Fiasco

By: Stanislaw Lem

Narrated by: Oliver Wyman

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.

The last farewell form Lem.

This was the last farewell from Stanisław Lem—one of the greatest masters of the genre. A good deal of hard sci-fi, where deep technical and scientific introspections are entangled with heavy moral dilemmas. Recommended to all sci-fi devotees.

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.

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.

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.

Did not enjoy this book

I had a really hard time staying focused on this book. I don't know if it's the long, boring passages or the narrator's relaxing voice, but I constantly found myself thinking about something else entirely. This book just couldn't keep my attention. The entire first chapter is basically irrelevant to the rest of the story. It does, unfortunately, set the stage for what the rest of the book will be like. He spends no less than an hour describing the character walking across a moon in a mech suit. That sounds fine in theory, but it's really nothing more than drawn-out descriptions of terrain mixed in with philosophical musings that I couldn't keep focused on. You could literally skip the first chapter and not miss anything important for the rest of the book. I keep seeing people online saying this is the author's best work, and that they thought it was so inspired and interesting. There are certainly some good ideas, but I had a difficult time getting over the truly awful choices the characters keep making once they arrive at their destination. These are supposed to be people from a unified planet, the smartest in their fields, and they just keep making one truly bad choice after another, with no real voice of reason to try to talk them down. They enact plans without any thought given to what might happen if something goes wrong or changes. They make huge leaps of logic and then act like they've thought things through. When it inevitably goes badly, they don't stop and think before the next bad decision, they just plow ahead, consequences be damned. It feels like the author keeps putting them in situations where they can either take a level-headed, thoughtful approach, or make assumptions and act immediately on them. They always do the latter. I just can't recommend this book.