Note:  Stories published in Polish as Dzienniki Gwiazdowe (The Star Diaries) were published in English in three volumes:  The Star Diaries, Memoirs of a Space Traveler and A Cosmic Carnival of Stanislaw Lem.

  Memoirs of a Space Traveler is representative of Mr. Lem in his most fantastic vein. In one of these grotesque and witty tales an inventor has created electronic intelligences that live in iron boxes connected to a central drum of recorded stimuli representing all the experiences that a person may have in a lifetime.(...)

  The theme of life as a dream is of course as old as European literature, but it is characteristic of Mr. Lem to recast traditional materials. Often reminiscent of ghost stories and folk tales, his suggestive fables range from the disturbing or horrific to the playfully satiric. 

The New York Times Review of Books

Verlag Volk und Welt,
Berlin 1976

        
Lem's drawing of an Old Steam Robot (Louis XIX)

  I wrote Star Diaries, stories that contain stories, in the course of 48 years. At first they were quite improbable because of their purely grotesque and humorous character. With time this grotesque started to be accompanied by cognitive concepts related to theology and answers to the question: what would human beings do if there were no limits to genes' composition? This idea was assisted by an array of most bizarre skeletons. As literary critics pointed out I turned from "pure inventions of Münchausen" to more serious concepts related to Swift's Gulliver and Voltaire, albeit still in a grotesque form. This volume discusses also many other topics, since I always had the tendency to write fiction that was a "general theory of everything". 

  The resemblance of Ijon Tichy, the hero of Star Diaries, to baron Münchausen or Gulliver was not a conscious act of the author - there were no theoretical premises or assumptions. I was not searching for any form of prototype, pattern or paradigm - just as the river does not anticipates its riverbed. My works "wrote themselves" - I turned into a form of a "rationally working medium" and I never processed plans related to my undertakings.

  The censorship banned publication of certain parts of this book in the Soviet Union and in other East European countries but I never considered this fact to be important.
 
 
 

 
Memoirs of a Space Traveler  
 

  Entry 116,309    We are approaching the speed of light.  Hundreds of unknown phenomena.  A new kind of elementary particle has made its appearance - squarks.  Not very large, but noisy.  Something peculiar is happening to my head.  I remember that my father was Barnaby, but I had another named Balaton.  Unless that's a lake in Albania.  I must check in the encyclopedia.  The aunts are buckling under, quantum by quantum, yet still gamely knitting away.  Bad smell on the 3rd deck.  Oliphant's child doesn't crawl now, it only flies, making use of the recoil from front and back discharges alternatively.  Amazing, the organism's capacity for adaptation!

  Entry 116,315    Today at my doorstep I find an infant, male, the following card pinned to its diaper:  "This is yours".  Cant' figure it out, an accident perhaps?  For its crib I'm using a desk drawer padded with old documents...
  
 Translated by Michael Kandel, Seabury Press 1976 

Polish Editions:

• Iskry 1957
• Iskry 1958
• Wydawnictwo Literackie1966
• Czytelnik 1971
• Czytelnik 1976
• Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1982
• Gebethner i S-ka 1991
• InterArt 1994
• Wydawnictwo Literackie 1999

• The Star Diaries - The Seabury Press, London 1976, 1979
• Memoirs of a Space Traveler - Harcourt Brace, New York 1982, San Diego 1983,1985
• Memoirs of a Space Traveler - Secker & Warburg, London 1982
• Memoirs of a Space Traveler - Mandarin, London 1991
• Memoirs of a Space Traveler - Andre Deutsch, 1992
• The Cosmic Carnival of Stanislaw Lem - Seabury Press, New York 1981