Humans attempt to communicate with aliens - at any cost

It's time to cover - for the first time here - a work by the Polish science fiction icon Stanislaw Lem. It's an unconventional entry point, as this episode focuses on his last novel, Fiasco, published in 1986. It is a fascinating but deeply gloomy piece of work, in which Lem doesn't so much burst the bubble of optimism about humankind's place in the stars, but systematically demolishes it.

Approached from various philosophical perspectives, Fiasco is a startlingly pessimistic novel which Lem used to cap his science fiction career - a challenging testament to human hubris and frailty, an indictment of how much we have to learn.

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