Mission: vertical launch at half booster power. Ascent to ellipsis B68. Correction to stable oriental path, with orbital period of four hours and twenty-six minutes. Proceed to rendezvous with shuttlecraft vehicles of the JO-2 type. There await further instructions. Tales of Pirx the Pilot imagines a world in which space travel has become routine and boring - an unremarkable aspect of the human condition. Pirx graduates through a series of stories from cadet to captain. He is regaled with anecdotes of the glory days, when space travel was dangerous and thrilling. And yet, even as he sits at the controls cursing that his little puzzle toy won't work in zero-gravity conditions or as he makes himself comfy on the luxury space cruise ship Intergalactic, things keep going terribly wrong. As the cyberneticist Professor Taurov sighs: 'We have no choice but to trust to our technology. Without it we would never have set foot on the Moon. But. . . sometimes we have to pay a high price for that trust.'