Tales of Pirx The Pilot - Characters

Characters

Pirx is a fictional character from works of science fiction by Stanisław Lem: the story collections Tales of Pirx the Pilot and More Tales of Pirx the Pilot, and the novel Fiasco. The story of Pirx is that of a spaceship cadet, pilot, and captain. In a way, Pirx is as an ordinary "working man" who unlike traditional heroic space pilots has little if anything heroic about him. He sometimes finds himself in extreme situations, which he overcomes mostly through ordinary common sense and average luck.

In particular, in the story The Inquest, Lem puts forth the idea that what is perceived a human weakness is in fact an advantage over a perfect machine. In this tale Pirx defeats the robot, because a human can hesitate, make wrong decisions, have doubts, but a robot cannot.

Although Pirx appears in the first half of Lem's later novel Fiasko, the identity of the protagonist in the second half is never firmly established, but Pirx is one of the two possibilities. However, the bulk of the novel is set much further in the future, and it is vastly different from the Tales thematically.