Fiasco

There are parts of this I delighted in, but I think I have too many issues with this one.

The story starts us with the pilot Parvis who is making a delivery run to Titan and discovers that a few people have been lost on the moon, including his mentor Pirx (of the Pirx the Pilot stories). He takes a mech out to find them but ultimately must freeze himself in a cryo pod.

Jump to the future where Eurydice is heading to make first contact with a planet. On board they've taken aboard the missing people including two pilots who have been in cryo, both of whom have names starting with P, but they don't have any more information than that. They randomly choose one to bring out of cryo, using organs from the others, but also know that the one that the bring back will have amnesia.

"Oh. So this will be important then!" I think "whether it's Pirx or Parvis will be an integral part of this story". Dear reader, let me dispel you of this notion. It's not. He never learns or if he does, he doesn't reveal it. And given that Lem mentions the fact that they are pretty similar personalities I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting. Just something I guess.

Anyway the resurected pilot picks up a book which the doctor gave him. And reads it. It's not important to the plot, but there you go. Previously one of the scientest was telling a story about El Derado. It's also tangental to the plot, but goes for pages.

And so here's my actual issue with this book. Why has it been stuffed with stories that have no impact on the rest of the story? I may have read that these were drafts of other stories Lem had lying around and had used as the basis, but in my mind he's being paid by word count here. You could argue that he's used the stories about discovery to tell us something about how man has always sought out new worlds and blundered, but I'm not entirely convinced that he achieves this even if it was his intention.

It's slog for slogs sake.

Anyway, the Eurydice is heading for a planet designated Quinta and doing so in a way that means that the will return soonish after they left Earth. Lem tackled the issue of contact with other worlds and the pointlessness of it in [b:Return From the Stars|251648|Return From the Stars|Stanisław Lem|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328875060l/251648.SX50.jpg|457761] and here he goes to great lengths to prove that travel to other stars in this short time period is possible. Great lengths.

Here, let's stop and grumble about how often the action in this book stops in order to drop into research paper territory. A great deal of history is laid out as to how the ships drive was created and how it's scientifically possible and I really didn't care.

Later, he goes into dissecting the arguments of the characters. Not by y'know having the characters have a discussion, no, it's in third person. Urhgh. It ends up being so dry.

So the pilot has two goals. One to remember who he is (or decide he doesn't care) and two to learn enough to be selected as the second pilot on the team that will be travelling on the smaller ship to Quinta, the Hermes, while the Eurydice stays away. Great so I'm now having to learn what he learns.

So he gets selected to go on the Hermes. Yah! We're about halfway through the book and they're still not at the planet. But spying on the planet they realise that it's full of signals and interference with each other, the planet has a ring of ice in it's atmosphere that appears to have been put up there by the locals from the sea and in orbit around the planet are many probes or satellite like things. They aim to catch one and it turns out to be biomechanical but diseased and the eventual decided upon theory is that there's a war on and that the infection was deliberate from the other side of Quinta.

The ship has an onboard computer, DEUS. And there's sort of a weird hierarchy where the captain, but the onboard computer tracks the mental health of the crew and if there's an issue with any of the crew, lets the captain and doctor know and they then need to handle it.

So what if the virus that diseased the probe that they caught infected DEUS. Eh, it doesn't happen. But DEUS often behaves weirdly.

The crew try to contact the planet with no success. Eventually they decide that the planet is ignoring them instead of not being able to understand and then start threatening them and this is where the book just entirely lost me. Because they carry out those threats, by destroying the moon.

What gets me is that it presumes that the threats could be understood and also the time limit could be understood. Which really?

They get contact, but things escalate, they send a fake Hermes down, it gets destroyed, they destroy the ice ring, get agreeement from one of the sides of the conflict to send the pilot down to check on the destroyed fake Hermes and let the Quntians know that if they don't recieve a message from the pilot every x minutes that they'll destroy the planet.

So in the last twenty pages the pilot finally gets to the planet. And he misses the second call in and the planet is destroyed by the Hermes, THE END.

What?

I just don't by the idea in the book that things would escalate like this. Imagine going to a strangers house in a less developed country, because you want to be friends with them. You knock on their door. They don't answer. So you blow up their garage. They say "Please go away" so you smash in their windows. It doesn't make sense.

And I've come to this after reading portions of [b:Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy|889430|Microworlds Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy|Stanisław Lem|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348193964l/889430.SY75.jpg|874679] where Lem pulls apart stories about first contact from [b:The War of the Worlds|8909|The War of the Worlds|H.G. Wells|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320391644l/8909.SY75.jpg|3194841] to [b:Roadside Picnic|331256|Roadside Picnic|Arkady Strugatsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1173812259l/331256.SY75.jpg|1243896], but I can't see how Fiasco holds with those discussions (apart from the parts where he derides science fantasy for not giving full explanations of the tech).

Now I admit that I am often more to the whimsical stories of Ijon Tichy, but I really do enjoy the more serious tales of Pirx, but this one feels off. It feels hopeless and morose. As if the future is pointless, inevitable and not worth attempting.

Where I really land on this one though is that it could have been three different and good stories. but as is, it drags strangely and doesn't mesh well together at all and I don't like it.

I'm yet to read the last Lem novel which was published after this one [b:Peace on Earth|88313|Peace on Earth|Stanisław Lem|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328874754l/88313.SY75.jpg|1271753] and as it's a Tichy novel I was keen to, but now I'm worried that I won't like it as I did this one.

Such a weird book! Some classics, like The Lord of the Rings read just like anything that came after them — at least in part because they had such an effect on future works. Not Fiasco.

It starts with the redirected landing of a spaceship to one base on Titan instead of the other. Turns out it was redirected because they assumed it had a person named Killian on board and they wanted this person. Who is this Killian? About a hundred pages later we are a thousand years in the future and Titan has been demolished. At this point it is pretty clear we are not going to learn more about Killian.

This pattern keeps repeating. A lot of interesting things were introduced on Titan in the first hundred pages, but now all that is gone. We have a single character to bridge us into the future, but we cannot even be sure who that is. But okay, we settle in, get to know a new environment. Then this new environment gets flown into a literal black hole, and we are off on a new adventure in a new spaceship.

Finally we arrive at what is the ultimate goal of the book, a planet orbiting a distant star, with intelligent life on it. The mission is to say hi. The locals have done and are doing a lot of weird things that are hard to explain.

Do we find the explanations ultimately? Maybe. It is like with Killian. Maybe if I carefully re-read the first hundred pages, I can find the explanation in the little hints and seemingly unrelated bits of dialog. Maybe the explanation is supposed to bloom in my mind when I am reading the poetic description of the landscape. The book does not give you straight answers, but gives you enough data that you know the answers may very well be in there somewhere. Basically it is an interesting puzzle, and I would love to talk about it with someone. Please read this book :).

Do they manage to fulfill the mission and say hi? I think it's fantastic. I imagine an epilogue where they return to Earth. Reporters are everywhere and they are asking, "did you manage to communicate with them?" "Were they nice?" "Did you make any friends?" "Did you bring back gifts of technological wonders?" and the people from the expedition have to explain: "Um, we actually ended up blowing up their planet."

The writing is very interesting too. Sometimes it's poetic, often it is philosophical (they even have a priest on board), but it also has hard technical detail, like energy figures in Joules and results of spectral analysis.

All the little parts are very interesting, and puzzle-like. The overall picture, of what happens when two extremely different cultures meet, is more of political statement, and also good to ponder/discuss.