Coming back to Fiasco, I actually thought the "window of communication" hypothesis made a lot of sense. The idea is that a civilisation will not become visible to the rest of the universe until it starts transmitting a fairly continuous volume of radio traffic at a strength which can cross light years without disappearing into the background noise. Given that such transmitted information travels at the speed of light, it would take at least four and a half years to reach us even from a planet orbiting the nearest star. Unless we do in the future find a way to exceed or bypass the light speed limit, it will take us longer than that to get to reach the source of the signal. At the moment, we couldn't even begin to think about starting the journey ... but in Fiasco we are in a future society when a ship is available. So, the bare minimum conceivable delay between transmission of a radio signal and the arrival of the fist visitor from elsewhere is ten years.
But the odds on that signal coming from the nearest star are remote. To cut a long and tediously numerical story short (email me if you want details), even an optimistic estimate of the number of communicating civilisations in our galaxy at any one time gives 1000:1 odds against our newly transmitting nearest neighbours being less than 350 light years away. So ... the best we can hope for, even if we have a lightspeed ship standing idly by at peak readiness with nothing else to do, is the thick end of a millennium between first transmission and our arrival.
How much does a civilisation change in the millennium after it discovers radio?
A thousand years back, we find iron age feudalism in Europe. Radio was first transmitted little more than a century ago; broadcasting on a scale which might attract SETI attention less than that. Since then, the rate of technological and social change has accelerated consistently. We are already beyond the reach of Jules Verne's predictions, made when radio was new; and more change has occurred in the last two decades than in the century since Verne's death. It's not worth even beginning to peculate what will have happened nine centuries hence (assuming, of course, that we haven't wiped ourselves out by then). By the time we reach this new nearest communicating galactic neighbour, it will have progressed beyond imagining; both it and the one which sent us on the journey will by then be as unutterably alien to us as we would be to the first hunter gatherer human beings.
Lem doesn't attempt to give us, the readers of Fiasco, any idea what the alien civilisation is like. Our emissaries never get even close to finding out; they and the alien civilisation are destroyed by their mutual incomprehension before any glimpse of comparison or contrast is possible.
The most bizarre part of Fiasco, for me, is not the main story (which seems gloomily likely) but the number of sidelines: resurrection of frozen bodies from our outer planets, who then join the expedition, for example (as an aside: one of Lem's recurrent devices is te Rip van Winkle effect - the individual who returns to society after a significant length of time outside it) . But that's not a criticism: I'm delighted by Lem's ability to gallop through so many provocatively thought provoking issues. It's a great book , and a profoundly philosophical one.
His master's voice is in the same territory, transmitted information from another civilisation and complete inability to comprehend more than its trivial fringes, from our own time and place. The first person narrator of HMV is a mathematician on the project team trying to decode what has been received: a team poisoned from the outset by the assumptions and paranoia which surround and pervade it.
Memoirs found in a bathtub also has a first person narrator. He has been instructed to carry out a top secret mission; but it is so secret that nobody is authorised to tell him what it is. He cannot even discover who knows what he is to do, or where they may be found within the underground complex where he wanders. Eventually he lies down in a bathtub with the journal of his search, and is found there by far future archaeologists. It's Kafka's Castle, transposed to late twentieth century but in a futurist setting.
Lem is (or was: he died last year) Polish; the narrators of Bathtub and HMV are American; the contexts are Cold War; but each book speaks to us of the eternal dangers of ignorance - the opposite of information.
Bibliography
1. Lem, Stanislaw. Fiasco. 1st ed. 1987, San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 0151306400. (Polish: Fiasko.)
2. Lem, Stanislaw. Memoirs found in a bathtub. 1973, New York,, Seabury Press. 0816491283. (Polish: Pamietnik znaleziony w wannie)
3. Lem, Stanislaw. His master's voice. 1983, San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 0151403600. (Polish: Glos pana.)
4. Lem, Stanislaw. The star diaries. 1976, New York, Seabury Press. 0816492832. (Polish: Dzienniki gwiazdowe.)
5. Lem, Stanislaw. Tales of Pirx the pilot. 1st ed. 1979, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 0151879788. (Polish: Opowiesci o pilocie Pirxie.)
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