The Futurological Congress

Any one paragraph in this book could be an entire book unto itself. It reminded me of the blurbs on the front of the Onion newspaper (when there was a printed version) that directed you to the inside of the paper to read the full article--which did not exist. Many of these ideas are excruciatingly funny skewerings of modern Western culture. No system, service or symptom escapes Lem's brilliant satire. The pharmaceutical industry is the most obvious foil, but Lem uses our propensity to believe there is a pill to cure everything to send up religion, government, academia, Big Agriculture, health care, marketing... the list goes on.

There are so many ideas in here, but not much of a plot. Still, one of the funniest and most original scifi books I have read in a long time. [I listened to this as an audio book read by David Maranz, who did an excellent job.]

Also cannot fail to recognize the brilliant translation work done here by Michael Kandel. I cannot imagine how difficult it was to translate this from Polish, with all the wordplay, made-up words, and still keep the humor intact. A bravura translation.