Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is a science fiction novel by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem, published in 1961 by Wydawnictwo Literackie in Kraków. In tone and approach it differs markedly from the speculative science fiction for which the author is best known, since rather than exploring distant worlds it plunges into a paranoid bureaucratic nightmare. Lem's conception of it recalls some of his short stories, especially the Legend of King Murdas, collected in Robots' Fables (1964).

The frame is a remote future, some five thousand years after our time. Historians of that age have plenty of material on ancient civilizations, inscribed stone and clay, but almost nothing about the world contemporary with the reader, because most records were kept on paper and a catalyst of extraterrestrial origin destroyed nearly all of it. What survives is the diary of a man found in a subterranean fortress, which scholars call the Notes of a Man from the Neogene, or Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.

The diary recounts the experience of an agent sent to the New Pentagon, a military complex buried beneath the Rocky Mountains and cut off from the outside world. His mission, given in cryptic directives that are never fully explained, is to investigate, report and perhaps provoke, inside an absurd bureaucratic machine where logic has no practical use. The narrator lives in a world where nothing is as it seems and everyone suspects everyone else, and he writes in order to keep his sanity.

The novel was well received by genre readers. The writer Theodore Sturgeon called it "a well-wrought nightmare indeed". Lem described it as a blend of grim strangeness and humour, and argued that its scope goes beyond political satire: it puts forward the totalization of intentionality, the human tendency to read every perceived thing as a message, an interpretation that can be turned to political ends and then run out of control. The title alludes to Jan Potocki's novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.