Dina's Reviews > The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy

This one didn't excite me at all. The first part of the book is so muddled, it's hard to make heads or tails of. While I acknowledge this attempt to put in the reader in the shoes of the protagonist, I'm sure we would have got the message loud and clear without the 50ish pages of is-it-real-or-isn't-it "hallucinations". Yes, we get it, drug commentary, psychopharmacology, etc, etc. Move along. Lem's attempt to establish a dystopia struck me as one-dimensional and boring, focusing almost exclusively on the rise of pharmaceuticals and the American will to consume. A fairly short book to begin with, but it still could have been cut down to about 25 pages...tops.