With noble motives, running hopelessly naked toward evil – reading Lemme's Fiasco

Fiasco is the thickest book in the Lem collection and is reserved for final reading.

After reading the first five books, I have tried to summarize the theme into one word: "Solaris Star" – memory, "Futurology Congress" – prospect, "Eden" – contact, "Invincible" – respect, "Voice of its Lord" – reflection. And "Fiasco" inherits the genes of previous works, which is difficult to summarize in one word. Amid the interplay of familiar plots, Fiasco became a summative work by Lemme, and if you look at it first, the appeal of several others will be greatly reduced, including the acclaimed "Solaris Star".

First Paves, then Turnp, the protagonist of Fiasco is actually the same pilot who has been given life twice, and has experienced two intimate encounters with alien planets from Titan to Quinta. The sudden death of Parvez while searching for his missing companion on Titan is only the prologue of the story, the remnants of the Titan expedition, and the protagonist who was renamed Turnip after regeneration, when facing the intelligent life of Quinta Star, he was born with the obsession of not being able to die anymore and must see the "true face of Lushan". This obsession was understood by his clever companions and naturally made him an "ambassador" for direct contact with the Quintas.

The crew of the Hermes spacecraft bound for Quinta, like the Invincible, was a multidisciplinary, multi-faith, multi-personality combination, ranging from scheming captains to dissenting physicists, chemists, doctors, and religious monks. In their initial contact with Quinta, the team generally showed the friendliness of human civilization, engaging the Quintas with peaceful purposes. However, the Quinta people were not interested in contact, and attacked the friendly signals sent by the earthlings in the resistance, and after the desire was resisted, the self-centered humanity began to gradually emerge, the Quinta people also changed from the object of visit to the enemy, and the plan of round after round of attacks began to be implemented. The process of this transformation was also fraught with fierce ideological struggles and conflicts, and in the end, the "anthropocentrism" of "establishing contact at any cost" prevailed, and the monk's proposal for love and retreat out of religious sentiment was rejected, and only Turnp, who had single-handedly entered the Quinta Star, was "ready to accept everything" and specifically emphasized: "The proposal is humble".

In fact, humility can only be the epitaph of the humble, and aggression is the passport of the invader.

From warm temptation to tough attack, the earthlings' desire to contact aliens seems to be a gradual process, but in fact, it is only in a single thought. The biggest motivation for contact is the self-centered willfulness and ruthlessness of human beings, the gentleness and elegance of the early stage, but a fig leaf of violence, handing over a piece of sugar, a date, the purpose is to make the other party obedient, otherwise, with "no one can provoke me without scruples" as the mantra, fierce, dead pull, a gangster's face.

Beginning with noble motives, but running hopelessly naked toward evil, the story of Fiasco is nothing more than a reproduction of real society.

Human beings caught in madness always repeat absurd reality dramas, occasionally awake in piles of corpses, and before long, they will still have a frenzied attack and create a new round of evil. Taking Germany and Japan in World War II as an example, they all hung a lot of high-sounding pretense on their bodies, launched a crazy charge against the bottom line of human evil, took ugliness as beauty, took pride in evil, and the ghosts are still not extinguished, and from time to time they show their vicious faces in some groups. In the movie "Hero", Qin Shi Huang never forgot "Tianxia", looking back from a modern perspective, qin's unification has many positive significance, but the unification of the world is premised on cruel conquest, just like the earthlings in "Fiasco", despite the refusal of the Kunta people, have to forcibly contact, behind the positive, is the foundation built by blood and tears, "one will become famous and ten thousand bones wither", Jing Ke's yishui lament always makes people feel infinite emotions.

Lem's science fiction is like a kite, soaring in the sky and extending to the infinite distance, but the line is always firmly in the hands of human beings. Human wisdom and stupidity, kindness and cruelty, just like the two sides of the same coin, appear intertwined and cycle endlessly. Vanity makes human beings happy to hear the words they want to hear, such as praise. Universal Studios Beijing's Wei Zhentian puppet shouted out the line "stupid human" and was reported, which really made people cry and laugh. The astronauts in Fiasco are constantly monitored by doctors and electronic systems so that they can intervene in time when neurotic symptoms occur, but what if doctors and computers are mentally disturbed? Will there still be a madman left on the spaceship who is locked in the iron room with Lu Xun's pen?

At this point, like the characters in the book, the author's "self-centered" obsession is still attacked, without a word to summarize "Fiasco", just like not seeing the Quinta people, the heart is always on fire, then just go down the donkey, obey the "obsession", whether accurate or inaccurate, whether right or wrong or wrong, but also force a two-word theme on "Fiasco", what is good?

To paraphrase a quote from the book: I realized that I had seen it — despair.

Victory and defeat, pass and epitaph, contact and counter-contact, evil for the sake of great good, are the products of human civilization on earth, in the case of alien wisdom is not yet confirmed, people can only extend their imagination based on the accumulation of human civilization on earth, even if it is Lem with super strong thinking, can only open the wings of philosophy in the entanglement of fiasco and fiasco, and all of this, and the vast universe does not seem to have much to do with it, from Titan to Kunta, games, in fact, only between humans, such as Zhou Botong, hands fighting, Have fun.

Like Lem, we often despair of the incurability of humanity.