SOURCE: “Futurological Congress as Metageneric Text,” in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 13, Pt. 3, November, 1986, pp. 313–28.

In the following essay, Philmus examines aspects of generic self-referentiality and the differentiation of real and imaginary worlds through language in The Futurological Congress. Philmus views Lem's novel as a continuation of H. G. Wells's conceptual experiment in The Time Machine.

Most, perhaps all, of Stanislaw Lem's fictions are typically “modern” or “postmodern” in this respect (inter alia): they implicitly comment on the genre(s) in relation to which they define themselves. It might therefore seem grossly hyperbolic, if not downright false, to claim that Futurological Congress (1971) is unique in its generic self-consciousness.¹ Nevertheless, I shall argue that it is a text without parallel in the rest of Lem's opus, and not only in the degree to which it is generically self-reflexive but also in the way that it depends upon that kind of reflexivity...