
The Star Diaries
Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy
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Narrated by:
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David Marantz
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By:
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Stanislaw Lem
About this listen
This collection of short stories centers around one character, space traveller Ijon Tichy. In these stories, Stanislaw Lem's "Candide of the Cosmos" encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in space that serve to satirize science, the rational mind, theology, and other icons of human pride.
©1976 The Seabury Press, Inc. (P)2012 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Hal Bregg is an astronaut who returns from a space mission in which only 10 biological years have passed for him, while 127 years have elapsed on Earth. He finds that the Earth has changed beyond recognition, filled with human beings who have been medically neutralized. How does an astronaut join a civilization that shuns risk?
-
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Starts well but...
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who can listen too this?
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-
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- Narrated by: David Marantz
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-
Overall
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Performance
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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.
-
-
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- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
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-
Overall
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The planet Quinta is pocked by ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. In stark contrast, the crew of the spaceship Hermes represents a knowledge-seeking Earth. As they approach Quinta, a dark poetry takes over and leads them into a nightmare of misunderstanding.
-
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Instruction Manual
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By: Stanislaw Lem
-
The Futurological Congress
- From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy
- By: Stanislaw Lem
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
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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.
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The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight-papyralysis-has obliterated much of the planet's written history. However, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community.
-
-
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By: Stanislaw Lem
-
Return from the Stars
- By: Stanislaw Lem, Barbara Marszal - translator, Frank Simpson - translator
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-
Overall
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Performance
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Hal Bregg is an astronaut who returns from a space mission in which only 10 biological years have passed for him, while 127 years have elapsed on Earth. He finds that the Earth has changed beyond recognition, filled with human beings who have been medically neutralized. How does an astronaut join a civilization that shuns risk?
-
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Starts well but...
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Overall
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Performance
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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.
-
-
Very thoughtful and entertaining
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By: Stanislaw Lem, and others
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- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 14 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The planet Quinta is pocked by ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. In stark contrast, the crew of the spaceship Hermes represents a knowledge-seeking Earth. As they approach Quinta, a dark poetry takes over and leads them into a nightmare of misunderstanding.
-
-
Instruction Manual
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 07-22-11
By: Stanislaw Lem
-
The Truth and Other Stories
- By: Stanislaw Lem
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twelve stories by science-fiction master Stanislaw Lem, nine of them never before published in English.
-
-
Excellent!
- By Diogenes on 06-29-22
By: Stanislaw Lem
-
The Cyberiad
- Fables for the Cybernetic Age
- By: Stanislaw Lem
- Narrated by: Scott Aiello
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try to out-invent each other. Over the course of their adventures in The Cyberiad, they travel to the far corners of the cosmos to take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequences for their unsuspecting employers.
-
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- By Nils J. Rasmussen on 05-27-14
By: Stanislaw Lem
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- The Definitive Edition
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At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it. To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation - complete for the first time, and the first ever directly from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani ( Battlestar Galactica), Lem’s provocative novel comes alive for a new generation.
-
-
A comment on negative reviews
- By Burns on 09-20-11
By: Stanislaw Lem, and others
-
His Master's Voice
- By: Stanislaw Lem
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A witty and inventive satire of "men of science" and their thinking, as a team of scientists races to decode a mysterious message from space. "I had the feeling that I was standing at the cradle of a new mythology. A last will and testament...we as the posthumous heirs of Them...."
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Excelent and entertaining
- By Jakub on 01-10-12
By: Stanislaw Lem
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Classic Radio Sci-Fi: BBC Drama Collection
- Five BBC radio full-cast dramatisations
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- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Original Recording
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Five seminal science fiction classics are brought vividly to life in these gripping BBC Radio dramatisations, with casts including Robert Glenister, William Gaunt, Carleton Hobbs and Joanne Froggatt. Titles include Frankenstein (1994), The Time Machine (2009), The Lost World (1975), R.U.R. (1989) and Solaris (2007). Accompanying this collection is a bonus PDF file featuring extensive sleeve notes by Andrew Pixley.
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CHAPTER LIST:
- By Anonymous User on 08-28-18
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A Fire Upon the Deep
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What a wild, wacky, awesome book!
- By Noah Smith on 06-20-10
By: Vernor Vinge
with hyper-Cosmic humour. We are lucky that the man of many journeys didn't loose it due to the many severe challenges he had to face!
🌠stellar humor
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I must say the performance was marred by the unfortunate hilarity of the reader pronouncing "ennui" as though he were pronouncing the alphabet letters "N" "U" "E". He also gets stuck in a monotone in some of the longer philosophical passages which is a problem with idea-laden exposition.
Great stories of fabular space travel
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not my favorite
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Moments of absolute ridiculous brilliance
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Story of a space-traveling Candide
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Is there anything you would change about this book?
Started good. Kinda Douglas Adams-esque scifi parody, but got pretty repetitive.And it is full of pseudo-scientific jargon that is at first amusing (again, a la Adams) but at a certain point just makes it really hard to follow.
What about David Marantz’s performance did you like?
Great performance, just not a great book.Eh... It lost me
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Lem is doing the exact opposite. His space hero, Ijon Tichy, is a goofy stand-in for the free play of imagination. He’s a space explorer who, using technology as ever-changing as the campy Batman of the 1960s, ventures on one silly adventure after another.
The first of the adventures should be more than enough to hook anyone. Tichy is flying through a distant galaxy when he discovers that the equivalent of his space-rudder has jammed. He then finds that, to fix it, he will need a second pair of hands, one to hold the item in place and the other to tighten the wrench. Alone, and in despair, he takes a nap only to be awakened by himself – a version of himself from the future a day in advance. It turns out (with the sort of vague reference to science that LeGuin would have found beneath her) that his ship is approaching the speed of light as it nears a star, and that has put him into a time loop.
Lem might have left us to wonder at his cleverness, but he takes things much further. Tichy at first refuses to trust his future self. Then, when later opportunities arise, he constantly frustrates his efforts to fix the space ship. He gets into fights, ambushes himself, anticipates what he will soon want to do but guesses wrong, and finally forms a kind of parliament of all his future selves on the ship.
Silly as such a story is, though, it’s simultaneously allegorical in at least two dimensions.
The dimension that’s more readily accessible is biting. At the same time as the entire book is a celebration of the capacity of the human imagination (certainly as Lem exercises it), it’s a critique of our capacity to work together to solve our problems. The perpetual bete noir here is bureaucracy, the lumbering ways in which we attempt to order our mutual efforts. The second story for instance, has Tichy appointed as Earth’s delegate to an interstellar association of civilizations. When he arrives, though, the association has to go through a lengthy deliberative process, demanding reports on Earth’s good conduct.
That’s a consistent concern throughout the stories, and it’s easy to imagine Lem drew on frustration with the communism of his Polish childhood. Funny as the perpetual insight is – bureaucracy kills the spirit that makes us human – it clearly has an edge.
The other dimension of allegory here grows out of that notion, but – as I read this 40 years later and a continent away – I’m conscious of missing much of the historical, political, and social import. I sense it, but I feel a little as if I’m hearing someone else’s inside jokes. Even through translation, I recognize the rhythm of a master joke-teller, but I find myself a beat slow. I am aware, always, that this is coming to me second-hand, that I am watching the man perform and then pausing to read the subtitles before I can fully laugh.
You get some wonderful details here – aliens that our dim-witted Tichy mistakes for vending machines, or potatoes that, adrift in space, become predatory and rapacious – but I did find some of the later stories running together. Maybe because I was missing some of the barbs at the ends of the hooks Lem throws out there, I felt as if I’d gotten the best of this before it was over.
Still, I recognize a deep cleverness here. Aware that there are parts of this out of my reach without footnotes, I still enjoy it. This is science fiction as it was first born, as Gulliver’s Travels first showed it can be, and that – even before its other virtues – makes me recommend it.
Gulliver in Space
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No 24th voyage.
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Amazing book
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A true masterpiece
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