SOURCE: “Futurological Congress as Metageneric Text,” in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 13, Pt. 3, November, 1986, pp. 313–28.
In the following essay, Philmus examines aspects of generic self-referentiality and the differentiation of real and imaginary worlds through language in The Futurological Congress. Philmus views Lem's novel as a continuation of H. G. Wells's conceptual experiment in The Time Machine.
