Aliens Fiasco

By Paul Gray

Stripped to essentials, Fiasco is simply another novel about earthlings attempting to contact aliens in outer space. Yet those who have read any of Polish Author Stanislaw Lem's numerous books know that even the most timeworn subject can be the occasion for fresh surprises. Lem's international reputation rests on two qualities rarely found together in one mortal: he is both a superb literary fantasist, a la Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, and a knowledgeable philosopher of the means and meanings of technology. Lem, 65, not only builds castles in the air, he also provides meticulous blueprints and rationales for their construction.

Hence the ambitious expedition, sometime in the 22nd century, of the Eurydice, a mile-long, billion-ton spaceship that is trying to touch base with the inhabitants of Quinta, the "fifth planet of the sixth sun" in the constellation Harpy. The earthly powers cooperate in funding and launching this enterprise because all other attempts to detect intelligent life elsewhere in the universe have failed. The old-fangled, late 20th century notion of scanning the skies for meaningful radio signals yielded nothing but static and was folly besides. The new theory favors the "window of contact," the relatively brief span during which any civilization achieves industrial know-how and then either destroys itself or lapses into self-absorbed silence. As a physicist aboard the Eurydice explains, "Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier."

Quinta seems, from terrestrial observations, a promising target, and getting there is half of Lem's fun. The Eurydice is constructed in orbit around a moon of Saturn; its thermonuclear flowstream engines use hydrogen intake as fuel and can achieve a velocity of 99% the speed of light. While the scout ship Hermes, weighing a mere 180,000 tons, is sent off to reconnoiter Quinta, the Eurydice lingers in the vicinity of a black hole. When Hermes returns, the mother ship will execute an "incomprehensible maneuver called 'passage through a retrochronal toroid,' thanks to which she would reappear in the neighborhood of the Sun barely eight years after takeoff. Without that passage she would return 2,000 years later, which would be no return at all."

Lem's imaginative physics is consistently beguiling. But the elegant planning and wondrous machines he describes fail to anticipate a simple problem: the Quintans do not want to talk. Flying high above the planet, the crew of Hermes can see signs of a highly advanced society. But attempts to communicate are met first with silence and then with hostility; unmanned probes carrying messages of peace are attacked. The earthmen begin to wonder whether the planners of their glorious mission "had invested billions and lifted mountains in order to find a civilization gone berserk."

The Hermes has the power to force Quinta to respond or to destroy it, but such a victory would constitute a defeat. One crew member tells the captain, "Whatever you do -- if you do not retreat -- will result in a fiasco." ( The captain has grown increasingly pessimistic: "Any detailed study of an alien technology was futile. Its fragments, like pieces of a broken mirror, would not yield a coherent picture; they were the indistinct result, only, of the thing that had shattered it."

Such ruminations seem more at home in a novel of ideas than in a saga of outer space. Fiasco happens to be both. Lem's plot is full of derring-do, infinite vistas and cataclysmic explosions. Equally engaging are digressions from the action: disquisitions on the development of the computer and artificial intelligence, advances in game theory, methods for reviving the dead after they have been frozen. Scientists may complain that Lem clutters up his theories with events; Trekkies and Star Wars buffs may claim the opposite. Readers in the middle distance will find a popular entertainment that is also dead serious.