Observation on the Spot

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Observation on the Spot (Polish Wizja lokalna, with the common meaning of the expression being crime scene reconstruction) is a social science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem. The novel is a report of Ijon Tichy's travel to a faraway planet Entia (in Polish text: Encja) to study their civilization. This report was supposed to fix a misunderstanding arisen from Tichy's Fourteenth Voyage to supposedly Entia (then known as Enteropia), which turned out to be a satellite of Entia, masqueraded by Entians to misguide explorers. The travel was also to verify the results of the "Institute of Historiographical Computers" (Polish: Instytut Maszyn Dziejowych), which use predictive modeling to overcome the speed of light limitation and get information about the state of the affairs on remote planets based on information obtained from previous expeditions.