From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy Books in Order

These books follow Ijon Tichy, Lem's great traveler, braggart, witness, and accidental philosopher. He appears in the early voyage stories gathered in The Star Diaries / Memoirs of a Space Traveler and in later books like The Futurological Congress and Peace on Earth. In English, the early journeys were split across more than one volume, which is why the series can look a little untidy on the shelf. The voice, though, is always the same, dry, polite, slightly vain, and forever one step behind the trouble.

Tichy is usually the least reliable person in the room, which is part of the fun.

He is not a conquering space hero. He mostly travels, observes, panics, improvises, and then writes it all down as if the whole thing were perfectly reasonable. That lets Lem do two things at once. He can stage huge science fiction ideas, time loops, future societies, robot worlds, bureaucratic nightmares, and cosmic misunderstandings, while keeping the point of view human-sized and comic. Tichy wants to survive the trip, make sense of what he saw, and maybe keep his dignity. Usually he gets two out of three.

The early tales work like travel memoirs and tall stories. Each voyage throws Tichy into a different logical trap or social absurdity, and the joke often lands hardest when the alien world starts looking uncomfortably familiar. The Seventh Voyage is a perfect sample, a damaged ship, a repair problem, and a time loop that fills the cabin with past and future versions of Tichy himself. The same spirit runs through the wider Star Diaries stories, where impossible customs and strange inventions become comic mirrors for politics, ideology, and human self-importance.

The absurdity is deliberate.

The Futurological Congress pushes the series into darker territory. Tichy arrives at a meeting of future-thinkers in a country shaken by unrest, then wakes into a world where drugs, illusion, and official reality have become almost impossible to separate. The book is funny, but it is also one of Lem's sharpest attacks on manufactured happiness and easy predictions about the future.

Peace on Earth shows what happens when the same comic traveler moves into a colder, more anxious late-Lem world. Earth has pushed its weapons and arms factories onto the Moon, and Tichy is sent to inspect the self-evolving military systems left behind. What begins as a mission turns into a story about split consciousness, unreliable memory, and how little control people really have once systems start running themselves. Across the whole series, that is what to expect. These are adventure stories, yes, but also satires, philosophical puzzles, and very funny reports from a universe that refuses to behave.