Rating: 
Summary: The best SF I've read
Review: After countless readings, Fiasco is the best SF title out there. I don't even think of this work as SF - the early jungle sequence and Titan construction segue into the conclusion leaving me thinking that what Lem is writing about isn't exactly what Lem is writing about at all. Invincable, Pirx, and Cyberiad may be his best known works, but this is Lem's masterpiece. If you don't have it - buy it.
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Summary: SETI gone mad
Review: Contrary to an impassioned and misplaced review Lem isn't arguing against space-travel, nor is he being morbidly sensitive about the death of traditional cultures. Lem is holding up a mirror of introspection about the human race and our technological future - the aliens the expedition sets out to contact are in many ways us, at least the collectivised Communo-Capitalist version of ourselves. The key to understanding is the "mini-novel" cleverly embedded in the main-story as a bit of VR entertainment for the crew. An expedition into an inhospitable African desert to find the control centre of the kingdom of the termites. And a centre that, in the end, doesn't exist. Lem has frequently pitted massive hulking machinery against techno-biological collectives, and usually the big machines fail. Bottom-up collective action defeats top-down command-decision hierarchies. But the collective doesn't make right either - Quinta's collectives are engaged in apocalyptic Cold-War, countering each other's espionage efforts so violently that the EM spectrum from the planet is full of noise and all space-vehicles are autonomous AIs. The planet is ruined and the populace seemingly enslaved to the war effort. The expedition is attacked by the machines, but instead of retaliation more vocal contact efforts are attempted. When contact is made the Quintans are too distracted to care about the newcomers. All that matters is countering the enemy, or so it seems. That's where the whole thing unravels. SETI and CETI become a fiasco when we don't fit in the mental space of the aliens. Yet Lem is really telling us about the futility of war, hot or cold, and the dangers of the collective, the hive, and technology that enslaves. He's written a book packed with ideas and new ones will stick in your head with each re-read.
Rating: 
Summary: DO NOT READ THE BACK COVER!
Review: DO NOT READ THE BACK COVER! Like the best, this isn't much of a science-fiction story. The aliens are interesting and the technobabble convolutions amuse, but the real reason to read this story is that it gets crazy. And as the characters become more and more morbidly insane, you go right along with them.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book, but...
Review: Everything between the first and the last chapter in this book is, in a word, excellent. Amazing combination of the first contact theme and hard SF (I am a hard SF fan myself, so I like those parts best). However, the first chapteer is too long and I found it so boring that I almost gave up reading the book. If you have the book, hang in there during the first chapter, it is worth it. As for the last chapter, it is too disappointing, even for Lem. If you like happy endings, don't read this book. It seems to be the thing with all Lem's works - they're all great, but they are all missing something. Maybe he should have teamed up with some other author. But anyway, this is the book I would reccomend.
Rating:
Summary: Fiasco is Fantastic!!!
Review: Fiasco's premise is that Mankind manipulates the space-time continueum in order to travel to the planet of Quinta in a far away star system. The Quintans don't want any contact with humans thus the humans don't take too kindly to this rebuttal. Fiasco boils down to no matter where Mankind goes in the universe, Mankind cannot escape its inherited traits of deceit, paranoia, and destruction. Fiasco is a briliant novel. For those of you reading this message and have not ever read a Lem novel before I would recommend Fiasco after reading Solaris. Not that they are connected storywise, it's just that Solaris is Lem's crowning jewel and it will warm you to Lem's style. Fiasco should be made into a film. With today's computers having the ability to render incredible CGI scenes I would think that the incident with Quinta's moon would be a fantastic site to see play out on the silver screen.
Rating:
Summary: Especially if you won't read it
Review: Gives such a picture of what we can expect in not so far future. My only problem was that the book is so short. It builds a good foundation for your own imagination run and your projections.
Don't skip it over if you can. You will see where are we going.
Rating:
Summary: Hard science fiction
Review: How hard can you take it? Fiasco is the fourth and most pessimistic of Lem's "contact" novels (after Eden, The Invincible and Solaris). Humanity undertakes its first interstellar voyage in the hope of making contact with the inhabitants of the planet Quinta, but the aliens won't play ball and all the scientists can do, as usual, is present various theories which achieve little, nothing, or worse than nothing. The basic problem is a simple one (and a recurrent Lem theme): how can human beings hope to recognize, let alone understand or talk to, creatures which are wholly different in their biological and technological heritage? There's a good deal of technical discussion, concerning both the possibilities of contact and the workings of interstellar travel, which might prove difficult going; but if you stick with it the paradoxes are delightful, though hardly encouraging; and the descriptive passages are as good as anything in Solaris. The opening chapter is a stunning jou!rney through a literally titanic landscape, and although it might at first seem rather loosely related to the rest of the book, its perspective on the "heroic" protagonist is vital to the ending - another set-piece in a beautifully evoked alien landscape, this time on Quinta. Heroism, even human-ness itself, when confronted with the alien, is not just an irrelevance (as it is to varying degrees in the three previous books) but a deadly liability. Even now that it can resurrect the dead and travel to the stars, humanity still can't see outside itself. The expedition, though a miracle of human endeavour, is a fiasco. But Fiasco is a hard, ironic, sometimes breathtaking triumph.
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Summary: Discover Lem!
Review: I can't believe this book is out of print! I found a stack of new ones in my local used bookstore marked at $1 each and decided to pick one up. Result - I LOVE Lem even more than before. If you haven't really been exposed to literary science fiction, this is a good place to start. Many readers may be put off by the seemingly overlong first chapter and the detailed tangents into sidereal engineering, but bear with it. The exposure to an alien civilization much more complex and foreign than any that could be reproduced by humans in cinematic makeup is well worth it. All seemingly insignificant tangents wend their way back into the plot elegantly. The end is surprising and very climactic. But the real value in this book is uncovered in examining the human reaction/interaction with the completely alien. While this book may seem pessimistic or depressing to some, the overt commentary on the Cold War is very astute, and all the more interesting in that it comes from the other side of the world. Highly recommended to non-scifi readers.
Rating:
Summary: You will not be sorry about having spent time with this book
Review: I've read this book a couple of times!!!
I nether regret it.
Even in case of you're a scientist
you may enjoy reading this book.
You will not find plot inconsistencies
and the book does not need to create
artificial thrill.
From my point of view, this is the second best book from Stanislaw Lem.
The best one is still SOLARIS
Rating:
Summary: Is he a SF writer really, or pure philosopher.
Review: If you read any book from this author, you will completely change your oppinion about SF genre in literature.I understand, people who think that SF is complete trash, pulp, call-it-what-you-want, literature, because i was one of them, untill I read "SOLARIS". I was shocked, amazed,and intellectualy shaken. Whole new horizon of thinking opened in front of my mind. "FIASCO" was the second, and the situation was the same. Buy this book, and you will find a lots of stuff to feed your mind with there.
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