Fiasco

By: Stanislaw Lem

Narrated by: Oliver Wyman

Length: 14 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

The planet Quinta is pocked by ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. In stark contrast, the crew of the spaceship Hermes represents a knowledge-seeking Earth. As they approach Quinta, a dark poetry takes over and leads them into a nightmare of misunderstanding.

©1988 Stanislaw Lem (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

A true masterpiece

Lem at his finset. the novel is a pinaccle of Lem's literary talent. a must read for any fan of hard SciFi

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong

Its a great book and an interesting take flipping the space invader narrative on its head and depicting the difficulties of interacting with extra terrestrials. it's one of the only sci-fi books I've ever read where Humans were the more advanced species.

The only problem I had is that Lem had a habit of inserting essays in his text. and you end up with 15 minute discussions on moral philosophy, or the fictional semeral technology. while he flys through the actual plot. it does make for good action though.

Simply nothing like it

Stanislaw Lem is one of my favorite sci fi authors and this book does not disappoint. A strange, though provoking story that kept a sense of wonder throughout the book. Certainly not a book for everyone but for people who love sci fi filled with ideas that stick long after the book is done, this surely is a book to read.

Not standard Sci-Fi fare ...

It's OK. There were certainly passages that made me stop and think, especially concerning the paths civilizations may take when it comes to war, self-destruction and so on. Lem must be brilliant but Fiasco seems to be mostly comprised of long expositions on these subjects and the story itself moves very slowly. And I really couldn't understand the ending at all. It just sort of fell off the cliff. All in all, it was worth it.

Sublime tale

Lem's wild and relentlessly logical imagination crafts a multi-layered tale of male desires probing and engaging nature. A delightful intellectual ride and a wise caution to grand ambitions combined with grand technical power.

interesting, but not as good as solaris

not a bad book at all really. fairly characteristic of lem. long passages that read like hard science, minimal characterization, extreme skepticism about interpersonal communication. just feels like he's only got this one note, though. you get essentially the same experience reading his other novels.

Sci-fi for the Hard of Core

This book is short on action but full of aha and hmm moments. In the form of a novel the author shares his thoughts and ideas about alien life and what an encounter with it look like as well as some ideas about advanced forms of artificial intelligence. The book uses scientific language and advanced concepts but it's not necessary to be familiar with them to follow the thoughts and get the ideas. If you ever wondered about what other forms of intelligence laws of nature can produce this is a book for you.

Maybe it reads better than it listens

I decided to give up after I nearly fell asleep and drove off the road. This was during an endless and repetitive description of the rock formations Lem imagined to be on Saturn's moon Titan. I was already a bit sleepy from a 20-minute passage that served to convey little more than the fact that the main character put on a mech-suit.

Short vivid descriptions stimulate the imagination. These long repetitive descriptions stifled mine. If I had been reading the book instead of listening to it, I could have skimmed them or skipped ahead to the good stuff. The narrator is quite good, but I nonetheless recommend reading this book rather than listening to it.

Meh. Not Lem's Best

The story might have been more interesting if the characters didn't read so much as mouthpieces for the author's views on alien contact. The long-winded lectures and exposition on the science of contact deflated any tension in the plot or interest in the characters. It was almost like reading a Socratic dialogue in some parts. I listened to much of this book in a kind of numb determination to get through it because there was little actual drama or character development. Good science fiction, in my view, needs to strike an appropriate balance between telling and showing: telling about the science and the speculation on future developments and showing that through scene-driven character development. Fiasco is most definitely a "telling" novel so full of exposition and long asides that the characters are only a tertiary concern. Wyman's narration, which can be very credible when he is given good material, only added to the slog of this book since the regular rolling tones of his speech lulled me into inattention and boredom. Skip this one and get Solaris narrated by Allessandro Juliani if you haven't already; that is guaranteed to be a better experience with Lem. It has interesting ideas, but it's not worth the slog to get to them.

The story is really short when you remove all the needles explanation.

Most of this book it spent putting up with hours of pointless explanation rather than plot. once I thought the story was actually starting, the book it over. There is a lot of cool elements that go unused in favor of explaining speculative alien history and laborious detail of technical systems. I guess the point is that the crew assumed they knew more than they did and made bad decisions on poorly drawn conclusions but overall this is drudgery with no pay off.