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.