"The Futurological Congress" by Stanisław Lem, translated by Michael Kandel. A science fiction with a heavy hallucination focus.
In the slightly distant future, a bunch of futurists have gathered to discuss the far distant future of humanity. Unfortunately, the hotel where this conference is held quickly turned into a war zone, and the countermeasure taken by the government were psychochemical weapons caused things to go downhill very quickly. The cover shows narrator seeing the hallucination of sewer rats walking around while standing up, but that's merely the beginning -- when the narrator awakes a few decades later, he finds a world where the fundamental building blocks of society are layers upon layers of hallucinations. It's a wild trip with many surprises.
There are many interesting concepts presented in this book that makes it stand out above other trippy stories. Besides the overarching idea of how all aspects of reality could be replaced by simulations in a piecemeal fashion, there were ideas on what future futurists would do to predict the even more distant future. For example, by making random permutations on words like "foot", we get words like "footless", "unfooted", "defeeted", and "defeetism". The last of which might eventually come to describe an evolution movement to get rid of human feet, even though those words seem meaningless today. The author is a real master in playing with words, and I am glad all those came through the translated version really well.
Besides the interesting ideas, there are some dark humor that were perversely entertaining. The first few pages started with a mostly academic conference interleaved with various threats, such as "This Room Guaranteed BOMB-FREE" and "these extremists had already delivered individual teeth of their hostages to the Embassy and various government offices, promising an anatomical escalation". The anatomical escalation came 3 pages later, but the futurological congress continued on. It was a careful mix of order and chaos that really made the joke. My favorite part was this boilerplate form that starts with "The measures taken to save your life were drastic, extremely drastic (circle one)." This book is densely packed with gems such as these, it was as funny as it was deep.
This is a much shorter book compared to "The Cyberiad", but it had just as many original ideas, and equally clever use of language. Definitely worth reading again.
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