Tales of Pirx the Pilot (Polish: Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie) is a science fiction stories collection by Polish author Stanisław Lem, about a spaceship pilot named Pirx, says wiki.They are... of a type. Kinda soviet-ish; but also of the naive scifi era. When spaceships were sent out "on patrol" - why would you do that? When space had sectors. And when displays were cathode ray.
They also feel a bit tame. As though Lem wasn't really sure what he was allowed to do with the new medium, and felt obliged to not stray to far from classical ideas. The prose is often of decent quality rather than pulp rubbish, but the ideas perhaps less so.
For example the last one is something of a ghost story, transmogrified: assigned to an old refurbed ship, Pirx discovers the reactor being maintained by an old robot who is revealed to have survived the crash years ago that killed all the previous crew, slowly. For no obvious reason it starts tapping out in morse code transcripts of the crash. This unnerves Pirx who ends up rather thoughtlessly recommending scrapping the robot, thereby removing the unsettling from his life and settling for the known.
This Goodreads review is a little harsh - I would be kinder - but is substantially correct.
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