Reading notes on "The Futurological Congress"

2025-07-03

In all honesty, I have the upmost trouble writing about books. It doesn’t align with my usual tone, style. It feels so wrong to just describe what’s in the book. And I don’t see how to discuss the deeper elements of the book without introducing them in the context of the narrative.

The Futurological Congress is a weird book. It’s short, it’s dense, it’s full of weird ideas, some deeply explored, other just approached at a surface level, but desserving pages of discussions.

The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem is a science fiction novelette about Ijon Tichy, a futurologue, and his insane adventures during the Futurological Congress in a Hilton Hotel in Costa Rica. It was published in 1971 in Soviet Poland.

The book is insane, it’s a wild ride. It sips into a sense of irreality that make us doubt everything. It’s not just an unreliable narrator but an halucinating narrator. It will remind scifi fans of Philip K. Dick. I thought about Ubik a few times while reading the book. The style is close to Peace on Earth, another Lem book that I absolutely loved. And the plot reminded me in an abstract way Et On Tuera Tous Les Affreux (To Hell With The Ugly) by Boris Vian.

The Futurological Congress

The book starts at the Hilton Hotel at Nounas in Costa Rica. A massive structure of 164 stories, where the Futurological Congress runs.

The conference happens while a literal civil war is brewing up in the country. Whatever the locals do is not material to the attendents, The Hilton is part of this non-space of international administration that lives in another plane of existance.

The Futurological Congress is the Davos WEF: it’s a gathering of completely incapable people ostensibly pretending to want to solve all the world problems. Those problems might be familiar to a 2025 reader:

The first item of business was the world urban crisis, the second – the ecology crisis, the third – the air pollution crisis, the fourth – the energy crisis, the fifth – the food crisis. Then adjournment. The technology, military and political crisis were to be dealt with on the following day, after which the chair would entertain motions from the floor.

The futurologues are more of a practical joke. With a reasoning cruelly similar to today’s AI boosters, one futurolgue predicts that exponential population growth will cause, in 400 years, humanity to form a living sphere of bodies with a radius expanding at approximately the speed of light.

Eventually the This-is-fine dog will burn, and that’s what happens in Nounas. Reality catches up with the Hilton.

Reality in the form of irreality: psychem. It’s a new way of managing protests. Psychoactive substances that induce a desired state of mind or hallucinations.

The Costa Rican police added “benignimizer” to the water. Benignimizer makes you happy and benevolent. Ideal to quell revolutionary protests. But wise to the police scheme, the protesters didn’t drink the water, they drank guaro instead.

With more than one trick up their sleeve, the police drop Love-Thy-Neighbour (LTN) gas over the protests. But turns out LTN also works on police. And ensued an orgy of brotherly love and friendship. Police, protesters, hookers: friendship besets everyone. As to the higher ranking officials, they just committed suicide on the spot, suddenly wise to their horrible act of cruelty.

Thankfully, the army was far from the war (love?) scenes, and, still untouched by compassion, could still exert cruelty:

[The army] had come to stifle the brotherly love rampant among the police. This they did, with considerable bloodshed.

Fleeing the complete chaos of a psychoactive civil war, Tichy and a few other futurolgue go down into the sewers. But the sewers turned out to be filled with hallucinogenic gas. That’s where we enter a completely demanted world barely strung together.

After a couple of false escapes that could put to shame the most hyperactive modern action movie, Tichy gets blown up, but his brain is preserved and gets transplated into the body of an attractive young balck woman.

Yes.

Tichy doesn’t seem that shocked by the change (I might be projecting here¹) but the doctors basically assume he’s done for. A bit later, he reawaken in the body of a sturdy irish-looking dude, and is confronted with his worse enemy wearing his own body. Turns out the irish dude was a revolutionary leader, and in no circumstances what-so-ever could Tichy leave the clinic, as he would be identified with him. Lem plays on the grammar of identity: when Tichy describes his own body, doing things while he’s not inhabiting it. In any case, the clinic gets raided and Tichy dies again, but he is back to the Hilton sewers, as it appears all of that was an illusion too.

After that, Tichy dies again. No need to dig into the weirdness of a 150 pages book where the main character dies half a dozen times. In any case, he gets frozen.

2039

Tichy wakes up in 2039. 2039 appears to be an utopia of abundance and democracy: the weather is selected by popular vote, the bank lends you money with no conditions associated, people seem to be able to change bodily appearance as easily as outfit.

Things are different though. Everything is done through pills. Encyclopedias don’t exist anymore. You eat a pill that gives you the encyclopedic knowledge, literally eating through it.

Books are no longer read but eaten, not made of paper but of some informational substance, fully digestible, sugar-coated.

All knowledge is acquired now by way of the stomach. Eagerly seizing this opportunity, I began to satisfy my hunger for information, but the first two volumes of the encyclopedia gave me the most terrible cramps

The vocabulary changed, Tichy can barely understand anything.

Some other unfamiliar expressions I’ve come across: threever, pingle, hemale, to widge off, palacize, cobnoddling, synthy. The newspapers advertise such products as tishets, vanailliums, nurches, autofrotts (manual). The title of a column in the city edition of the Hearld: “I Was a Demimother.” Something about an eggman who was yoked on the way to the eggplant. The big Webster isn’t too helpful: “Demimother – like demigran, demijohn. One of two women jointly bringing a child into the world. See Polyanna, Polyandreew.” “Eggman – from mailman (Archaic). A euplanner who delivers licensed human gametes (fe-male) to the home.” I don’t pretend to understand that. This crazy dictionary also gives synonyms that are equally incomprehensible. “Threever – trimorph.” “Palacize, bepalacize, empalacize – to castellate, as on a quiz show.” “Paladyne – a chivalric assuagement.” “Vanillium – extract emphorium, portable.”

Yikes fam, don’t be a creep, join my polycule. Or maybe you are plural? Ask your other tuplas.

This is a major theme of the book. The alienness comes from the language moreso than the narrative. But it seems we are exploring queer identity here? It’s weirdly familiar, despite being a future from the 1970.

More on the psychem. To learn stuff, you just eat a pill. To change appearance, you eat a pill. In fact, no need for cloth anymore, you eat a pill and the outfit grows out of you. You get in a dispute? You take recriminol to enhance your critic. You don’t go to church, you take a sacrosanctimonium pill. No need for prisons, you get a procrustic pill, it cancels pleasure pills.

Chosing between breakup and marriage is now a choice between the black pill and the white pill.

Want to fix racism? Prescribe caucasium to all the balck people.

There is some technology involved. For example, there is a sort of wireless 3D printer-TV. But beware! If there is interferance, the printed characters might just thrash you².

Also the TV set has an integrated camera, Tichy notes the similarities with 1984, and immediately discards them, as it is strictly illegal to snoop on people without their explicit consent³.

The robots are here and appear to do all the industrial work. But robots get outdated:

A strayaway is a robot who doesn’t belong to anyone. It was one of those duddlies – a factory deject, a model taken off the market but not recalled by the manufacturer. Out of work, in other words, and unemployable. Many of them become juggermuggers. My bathroom immediately realized what was happening and dismissed the intruder.

With intelligence, comes shirking. It’s Chapulier’s Rule:

If the machine is not too bright and incapable of reflection, it does whatever you tell it to do. But a smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead to figure some way out of it. Whichever is easier. And why indeed should it behave otherwise, being truly intelligent? For true intelligence demands choice, internal freedom. And therefore we have the malingerants, fudgerators and drudge-dodgers, not to mention the special phenomenon of simulimbecility or mimicretinism. A mimicretin is a computer that plays stupid in order, once and for all, to be left in peace. And I found out what dissimulators are: they simply pretend that they’re not pretending to be defective. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.

Advertisement is freakishly similar to 2025:

Manufacturers these days have peculiar problems: a package may recommend the virtues of its product by voice only, for it is not allowed to grab the customer by the sleeve or collar. […] Security doors open only at the sound of their owner’s voice. Also, the ads in magazines animate when you look at them.

The illusion

But Tichy feels alienated, it’s not right to order society according to psychem. That’s where he meets Trottelreiner. Trottelreiner was part of the Futurological Congress of the beginning of the novelette, and he too was resurected. He tells Tichy that the world is a lie, the prosperity is as artificial as the love and fidelty induced by pills.

He gives Tichy a choice: keep the bliss of illusion, or experience the world as it is: smell the vigilanimide.

And the mask starts to drop. The magnificient gilded 5 star restaurant they are in turns into a bunker, the poultry in front of him turn out to be a grayish paste.

Is this a metaphore for our modern society? Focused on the shiny and “potential future” at the expense of what is really going on? Bonus for including “climate collapse” in the mix. You may answer this question at your own leisure.

But that’s only the start of it. Indeed, all those robots I talked about earlier? They are humans driven into the illusion that they are robots. Reminds you of anything?

Actually, there is no functional lifts, people jump on the lift cables and climb down/up, as the lift cabines are long gone, but their psychem gives them the illusion of a lift.

Neither is there any car. Car production has since long been halted. People walk down the street with the illusion of driving a Mercedes.

Now, Lem lived in Soviet Poland, a first order analysis would make the parallel with the long waiting list for cars and other shit impossible to put your hand own in Soviet times. But a more self-indulging smarmy dude who thinks hismels supreoir (like me) would tell you that it’s about the distinction between what is being sold to you and what you actually get.

Do you really buy a Mercedes (today I’ve something against Mercedes, sorry) because it can move you from point A to point B? Of course not. Someone who isn’t self-aware will tell you that it’s because of the superior build and high quality components. Bollocks, utter bollocks. It’s about showing you’ve money. Bonus if it makes a lot of noise so that you can advertise your wealth around like the creepy exhibisionist every single freaking rich dude apparently is.

Ok where was I at? Ah yes, nothing to do with the material reality, purely to do with status, things that do not exist and are not encoded in any shape or form in the object you are purchasing. So why not take a pill that gives you the feeling of being wealthy instead? It’s what you are after, and it’s a purely social construct, so might as well make it a pill instead of pilfering and destroying the planet to make toy cars for adults.

People don’t sleep at home, they sleep in the street. Also the climate colapsed and it’s snowing every week.

Eventually Ijon Tichy wakes up from this nightmare and find himself in the present day, all of this appearing to be yet again another figment of his imagination.

What’s amazing about Lem’s terrifying scifi is that he not only gives those extremely unique, excentric visions of the future, completely appart from the garbage unimaginative pulp produced en masse by American authors of the same era. Asimov, Clarke, Herbert: The slope they produce serve more to obscure the mind than open it to new horizons. The key to a scifi book is it’s bridge to the present. It makes explicit what the fuck the whole book is about. Scifi isn’t about the future, it’s about the present.

There is much more to the book I didn’t mention. If I keep up, this post would be a full reprint of the book with commentary on top. That would both be illegal and highly impractical.