Book Review: Stanislaw Lem's The Seventh Voyage by J. Muth et al.

Stanislaw Lem's The Seventh Voyage adapted by Jon J. Muth and translated from Stanislaw Lem's short story by Michael Kandel

Spacefarer Ijon Tichy's spaceship is hit by a tiny rock which destroys the guidance system and puts a hole in one of the rudders. When he goes outside the ship to fix it, he realizes the job requires two people. He gets back in the ship, lamenting his fate, as the ship is headed through a region of gravitational vortices. The vortices cause time loops. One night, Ijon is woken up by a future Ijon, whom the first Ijon assumes is a dream. The second Ijon is really frustrated because they could fix the ship if they would just work together. Later, Ijon experiences the encounter from the other side and then encounters another one of himself. While he is trying to work out what is going on, his future self bemoans his own prior stupidity. When the ship hits more complex vortices, even more Ijons show up. But will the ship ever get fixed?

This story is a comic masterpiece and a well-thought out time travel story, for the most part. Ijon lives through both sides of incidents several times, sometimes lying to himself in moments of panic or confusion. Ijon is both too smart for his own good and too quarrelsome to get along with himself. I laughed out loud several times. The watercolor-style drawings fit the tone quite well.

Highly recommended. Ijon Tichy has many stories by Lem (from the supplementary material, I gather Tichy is a bit like Gulliver from Gulliver's Travels) and I am inspired to seek them out, even if they are only text!