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I guarantee I found this title on the same cyberpunk listicle as Neuromancer and it was fucking awesome. I really enjoyed this book especially the language (which I found mindblowing that this was written in Polish and translated bc the English is so clever). We recently went to see Inception in "beautiful original 35mm" and I hated it!!!! I thought Inception was so fucking stupid and boring (and felt cheated after spending years hearing about what a mindfuck of a movie it supposedly is) and I would like to say to anyone who thought Inception was dumb, you're right and you should read The Futurological Congress
The central theme of the mechanical story is global overpopulation and methods of population control/population storage, but the central theme of the character story is distrust of reality. Inception was an easy to follow action movie with the "trippy" plot device of dream sharing and dream nesting, but the characters were so flat and the dialogue was so boring that I couldn't ever care or feel immersed in the idea that you never know if what you perceive is reality. In The Futurological Congress, Lem delivers on the unreality headtrip I was so desperately seeking during that longass boring movie. Ijon Tichy is at an enormous Hilton where the futurological congress is being held and outside a civil war is beginning, but none of the hotel occupants care or notice until the psychemical bombings begin, releasing psychemical "benignimizers" that alter the mental state of all those who do not have a personal air supply. Tichy takes refuge in a sewer where he takes off his mask and begins tripping balls. Each trip begins with his rescue from the sewer and then becomes increasingly surrealistic, until falling apart when Tichy realizes he has not left the sewer (by falling in the sewer water). Then Tichy is rescued and cryogenically frozen in hopes that in the future there will be a cure for his severe paranoia that everything he is experiencing is a hallucination. When he wakes up it is in a pharmocratic utopia where psychem drugs are available to give the user any mental state or expereince they desire.
This book is so clever and funny, it was 180 pages in ebook format and the language was so evocative and interesting that the story feels masterfully compact (like The Wizard of Earthsea). Recommend to anyone who thinks Inception is dumb and anyone who loves clever names (especially chemists).