Communication breakdown: Fiasco (1986) by Stanislaw Lem

Humans attempt to communicate with aliens - at any cost

Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006) was once probably the most widely read science fiction writer in the world; this was all the more remarkable given that he wrote in Polish. Today, he is best known for his mid-career novel Solaris (1961), which has been adapted to the screen multiple times. Lem’s career as an SF novelist ended with a much less well known book published 25 years later: Fiasco (1986).

As its title implies, Fiasco is - like Solaris - one in a string of pessimistic takes by Lem on the theme of first contact. It follows the crew of the human starship Eurydice, dispatched to the distant star system Zeta Harpyiae. Scientists have detected evidence that an intelligent species resides on the star’s fifth planet, dubbed Quinta. After a long journey, the humans are set on establishing contact with the Quintans. When their efforts are ignored, the crew of the Eurydice resort to increasingly extreme methods.

Complex, disgressive, and philosophical, Fiasco is Lem’s exploration of the difficulty - even impossibility - of establishing relations with alien species. It also deals at length with the limitations of artificial intelligence, game theory, and the human desire to impose a sense of order on the universe.

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Context of the novel

Unusually, Fiasco was not undertaken independently by Lem but was commissioned by the German publisher Fischer Verlag. For this reason, the German edition was the first to be published. The English edition followed in 1987, translated by the acclaimed Michael Kandel who translated numerous Lem works.

Fiasco was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, then in its second year of existence. The eventual winner was The Sea and Summer, by the Australian writer George Turner. Lem would write no more novels, dedicating himself to non-fiction for the remainder of his life.

Returned to life

The novel opens with a lengthy initial chapter titled “Birnam Wood”, a reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Apparently intended at one point to be published separately as a novelette, the chapter is set on Saturn’s largest moon Titan. A spacecraft is redirected to a spaceport on the moon. Its pilot, Angus Parvis, volunteers to rescue some missing personnel partly because one of them, Pirx, is a friend of his. (Pirx is the protagonist of numerous earlier stories by Lem.)

Parvis pilots a huge mech and journeys across Titan’s surface. While he finds another severely damaged mech, he does not locate the missing officers. Struck by a new disaster, he is forced to use a “vitrifax” device to place himself into suspended animation, hoping that he can be revived at a later time.

Eurydice and Hermes

Over a century later, the vast starship Eurydice is assembled in orbit around Titan. Its mission is to visit the (fictional) Zeta Harpyiae system, and its fifth planet Quinta, to follow up on signs of life. A body found on Titan is reanimated to join the mission: it never becomes clear whether he is Parvis or Pirx, as he suffers from amnesia.

The Eurydice crew arrive at Zeta Harpyiae and exploit a nearby black hole to conceal themselves and shield themselves from time dilation. A crew of ten approaches Quinta in the smaller ship Hermes. They find the Quintans to be extremely enigmatic and reluctant to communicate. The humans, in discussion with their supercomputer DEUS, elect to use increasingly extreme methods to provoke contact. The mission devolves into the tragic fiasco of the title.

Closed for business

Fiasco is primarily a pessimistic exploration of first contact, one of the most enduring topics in science fiction. The novel presents an alien race which simply refuses to engage with human attempts at communication. The humans eventually hypothesise that the planet they have called Quinta is locked into an intractable worldwide war which may explain their total isolationism. Some readers have interpreted this as a commentary by Lem on the apparent futility of the Cold War, then ongoing in 1986.

Lem’s human crewmen - and they are all men, in a novel without any role for women at all - refuse to accept the Quintans’ silence. The analytical equivocation of DEUS does not dissuade the more militant members of the crew from initiating attacks on Quinta designed to provoke a response. Exploiting their formidable technology, the crew of the Eurydice destroy a ring of ice that encircles Quinta, causing devastation on the surface.

The well-meaning and enlightened nature of the humans does not survive the Quintan silence. Lem writes that the “nearness of the alien civilization [...] became a separating distance that mocked their attempts to get to the heart of it.” Feeling mocked in this way, the humans abandon diplomacy and resort to catastrophic force which accomplishes nothing. In Lem’s pessimistic view of interstellar travel, humankind has learned little despite the traumas of Earth’s history. 

Lem reminds us that violence has always been a part of the human experience: “the phenomenon that in the nineteenth and especially twentieth centuries was called the ‘arms race’ came into the world with the paleopithecanthropus, when he employed the long thighbones of antelopes as clubs…”

Style and substance

Fiasco is a challenging and at times frustrating novel to read. Lem’s style is freighted with technical language taken from biology, astrophysics, computer science, and game theory. His characters frequently use Latin phrases, which are never explained - an approach which seems both unlikely and a little pretentious. The novel’s relatively dry prose recalls Arthur C. Clarke and the later work of Liu Cixin. 

Perhaps even more so than with those writers, Lem’s characters are scarcely worthy of the term. These figures are instead mouthpieces for various philosophical perspectives. The papal delegate Father Arago presents the theological point of view; the Japanese physicist Nakamura exhibits a sort of Zen equanimity, and the practical, no-nonsense pilot Harrach rapidly becomes an advocate for indiscriminate use of force. 

Much of Fiasco is taken up with Lem’s numerous and varied digressions. These cover topics such as whether God intends his creations to meet across the gulf between the stars, the purposeless beauty of rock formations on Titan’s surface, and the design of the Eurydice (which combines laser propulsion and a variation on the Bussard ramjet). While at times these discussions can seem superfluous, at their best they are fascinating. One example is a discussion of physics and causality, during which crewman Lauger describes physics at one point as “a narrow path drawn across a gulf that the human imagination cannot grasp.”

There are some fascinating details in the novel which reinforce Lem’s gloomy view of the future. One example is the “vitrifax” machine used by the stranded pilots. A crude design built more in hope than in expectation, it brutalises the body of the person it is designed to save - smashing their teeth as it forces in a nutrient tube and exchanging their blood for a preservative fluid. The pilot who is taken to Quinta is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, assembled from parts salvaged from frozen corpses. Later, Lem describes a “gracer” (gravity amplification by collimated excitation of resonance), a kind of gravity gun which, like all the humans’ tools, is pressed into service as a nightmarish weapon.

The last word

First contact was an abiding fascination for Stanislaw Lem and Fiasco has been described as a culmination of this interest. Lem’s growing disinterest in writing science fiction at the time may be detectable in the novel’s digressive and philosophical nature. What it lacks in characterisation or a stirring plot it makes up for in its multi-faceted, intense, and pessimistic view of the limits of human knowledge and our role in the universe.

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• Lem’s previous novels dealing with first contact are Eden (1958), Solaris (1961), The Invincible (1964), and His Master’s Voice (1968). Eden was actually not published in English until after the publication of Fiasco, in 1989.
  
• In 2023, Michael Bartlett shared an interesting video on Fiasco, also mentioning other novels covered here including The Stars My Destination (1956) by Alfred Bester, Rogue Moon (1960) by Algis Budrys, and Tau Zero (1970) by Poul Anderson.
  
• The header image incorporates a map of Titan's surface - this was made by "Eichodea" and released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.