History Literature / TheStarDiaries

The {{sequel}}, '''''Memoirs of a Space Traveller''''' (1982), also consists of short stories, but differs notably from ''Star Diaries'' in that most of the stories are set on Earth and are also quite serious, [[DarkerAndEdgier even dark]] (though not all of them). Mostly they feature Tichy, now a [[FamedInStory respected celebrity]], meeting eccentric scientists and inventors, and only a few deal with Ijon Tichy’s adventures with alien civilizations.

The Ijon Tichy character went on to star in three more satirical novels: ''The Futurological Congress'' (1971), ''Observation on the Spot'', where he revisits the planet Entia (from Fourteenth Voyage) (1982, no translation), and ''Peace on Earth'' (1987), where he accidentally wanders into the range of a brain-damaging experimental weapon and gets an EvilHand (and leg, and the entire left half of his body).

The Ijon Tichy character went on to star in three more satirical novels: ''The Futurological Congress'' (1971), ''Observation on the Spot'' (1982, no translation), and ''Peace on Earth'' (1987), where he accidentally wanders into the range of a brain-damaging experimental weapon and gets an EvilHand (and leg, and the entire left half of his body).

* ArtifactTitle: In-universe. "The Washing-Machine Tragedy" is a story (in the style of [[Webcomic/SaturdayMorningBreakfastCereal Zach Weiner]]) about two washing machine vendors trying to outcompete each other. Very soon [[RidiculouslyHumanRobots their products]] [[DisSimile cease to resemble]] [[CallASmeerpARabbit "washing machines"]] completely.

* MadScientist: Not Tichy himself, but he tends to be sought after (or seek) people like that. Sometimes they want his help, sometimes he wants to hear about their work.

* AssimilationPlot: The Thirteenth Voyage has Tichy visit a series of societies by "The Great Architect", whom Tichy is travelling to meet. The last society is one where everyone is engineered to look exactly the same, and there's a lottery where everyone takes a different role in life (banker, janitor, wife, child, etc.) every week. This is the Architect's "masterpiece", because it eliminates identity, and thus eliminates death. Tichy then decides the Architect is completely off his rocker, and runs away as fast as possible.

* BatmanGambit: In ''The Star Diaries'' it's paired with a literal [[ParanoiaGambit Paranoia Gambit]]. On an alien planet, [[AIIsACrapshoot an uber-computer interprets its directive to make local population happy as "turn them into black disks"]]. The survivors forbid him from killing any more people, so the computer announces that he will only do so with people who he is told to carry off. Guess what, in the next morning there are a lot more disks...

* {{Bulungi}}: The neighboring nations Lamblia and Gurunduwaju in "Professor A. Donda".
* CausedTheBigBang: Professor Donda works out that [[spoiler: Big Bangs are caused by ''information'' amassing, and that humanity is just about to excess the critical "mass", which would erase all the world's databases and create a tiny universe. Nobody believes him. And then it happens.]]

* TheyCalledMeMad: Professor Donda is ridiculed by the scientific community for his work on "śvarnetics", or computerisation of magical spells. However, what he's actually trying to prove is [[spoiler: that information can turn into mass and form a new universe]], which requires filling computer disks with information, the actual value of which being completely irrelevant. Still, Donda is quite bitter towards other scientists. Tichy himself is never quite sure whether Donda is a crackpot, pretending to be a crackpot, considered a crackpot and running with it or any combination of the above. [[spoiler: For what it's worth, his theory proves correct.]]

* RoboticReveal: In one story, the aggressive competition of two producers of washing machines leads to multitudes of intelligent, human-looking washing machines posing as people.

* RiddleForTheAges: In the Fourteenth Voyage, Tichy visits the planet Enteropia where there's an activity called "scruption". Tichy can't find out what it is, because the lexicon entries about it all just link to each other. On the planet, all of his attempts to learn more end in scandal. (Scruption is apparently something sexual, since you can't do it without a wife.)

* AssimilationPlot: The Thirteenth Voyage has Tichy visit a series of societies by "The Great Architect", whom Tichy is supposed to meet. The last society is one where everyone is engineered to look exactly the same, and there's a lottery where everyone takes a different role in life (banker, janitor, wife, child, etc.) every week. This is the Architect's "masterpiece", because it eliminates identity, and thus eliminates death. Tichy then decides the Architect is completely off his nut, and runs away as fast as possible.
* BatmanGambit: In ''The Star Diaries'' it's paired with a literal [[ParanoiaGambit Paranoia Gambit]]. On an alien planet, [[AIIsACrapshoot an uber-computer creatively interprets its directives and turns most of the population into black disks]]. The survivors forbid him to kill any more people, thus he proposes that he will only do so with people who he is told to carry off. Guess what, in the next morning there are a lot more disks...

* CasualInterstellarTravel: Exaggerated: Ijon Tichy once turned his rocket around and headed back several parsec because he had left his pocket knife in a spaceport cafeteria. (Turns out it was in his pocket all along.)
* CausedTheBigBang: There's an episode where scientists are trying to send into the past a particle which will become the Big Bang (they are also trying to imbue it with the properties to create a better universe... doesn't really work out).
** Also, professor Donda works out that [[spoiler: Big Bangs are caused by ''information'' amassing, and that humanity is just about to excess the critical "mass", which would erase all the world's databases and create a tiny universe. Nobody believes him. And then it happens.]]

* ConflictBall: Conflict in the Seventh Voyage could have been resolved in minutes if Tichy hadn't been one week beating up himself.

* TimeTravel: Ijon Tichy gets handed the TimeyWimeyBall several times, the most amusing instance probably being the episode when Tichy, [[TemporalParadox caught in a time loop]], is [[AmusingInjuries banged on the head with a saucepan]] wielded by a [[MyFutureSelfAndMe future version of himself]] ([[ForegoneConclusion then goes on to bang a saucepan on the head of a past version of himself]]). For ''a week''.

* BrainInAJar: Professor Corchoran creates [=AI=]'s that have no connection to the real world - all their sensory data comes from the tapes set by him. They don't know about it, except for one who suspects. Another, slightly more mad scientist creates an [=AI=] copy of Corchoran's mind, as well, but this copy is [[AndIMustScream aware of his situation]].

* FamedInStory: From ''Memoirs of a Space Traveller'' onward, Ijon Tichy's celebrity status on Earth is well-established, and often forms a set-up for new adventures.
* InsideAComputerSystem: An interesting example in the first story: instead of people being trapped in a virtual reality, it's cybernetic brains created by a scientist. These are all hooked up to a large computer, which is creating their reality around them. Every brain is a different person: a beautiful girl, a scientist... and a madman, who thinks that paranormal stuff like prophecies or telepathy are the result of an error in the illusion that is his reality.
* MoodWhiplash: Purely satirical stories are followed by completely serious ones, about hard themes like the creation of a truly independent mechanical intelligence, or the horror of having an immortal soul without a body. Partially caused by the book being a collection of short stories written over a period of about twenty years.

* TimeTravel: A much darker example has a hapless inventor test his prototype time machine in Tichy's living room by a casual trip 50 years into the future - realizing too late that the trip actually ''will'' take him 50 years. [[BuriedAlive And the machine has no emergency brake.]]

The Ijon Tichy character went on to star in three more satirical novels: ''The Futurological Congress'' (1971), ''Observation on the Spot'' (1982, no translation), and ''Peace on Earth'' (1987).

* SpacePirates: {{Parodied|Trope}} in "The Twenty-eighth Voyage", when Ijon Tichy tells of his grandfather Euzebius, a space pirate. Euzebius would lure rockets off course by "scatter[ing] tiny flashlights along the Milky Way", then fall upon the duped and plunder them. Because of his habit of simply chucking dead bodies into space, over time there formed a cloud of corpses forever orbiting his black rocket. Ijon Tichy also [[DeconstructedTrope mentions that interplanetary piracy is generally unprofitable]] and therefore practically inexistent; indeed Euzebius (says Ijon Tichy) had no material motives, but was [[JustifiedTrope a Romantic idealist who wished "to bring back the venerable Earth tradition of piracy on the high seas"]]. Since Euzebius would frequently wait for years for rockets to prey upon, and therefore suffer terribly from boredom, he would after a completed robbery give back his victims all their belongings and let them travel on, then overtake them again to board and plunder them another time ("this would happen six, even ten times in a row").

* ReligiousRobot: The robot monks of Dykhtonia. They are aware that if they connected to a robot with all the facts on religion they would become atheists, [[ConfirmationBias so they choose not to connect to other robots out of religious principle]].

* SpacePirates: {{Parodied|Trope}} in "The Twenty-eighth Voyage", when Ijon Tichy tells of his grandfather Euzebius, who chose a career in interplanetary piracy. Euzebius would lure rockets off course by "scatter[ing] tiny flashlights along the Milky Way", then fall upon the duped and plunder them; because of his habit of simply chucking dead bodies into space, over time there formed a cloud of corpses forever orbiting his black rocket. Ijon Tichy also [[DeconstructedTrope mentions that interplanetary piracy in generally unprofitable]] and therefore practically inexistent; indeed Euzebius (says Ijon Tichy) had no material motives in the first place, but was [[JustifiedTrope a Romantic idealist who wished "to bring back the venerable Earth tradition of piracy on the high seas"]]. Since Euzebius would frequently wait for years for rockets to prey upon, and therefore suffer terribly from boredom, he would after a completed robbery give back his victims all their belongings and let them travel on, then overtake them again to board and plunder them another time ("this would happen six, even ten times in a row").

* SpacePirates: Ijon Tichy mentions that his great-great-uncle Eusebius made a committed attempt, but it didn't pay off.

* RoboticReveal: Inverted in the Eleventh Voyage. Tichy, sent in a robot disguise to a planet inhabited solely by machines that are hostile to all humanity, discovers in the story's finale that there is no single robot around the place. All of the alleged machines are in fact secret agents like himself, who have been exposed one by one, and forced to keep up appearances. Furthermore: the computer mastermind behind this plot shows up to be merely a humble human gofer working for the agency responsible for sending all those people on a mission to that planet.

* MyOwnGrampa: In "The Twenty-eighth Voyage", Ijon Tichy reads the private log of Cosimo Tichy, captain of a spaceship approaching the speed of light, which mentions Cosimo's relative Amphotericus confiding to him that as a consequence of the latest temporal paradox (accelerating, the ship's stern had "cut across an isochronal"), he is now his own father.
--> [A]pparently his time line knotted up into a loop.