Futurological Congress: Modern Classics

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Both gruesome and very funny, The Futurological Congress is the story of an ill-fated gathering of scientists who meet in a vast luxury hotel in the smog-bound, chronically over-populated Costa Rica of the future.  Caught up in a revolution, the congress ends in a shambles as the authorities try to quell discontent by pouring hallucinogenic drugs into the water-supply.  The beleaguered hero, Ijon Tichy (well-known to readers of Lem's The Star Diaries) is shot, frozen and thawed out years later, to find the Earth he had known changed in entirely unexpected ways.