I like Lem because he reminds me of Vonnegut and brings past and present together.

After coming from Helen Sperling’s talk on her experience during the Holocaust and reflecting on Lem’s “Futurological Congress,” I am angry with the ways humanity has messed up the world’s beauty. It seems we can never appreciate the world’s beauty as it is. In “Futurological Congress,” Tichy reflects on the ways humanity looks to the future like there is something better waiting for humanity. Lem describes Tichy as incapable of being in the moment. After Tichy is wounded, he is frozen waiting for a cure. When he wakes up, he appears to be living, but he is still waiting for a cure in a frozen state of mind more or less. In his construction of Tichy, Lem sends us a message about our inability to live in the moment.

The text also conveys humanity’s need to learn from the past. Lem writes, “Yet hardly anyone studies history now—history has been replaced in schools by a new subject called hencity, which is the science of what will be” (p. 89). There are clear differences between science and history. Science is objective, while history is subjective. History directly follows the lives of humans, while science is a product of human history. Lem suggests that history deals with the soul, while science deals with the body, which according to Lem, doesn’t matter. Lem never quite says why the body doesn’t matter, which conveys his lack of regard for the human body. This lack of regard for the body can be seen in Tichy who battles with his own body as he goes in and out of hallucinations and a frozen state. It may be that living in the moment—tuning into our soul—requires an acknowledgement of past human history.