse of language. Like Orwell, he notes that words, or their lack, are used to manipulate the populace, stating, “The inexpressible therefore is unknowable.”
Tichy struggles valiantly with the new jargon, for example, “simulant” being something which pretends to exist but does not, and “fictifact,” a dream made to order at the local dreamery.
Robots are another target for Lem’s wit. An whole ecology of them has arisen, including, for example, drudge-dodgers, intelligent robots too intelligent to bother themselves with the menial tasks they have been charged with. Probots are on probation, whereas servos are serving time. And so on!
Lem anticipates armored micro-drones — gyroflies and automites. He also anticiaptes the robot destrction rodeos seen in the AI movie, assuming the robot does not commit autocide first.
Slowly, the psychemical underpinnings of the world start to warp and bend, and, as Tichy becomes less and less comfortable with his place in this less than brave new world, he meets one of his old preofessor friends from the long-ago congress, who was also frozen, then also revived.
It is through the professor that Tichy finally gets to see through the psychemical veil and is exposed to the world as it really is — taking a drug that removes the drug-induced illution.
The revelation is shocking both for Tichy and the reader. And this is only the beginning of the rapid slide down into reality.
The real reason for the chemical hoax is not to protect humity from its baser animal instincts, but from the sheer destruction 30 billion people have wreaked upon the Earth, such that what is left is a tattered ruin of the civilized world.
To save people from the dire consequences of humanity’s profligate lifestyles, they are shielded from the truth, thinking they live in a modern idyll, whereas reality is grimmer than the grimmest Soviet gulag.
A curious side-benefit is the accidental abolition of war, because all munitions are illusions, and all conflicts merely the sprinkling of the right drug over the relevant population such that they see their psychemical war, believing it real.
However, where it the truth? In the layer below? Or the layer below the layer below?
This is a wonderful, wickedly satirical book, jam-packed with brilliant ideas in its brief 129 pages. Lem takes aim at many things and skewers them all. The narrative’s slightly uneven start during the congress is a minor concern and shouldn’t discourage you from reading this book.
Once you arrive in the psychemical future, the story truly shines, and you will be whisked along past the strange, bizarre, and weird, marveling at Lem’s relentless ability to see past the surface of the work we live in and transpose into the book’s future.
Post Script
There is an “adaption” of the book in movie form, as I discovered during my research. Or, perhaps “interpretation” is a better word, based on the description and reviews of the film I have read. “The Congress” was made in 2013 and is a combination of live-action and animation. I have never watched it. Indeed, I did not know of it until writing this review.
I’ll watch it and see how it works against the source material, and then write a review.
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