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A Book I Should Have Gotten Years Ago
Feb. 26th, 2011 01:22 pmTales of Pirx the Pilot by Stanislaw Lem.
Found it at a library sale at the same time as my replacement copy of Red Storm Rising and I'm taking advantage of the downtime this weekend to read it. I'd already read the first story--in a thirty-year old copy of Omni magazine, so I know what I'm getting into.
Pirx and I have a lot in common...probably more than I'm comfortable admitting, but sure. It's a future I expected we'd have by now, but don't--a burgeoning spacefaring civilization, with little colonies scattered across the near planets of the Solar System. The demand is high for space pilots and captains and navigators, and so the search for talent has gone beyond the Chuck Yeagers and Yuri Gagarins and Neil Armstrongs to...Pirx.
He has a lot of things going for him but is in no way perfect. Everybody who knows him describes him as a "decent, regular sort of fellow"--a description that irks him to no end as he wants people to see him as heroic. Meanwhile, he does his job adequately but not without trial. He survives rather than wins. In that regard he is like most pilots--although pilots themselves likely won't own up to the fact. Sometimes Murphy's Law is his foe; other times it's his ally.
I should have read these stories a long time ago.
Found it at a library sale at the same time as my replacement copy of Red Storm Rising and I'm taking advantage of the downtime this weekend to read it. I'd already read the first story--in a thirty-year old copy of Omni magazine, so I know what I'm getting into.
Pirx and I have a lot in common...probably more than I'm comfortable admitting, but sure. It's a future I expected we'd have by now, but don't--a burgeoning spacefaring civilization, with little colonies scattered across the near planets of the Solar System. The demand is high for space pilots and captains and navigators, and so the search for talent has gone beyond the Chuck Yeagers and Yuri Gagarins and Neil Armstrongs to...Pirx.
He has a lot of things going for him but is in no way perfect. Everybody who knows him describes him as a "decent, regular sort of fellow"--a description that irks him to no end as he wants people to see him as heroic. Meanwhile, he does his job adequately but not without trial. He survives rather than wins. In that regard he is like most pilots--although pilots themselves likely won't own up to the fact. Sometimes Murphy's Law is his foe; other times it's his ally.
I should have read these stories a long time ago.
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