Word: bathtubful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Erica Jong writes not so much novels as almost breathlessly up-to-date confessional bulletins. When last seen in Fear of Flying, Jong (who calls herself Isadora Wing on paper) was soaping up in her psychiatrist-husband's bathtub, waiting rather ambiguously for him to return and forgive her for the 340-page sexual excursion that made up the novel...
...name, pulled on Harvard when he tied his contribution for the Science Center to the stipulation that the structure look like his photographic brainchild. Lem is an absurd humorist whose jokes are too big to be funny. He writes of a world gone mad. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Futurological Congress are tales set in future societies that no longer know where they have come from or where they are going. Indeed, they no longer know why they exist...
...Rocky Mountains, and the other starts in the Costa Rica Hilton and moves to Manhattan. Lem is an Eastern European but his mind wanders in an American technological wilderness, and the paranoia he evokes is at home under the shadow of the Science Center. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub starts where a comfortable narrative would already be well into the body of its tale. The narrator is in some indefinite Pentagon Three, buried deep within the Rocky Mountains. Pentagon Three, with thousands of offices, miles of corridors, and an enormous supply of food and water, sealed itself off from...
...Futurological Congress is savagely anti-utopian. Lem dreams up a future world in which the only sophisticated technology belongs to the pharmaceutical industry. Where Memoirs Found in a Bathtub enthralls the reader in the narrator's desperately futile search for a purpose, The Futurological Congress sweeps along on Lem's wild imagination. The people live in squalor while they unknowingly take hallucinogens that make them believe they live in the best-of-all-possible-worlds people once believed science would someday provide. The Cyberiad, a collection of short stories, likewise offers tales of how science, once thought so omnipotent, gets...
...dilemma of the character writing Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is grim, and the book's resolution is grimmer. He goes crazy. The book offers no hope--just a warning. The narrator becomes convinced that everyone around him is crazy. He searches for a mission among a maze of people, but stops communicating with them, just as Pentagon Three once cut itself off from the outside world. The first part of the book's warning is about paranoia. The narrator also passes up his one chance to get away from the corridors after corridors. Once he found...