Greetings,
I have posted this message on another "Fiasco" line here that has not been active for more than a year. I repeat it here hoping to find a reply.
I have three questions about the book.
1) Given how Lem, both in Fiasco and especially in Solaris, expounds repeatedly on the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of contact between two biologically different intelligent species, I was more than a little surprised to discover that suddenly, in the late chapters of Fiasco, the Quintans are able to send messages to the Hermes that can translate into lines of computerized text.
I thought at first this was Deus translating the Quintans' equivalent of the Hermes' "Cartoon," but this seems implausible. How do you explain this sudden unexplained breakthrough in communication?
2) Tempe's death at the end clearly mirrors his misadventure in Birnam Wood: he was excessively adventurous and wandered a little too far. However:
a) Could not his spacesuit have been equipped with some sort of device allowing for emergency communication outside the vehicle?
b) Would not the Quintans have fired back a message at the Hermes warning them that their emissary had literally "crossed the line" and they are no longer responsible for his fate?
Minor quibbles, perhaps, in an otherwise superb novel.
As for the Hermes wiping out all of Qunita, I may have misread the book, but I thought Steergard had rejected that idea and threatened instead only to take out the spaceport if Tempe did not respond.
Cheers,
Ronald Zajac,
Canada
P.S.: (to the above query re Croatia) Darko Suvin was my professor, more than a dozen years ago.