Pirx the Pilot

Unlike the absurd adventures of Lem's other recurring astronaut-hero, Ijon Tichy, the things that happen to Pirx generally make sense, at least by the end of the story. His adventures are moderately hard science fiction, probably the closest things that Lem has written to conventional SF as readers in the English-speaking world know the genre. Pirx is a commercial space pilot in Earth's solar system, living by equal parts calculating ability and common sense, and he usually pulls off his more miraculous victories in situations in which common sense is particularly called for.

The first of these stories, "The Test," is about young Pirx in school; the next two, "The Conditioned Reflex" and "On Patrol," are cautionary tales about the dangers of taking machines at their word ("The Conditioned Reflex" takes its time to actually get around to the story, and in the process includes some wonderful descriptive passages about the desolate lunar farside). "The Albatross" is a moody piece in which Pirx is a long-distance witness to a disaster; the only flaw in it is that "milliparsecs" are used as an inner-solar-system unit of distance; they're far too big for purposes of the story. Finally, my favorite of the stories is "Terminus", in which Pirx takes command of an ancient, wheezing spaceship whose reactor-maintenance robot has a peculiar habit... and a long memory.

Pirx is also featured in stories in More Tales of Pirx the Pilot and Mortal Engines, and he figures in a very peculiar way in Fiasco.

These further adventures of Pirx are, if anything, better than the ones in Tales of Pirx the Pilot. Most of them involve artificial intelligence in some way, and they are reminiscent of Isaac Asimov's early robot stories.

In "Pirx's Tale," told in the first person, Pirx encounters an unidentified hyperbolic object while hauling scrap. The second story, "The Accident," is an anomaly; it seems to take place in an entirely different universe than the other Pirx tales, one in which there is fast interstellar travel. In it, Pirx surveys an unexplored planet and finds evidence of remarkably humanlike behavior on the part of the team's robot, faced with a challenging rock climb.

"The Hunt" is also reprinted in Mortal Engines. In it, Pirx goes searching for a violently deranged robot on the Moon, and eventually finds it in a surprising encounter. "The Inquest" is a complex tale, told from multiple points of view, concerning Pirx's involvement (and possible culpability) in a test project for a new type of android astronaut. "Ananke" has Pirx on Mars, investigating a catastrophic spaceship crash that seems to be the result of a malfunction in the ship's autopilot. Throughout the tales, there resonates Lem's trademark sympathy for the machine. Even when a robot has been transformed into a destructive juggernaut, it's usually through no fault of its own.