Professor A. Dońda

by Stanislaw Lem

The novel is a "story within a story". The "frame story" starts with the author (Ijon Tichy) complaining that he has to cut his memoir in clay tablets, the way Babylonians did. This unfortunate situation resulted from the world ignoring the warning of professor Dońda (whose sidekick was Ijon Tichy), who established that information has a kind of "critical mass", and when it is exceeded, similar to uranium, a destructive chain reaction may happen. Tichy then proceeds to tell the story of the professor.

The plot of ‘Dońda’ is set after an informational holocaust, a result of the transformation of information into mass by Dońda, which caused the disappearance of the contents of all computerised data banks. Although it caused enormous destruction in the much better computerised First World, it brought enormous relief to the Third World, which no longer had to be in hot pursuit of a vanishing target. Not only did modern arms became unusable, but the global monetary system with the US dollar as the major world currency also collapsed, thus forcing humanity back to the paradise which it had lost when it became civilised. Wojciech Orliński writes that professor Affidavid Dońda is one of the most sympathetic geniuses of Lem. His whole life, literally from his very conception including his first and last names, was a chain of errors and coincidences, which had eventually led to his discovery and the ignored prediction of the catastrophe.