The "frame story" starts with the author (Ijon Tichy) complaining that he has to cut his memoir in clay tablets, the way Babylonians did.
This unfortunate situation resulted from the world ignoring the warning of professor Dońda (whose sidekick was Ijon Tichy), who established that information has a kind of "critical mass", and when it is exceeded, similar to uranium, a destructive chain reaction may happen.
Not only did modern arms became unusable, but the global monetary system with the US dollar as the major world currency also collapsed, thus forcing humanity back to the paradise which it had lost when it became civilised.
His whole life, literally from his very conception including his first and last names, was a chain of errors and coincidences, which had eventually led to his discovery and the ignored prediction of the catastrophe.
[5] His hilarious exploits in the fictional African country of Gurunduwaju is an acute satirical allegory of Polish People's Republic of 1970s.