Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight-papyralysis-has obliterated much of the planet's written history. However, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community. Translated by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose.
Stats for nerds
15recommend
34mentions
28people
2009–2026years
53% recommend44% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I recommend "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" by Stanisław Lem, it has this line of thinking.
- I really like Lem, but Solaris is probably my least favourite of his stories. It does have the thing I most admire in Lem's work of being about true aliens - that is, not just us again but in a Halloween costume like a Star Trek alien - but somehow Solaris doesn't "work" for me even though say, Memoirs Found In A Bathtub or Futurological Congress do.
- You may want to check Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanisław Lem :)
- I agree, the videogame does a good job conveying a Lem-like sense of inscrutable alienness mixed with pervasive unease.
Just a bit of advice, there was one section maybe about 75% through the game where you hit a fork and you're meant to turn left, but I got turned around in the map and turned right instead. And instead of notifying me that I was going the wrong way, the game's atmospherics started very gradually getting foggier and foggier and it became harder and harder to move forward. Eventually I came to a region where my vision was so grayed-out that I could barely see a foot ahead of me. I had to ditch the rover and proceed on foot, but even then it felt like I was walking through molasses and that the way forward was somehow eluding me like a hidden passage.
I mistakenly thought that was just an expected part of the journey and I stubbornly tried to slog on in the wrong direction for what seemed like a couple of weeks. I became frustrated and was ready to give up playing and then just decided on a whim to go all the way back to the fork and try the other direction, whereupon to my surprise it became immediately obvious that I was now on the correct route, and the game proceeded normally.
That whole misadventure became to me a core part in how I experienced the game even though it effectively nothing more than a side quest to nowhere. If you ever read his (in my opinion) greatest work, "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub," it felt in some way very much like that book, pushing forward with no sense of progress but a vague sense of something very wrong.
- In fact quite a lot of Lem's writing is not sci-fi at all, period. Hospital of Transfiguration is an absolutely mandatory read for any fan of Lem, even though it will leave you depressed for a week afterwards. And memoirs found in a bathtub is just a masterpiece of absurdity, it has a very good English audiobook actually if anyone wants to try.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_Found_in_a_Bathtub
Related, great Stanislaw Lem novel about the "Great Decomposition" of paper.
