Word: lemly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Crimson was led by first year Coach Wayne Lem, the squad played its first full year in the new Malkin Athletic Center, and eight players wore the Crimson uniform for the first time...
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...
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...
...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...
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...