"Fiasco" by Stanisław Lem, a science fiction story about a botched alien contact mission. We are the aliens.
The story opens with a rescue mission on Titan, featuring detailed description of the extraterritorial landscape, and the giant robot that navigates this hostile terrain. I was only partway through all the text enumerating various design quirks of these giant robots and I like this novel already. This was going to be a hard science fiction, and it had giant robots. The backdrop of this novel is that humanity had already made enough progress to operate giant robots on another moon, and these giant robots even come with a last resort feature of instantly freezing the pilot when all else fails.
This freezing feature was put to use merely ~26 pages later when the pilot was certain that no other viable plans exist. The pilot is revived two chapters later, and there is where the real story begins. By chapter 3, humanity had finally gained the means of reviving frozen bodies, and even mastered sidereal technology needed to navigate to distant planets. Computers were so advanced that they were only limited by laws of physics. Basically humanity had already made all possible accomplishments in technology, and were using this technical prowess to try to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Despite having all the technical advantage in the world, the contact with extraterrestrials did not go well.
This book explores the development of civilizations, why attempts to contact civilization might fail, and how humans act when their mission is "make contact at all costs". It's a fascinating book that has been very rewarding to read.
This is a book about human contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, and this contact did not go well. An early hint of this is in chapter 4 (page 114) where it's noted that humans must carefully time their arrival to match the rate of development in the alien civilization, otherwise "the expedition would be a fiasco". This is the first time the title word "fiasco" appear in the book, the next occurrence would be near the end (chapter 15, page 293) when they talk about retreating from this planet. What happened in between was that the expedition indeed did not go well. Maybe the timing was really off due to needing to slow down the spaceship to revive the pilot from chapter 1. Although the real reason might be that alien life was simply too different from what humans were looking for.
A large portion of the later chapters had to do with finding out what the aliens might look like. Even with all the fantastic instruments available that could scan the whole planet, the humans simply couldn't find any animals that might fit the bill. There were theories that the aliens were all dead and it's actually the leftover machines that are running the show, and then there were theories that the aliens are really good at hiding. But the reality is that there are other kingdoms of life besides animals, and the scientists simply weren't considering other branches as intelligent. There was an early hint near the middle of the book (chapter 7, page 154) where the explorers captured an alien spacecraft and discovered virus-like organisms inside those spacecrafts, and I kept thinking "what if those viroids were the aliens?" I would have to read all the way to the final page of the book for the punchline to confirm my theory.
There is a dark tone that runs throughout the book in the sense that the mission seemed destined to fail at every step, with many convincing arguments on how this failure is inevitable. But even with all this foreshadowing of failure, the book still managed to pull that punchline at the end to show just how spectacularly wrong we were in our expectations. Stanisław Lem is really good at this kinds of stories that contrasts differences in scale, and he has done another wonderful job with this book.
Even if it didn't present a novel concept of aliens, it had many gems such as this conversational error message from the computer:
The relieving of frustration in the face of insoluble problem does not lie within the domain of my computing ability. Do not ask the impossible, Captain. The branching tree of heuristics is not God's Tree of Knowledge.
(chapter 13, page 238)
I took a long time to read this book, but it was totally worth it.
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