Earthly expedition tries to communicate with the civilization of the remote planet Quinta, however these attempts fail because Quintians avoid contact at all cost.  Lem ingeniously equipped his Astronauts with adequate technology, but it did not help them realize the everlasting dream of humanity of exchanging experiences with brothers in reason.  Hence strangeness remains  - as always with Lem – inscrutable, and people remain wrapped for eternity in their mythologies.  “Fiasco”, the last novel by Lem, bitter and pessimistic, summarizes the most important traits of his writing.

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Hard science fiction Philip Challinor 2009-02-14 21:11:31 How hard can you take it? Fiasco is the fourth and most pessimistic of Lem's "contact" novels (after Eden, The Invincible and Solaris). Humanity undertakes its first interstellar voyage in the hope of making contact with the inhabitants of the planet Quinta, but the aliens won't play ball and all the scientists can do, as usual, is present various theories which achieve little, nothing, or worse than nothing. The basic problem is a simple one (and a recurrent Lem theme): how can human beings hope to recognize, let alone understand or talk to, creatures which are wholly different in their biological and technological heritage? There's a good deal of technical discussion, concerning both the possibilities of contact and the workings of interstellar travel, which might prove difficult going; but if you stick with it the paradoxes are delightful, though hardly encouraging; and the descriptive passages are as good as anything in Solaris. The opening chapter is a stunning jou!rney through a literally titanic landscape, and although it might at first seem rather loosely related to the rest of the book, its perspective on the "heroic" protagonist is vital to the ending - another set-piece in a beautifully evoked alien landscape, this time on Quinta. Heroism, even human-ness itself, when confronted with the alien, is not just an irrelevance (as it is to varying degrees in the three previous books) but a deadly liability. Even now that it can resurrect the dead and travel to the stars, humanity still can't see outside itself. The expedition, though a miracle of human endeavour, is a fiasco. But Fiasco is a hard, ironic, sometimes breathtaking triumph. Philip Challinor Reply | Quote 0   0

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