YMMV / Tales of Pirx the Pilot

• Broken Ace: Boerst from "The Test" can bee seen like this. He excels at everything the Institute throws at him, seemingly effortlessly being the top of his class... but loses it when facing an unexpected emergency during the test simulation he thought was real.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: For the readers. Albatross was written in 1959. It begins with Pirx sitting on a deck of an enormous, luxurious (space)ship called the Titan which is uncrashable, musing on the ridicules of high society and admiring a beautiful lady who's traveling first-class. Sounds familiar? The plot shifts to entirely different things in a few pages, though… And the Titan DOESN'T crash.
• Once Original, Now Common: The big "twist" of Pirx as a character is that he's The Everyman, rather than The Ace typical for science fiction of the era. As ground-breaking it was in the tail end of the 50s (and especially in the Communist Block), the concept of "space truckers" became completely normalised over the years, becoming a cliche by itself^note Probably best exemplified with Alien. So it's a bit hard to appreciate how daring and unusual it was for Pirx to simply not be yet another Ace Pilot with various extraordinary skills and abilities, equipped with Lantern Jaw of Justice and great physique. Fortunately, it doesn't take away from the stories themselves.

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