Fiasco

In his last novel Fiasco, published in 1986, Stanisław Lem returned to one of his idées fixes, the impossibility of meaningful contact with aliens. In Solaris (1961) scientists studied a living ocean but found only their own preoccupations reflected back; and in His Master’s Voice (1968) the meaning of a radio signal from the stars became more elusive the more effort went into decoding it.

( Fiasco is, if anything, an even more depressing take on this theme: it’s a direct rebuke to the optimism and anthropocentrism of much ‘first contact’ science fiction. )