Fiasco
'There were two kinds of landscape characteristic of the inner planets of the Sun: the purposeful and the desolate.' The planet Quinta is pocked with ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network draped from spindly poles. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. The Earth spaceship Hermes arrives on Quinta with the best of intentions towards the humans' 'brothers in intelligence'. But something on the planet has gone terribly wrong...
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2009–2025years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I love Stanislaw Lem. Solaris is his most famous and it has many of his core themes; I'd also try Fiasco.
I'm also a huge fan of R.A. Lafferty, but his stuff his harder to find, mostly out of print.
Peter Watts' Blindsight is amazing recent-ish hard SF. (the follow-up, I did not like at all).
Anything from the Strugatsky brothers you can get your hands on!
- Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe are generally considered part of the West [*] (in contrast to, say, China or Japan), so Stanislaw Lem is western author.
(Outside of that, i would definitely recommend Lem, esp. Fiasco, The Invincible, or Peace on Earth.)
- But it would constitute nukes in space in a breach of international treaties!
Certainly a NERVA-style rocket engine is not a nuclear bomb, and a few nuclear reactors with known and tightly watched positions won't constitute a threat of a sudden nuclear strike.
But the treaties were made at times when the principal parties, the West and the Soviet bloc, did not trust each other one bit, and rightfully expected sabotage at any smallest loophole. So the treaties are overly tight.
Today's world is about as bad, with a hot war in Europe, and a lot of tensions around Taiwan. No chance that the treaties would be relaxed for mutual good, due to the increased mutual trust.
Breaking a treaty unilaterally just because it's inconvenient is also not great, and would untie the other sides' hands.
That's why we can't have nice things.
/* If you haven't yet, I recommend to read the novel Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem. It describes a civilization where all trust and cooperation are gone, and the planet is in the state of constant creeping war of sabotage. What Earthlings do there is another thing worth reading about. */
- Fair warning, I only liked the first part of Seveneves; I thought the second part was stupid. You'll get a lot of recommendations for Liu Cixin's "Three Body Problem" which I personally hate (though the first part of the first book is very well written), but if you like all of Seveneves then it might suit you.
My personal favourites that might not already be on everyone else's lists:
Fiasco - Stanisław Lem
This is how you lose the time war - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Feersum Endjinn - Iain Banks
The Dark Side of the Sun - Terry Pratchett (yes, that one)
Blindsight - Peter Watts
Bloom - Wil McCarthy
Good luck!
- I'm surprised no one mentioned "The Invincible" by Stanislaw Lem. Basic idea of the story is exactly what you're describing, "self-replicating system", with "creators long forgotten".
I recommend this novel, among with many others ("Fiasco", "Eden" and, of course, "Solaris"), for anyone who likes good sci-fi about "first contact".
- That would be Stanislaw Lem's most depressing but aptly named masterpiece, "Fiasco".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)
http://garethrees.org/2012/05/31/fiasco/
2. Radio static
A radiolocation map of the planet showed hundreds of transmitters of white noise, which merged into shapeless blotches. Quinta was emitting noise on all wavelengths.
In the Cold War theory: “What came to mind was an image of “radio warfare” taken to the point of absurdity, where no one any longer transmitted anything, because each side drowned out the other… All bands of radio waves were jammed. The entire capacity of the channels of transmission was filled with noise. In a fairly short period of time the race became a contest between the forces of jamming and the forces of intelligence-gathering and command-signaling. But this escalation, too, penetrating the noise with stronger signals and in turn jamming the signals with stronger noise, resulted in an impasse.”
Other hypotheses considered: “The noise was either the scrambling of broadcast signals or a kind of coded communication concealed by the semblance of chaos.” [It’s a consequence of the Shannon–Hartley theorem that the maximum information is transferred on a channel in the form of white noise.]
