Word: fiascos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
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...
...view, and that of Historian Pfeiffer, the reason that the Bay of Pigs failed was not because the machinery of Government was short-circuited. Rather, it was a case in which the entire system worked the way it was supposed to -- and produced a fiasco...
After 25 years, Pfeiffer thinks it is time for his own studies of the fiasco to be made public. "Kirkpatrick's order to destroy the documents was outrageous," he commented last week. "What's to say the CIA's records on the Iran-contra matter won't disappear the same...