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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...
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...
...these Dayton bicycle mechanics ever had such a grandiose notion. The bachelor sons of Bishop Milton Wright lived in a circumscribed world of nuts and bolts. They took care of business, and by trial and error they slowly realized their dream of flight on the sands of the Outer Banks and over Huffman Prairie, a half-mile-long field on the Dayton-Springfield trolley line...
...research and manufacturing station or send them into orbit to be assembled as a manned interplanetary ship. And they now have the muscle to do what the Pentagon cannot for the foreseeable future: orbit antisatellite and antimissile laser and particle-beam weapons for Star Wars-like battle stations in outer space...
...than five pounds. With such a light weight, I wondered why discus throwers didn't throw the discus like a frisbee. But when I tried to hold the discus in a classic frisbee-throwing position, I found it difficult to do so. No edge had been formed on the outer rim around which I could wrap my fingers...