Fiasco, by Stanislaw Lem

Staff review by Chris Saliba

A challenging masterpiece from an indisputable genius.

Fiasco opens describing events that have taken place one hundred years before the main story. A young pilot named Parvis is sent to Saturn’s moon, Titan, to find another pilot, named Pirx, who was lost there. Parvis experiences a fatal accident during the search and before he dies, manages to activate a device that cryogenically freezes him. One hundred years later Parvis and Pirx’s bodies are exhumed. Scientists manage to bring one of the bodies back to life, using organs from the two, but don’t know whether it is Parvis or Pirx. When the reanimated body is brought back to life, it has no memory and goes under the new name of Mark Tempe.

Tempe is asked to take part in a new voyage, to the planet Quinta, which it is believed harbours an intelligent life form on a par with earth’s humans. The huge mothership  Eurydice is dispatched to a black hole near Beta Harpiae, where it sends off a smaller spaceship, the Hermes, which contains a full crew of scientists, astrophysists and even a Dominican priest.

Once the Hermes approaches Quinta, strange, unanticipated things are noticed. The planet is covered with an extremely high volume of radioactivity, a baffling blanket of white noise. The planet is also surrounded by a ring of ice, the result of all the surface water – the oceans - being somehow forced up into the atmosphere. How or why the Quintans have done this is a mystery.

The crew tries to communicate with Quinta, sending out messages over a sustained period, almost like a bombardment. There is no response. More messages requesting contact with the Quintans are sent, but an eerie silence remains. As a show of strength, the crew decides to create a massive cavity on their moon’s surface, but when the missiles are sent they are intercepted by Quinta’s defense system which sends the missiles off course, only to create catastrophic damage as huge chunks of the moon fall to the planet’s surface.

As a final attempt at contact, the crew decides to project a “cartoon” onto Quinta’s clouds. This works, and the Quintans agree to meet a human ambassador. Mark Tempe is sent to the planet’s surface, but when he arrives, and discovers the strange form the Quintans take, he is horrified by their banal, ugly, incomprehensible forms. The whole expedition has been a bizarre – and tragic - waste of time.

Stanislaw Lem’s 1986 novel is an intellectual, philosophical and aesthetic tour de force. It’s a fully realised alien world set in deep space. Like his other first contact novel, Solaris, it is enveloped in a haunting, eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere. The sense of existential dread is palpable. The crew, slowly going insane, are deluded that powerful computers and probability theory can predict life on an unknown planet. Yet all their superior systems continually fail them. The Quintans refuse to communicate. The crew tries to anticipate every possible reason for Quinta’s unfathomable behaviour, but their only response to the maddening silence is the use of violence. In the end this violence turns out to be a show of weakness and impotence.

The basic theme of Fiasco is the limit of human technology and science. Trying to overreach only leads to madness. It could be argued that Lem is saying the human race is a diabolically mad race (Lem was writing in the middle of the Cold War, when nuclear weapons threatened to blow the globe up.) This is a novel that is deeply pessimistic (even cynical) about the kind of hubris that results from too much faith in technology, mathematics and science.

Fiasco is a difficult novel to read and it demands some attention. There are some flaws: the opening chapter, set one hundred years in the past, is perhaps too long; the text can be dense at times, laden with scientific language; and the plot could perhaps move more swiftly. Having said that, Fiasco is a novel that can have few peers for its astonishing range and depth of ideas, written by a man who is an indisputable genius.  

Fiasco, by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Penguin Modern Classics. ISBN: 9780241334355 RRP: $22.99

To sign up for our monthly newsletter, featuring new releases, book reviews and favourite articles from around the web, click here.