Stanislav Lem is a giant of science fiction and his book can be appreciated at that level too.
Why I say so? WHy do I need to specify it?
Because they are much, much more than that.
Lem is a Polish author that started writing during/after the second
world war, in a Poland coming from the destruction of Nazism and going
to face the ones of Communism. Poland, a country sealed to the world, in a society
deeply religious, catholic, dominated by atheist Russian (at best
orthodox). Always in the middle, always disposable in the centuries.
Something, this sort of acceptance of greater forces which nobody can
escape, that can be found in all his works.
I say all that because you need a bit of background if you want to understand the real meaning of his books, and this one in particular. You must understand from where he comes from. Beware of another little thing. His first novel, The Hospital of Transfiguration, is not a science fiction work. It is a story in a mental hospital during nazi occupation. Thought stuff, I read it, and so did the censorship at the time, and asked him to stick to science fiction.
He did, but I guess because in this way he could express the best of his idea, his philosophy and his pessimism on unavoidable fate, against which any resistance is simply futile.
In this work he writes about two civilizations, human and another, which come to their first contact. They seem eager to communicate, they want to, and you enjoy this in the book, but then the questions arise. Do they trust each other? What's the aim of each of them?
The discomfort grows, the attempts of communications are done and fails for the inability to see the counterpart as something else than what's expected according own standard; even little mistakes make the first contact what it is: a Fiasco.
It is a book of the Cold War and about it. It is a book of two worlds that want to talk, but that can't and do not understand each other. There is no right or wrong. It is about what it is logical to happen, that they talk to each other but how it is equally logic that the contact cannot happen for stupidity, for mental rigidity... it is a book, like many of his, extremely philosophical. Read it to appreciate it. Science fiction can be much much more than what you think.
Deeply suggested.
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