Customer Reviews

The Invincible (Ace Science Fiction Special 4)

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An impressive science fiction thriller, despite the fact that my Ace paperback edition is an English translation of a German translation of a Polish novel.

A military spacecraft lands on an unexplored planet to determine the whereabouts of a lost crew. The story resembles the film ALIENS in some ways, and also the Niven-Pournelle-Barnes novel LEGACY OF HEOROT; although this novel predates those other stories by a few decades. A better way to describe it is to call it a horror novel in a Perry Rhodan vein, for those of you who are old enough and pathetically geeky enough to benefit from that reference. It employs many elements of space opera: laser guns, antimatter cannon, force fields, atomic combat, and other such special effects commonly found in Perry Rhodan and Doc Smith's LENSMAN. But this one has a much creepier tone to it than what you'd expect from space opera.

The theme to the book is similar to that of other Lem novels, like SOLARIS and THE INVESTIGATION, where the heroes find themselves up against increasingly complex and frustrating phenomena. I liked this one better than those two, however. Recommended, but you'll have to look to find a copy.

A rather common theme in Lems writing (Solaris, Fiasco) is human encounter with an alien, fundamentally incomprehensible civilisation or "organism". In Lem's view such an encounter is likely to escalate to the level of destruction or surrender because human motives and interpretations are with necessity confined within human frames of reference, no form of closer understanding is possible. In "Invincible" an expedition shall find out the fait of a previous lost expedition. The aggressor (the result of a very particular form of evolution) this time is the alien being a deadly threat because of human presence (or rather, human technology) only. The plot unfolds with many twists and turns typical of Lem and is good entertainment for anyone liking Solaris or Fiasco.

I read this after "Eden" and found it to be an interesting book, for it deals with an alien life form which is complex and strange. As in all his books, Lem explores human understanding of a foreign world.

The invincible is a great story about a ship, the invincible, that has a crew of about 80 people, armed to the teeth with nukes and superior shields. It is on a mission to Reigis III to find out what happened to their sister ship, the condor. Part of the story has to do with exploring the barren planet that contains some seas and metalic ruins, finding the condor and then dealing with what happened and why. Lem is a great writer of hard SF, trying to be very factual and makes sense. The book has been written some time ago though so some points are a little dated such as the warship the invincible being a huge rocket, but this really doesn't detract from the whole story. What happened to the mighty sister ship the condor? This may have been the first book to deal with this type of enemy! Very advanced for the time of this book. Great chapter on the theory of how this enemy evolved on the planet. Recommended!

Great book, just as much of Stanislaw's Lem's books are.

Titanic, unstoppable Spaceship lands on alien world... encounters alien life form that bears an amazing resemblance to the monster in Michael Crichton's "PREY" (only it's much more exciting and interesting in the movie "THE INVINCIBLE" )

Ah, I have to go buy a new copy of this. Mine's in tatters.