The Invincible - Stanislaw Lem Classic Sci-Fi & Modern Ideas

The Invincible is the story of a heavily-armed  exploration ship that sets out to discover what happened to The Condor, a similar ship that landed  on the uninhabited and desolate planet Regis III before losing contact without warning. The first  half of the book focuses on the crew’s efforts to discover what happened to The Condor and its crew,  and they soon discover a mysterious artificial city, which seems to have been abandoned  long ago. They then discover The Condor, still intact and larg

ely undamaged,  hundreds of kilometers from the city. Then they have their first encounter with an  ominous and metallic cloud that emits a strong electromagnetic field and interferes with  their communications. Things quickly spiral downward as they realize they are dealing  with an artificial machine intelligence that does not possess higher consciousness,  but is perfectly capable of destroying human technology and mental functions, and even the  mighty anti-matter weaponry of the Invincible.

There are various arguments among the crew,  particularly the captain and the first navigator, Rohan, who is the main character in the story,  about how to confront this implacable alien swarm intelligence, one that hardly seems aware  of the pitiful human presence on the planet. However, unlike Kris Kelvin in Solaris, we  really don’t get to know the human characters in The Invincible, as they seem largely  lost in the face of an impossible situation. Ostensibly they are there to discover the 

crew of The Condor, but their whole mission comes into question, and by extension the whole  justification for human exploration of strange and hostile worlds is also put under the microscope.  Do humans really have a moral imperative to explore and conquer, and when they encounter an  inorganic swarm intelligence that is perfectly adapted to its environment, but also perfectly  uninterested in organic life, what possible gain can be had by trying to “communicate?” Invincible is a classic sci-f

i story written in the early 1960’sby Stanislaw Lem then  translated into English in the early 1970s. Having a Forbidden Planet feel with not  only accurate science or with believable characters The Invincible manages to be quite  modern, even fifty years after it was written.