Fiasco

A young pilot named Parvis sets out across Saturn's moon Titan in a walking machine to search for missing people, among them Pirx from Tales of Pirx the Pilot, at the start of Stanisław Lem's novel. More than a century later, a starship expedition from a unified and peaceful Earth heads for a distant star, hoping for first contact with a civilization that seems to live there. The novel extends Lem's view that the difficulty of communicating with alien intelligence more likely stems from cultural difference than from physical distance. It earned a nomination for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Lem said it was the only time he wrote to order, on commission for the publisher S. Fischer Verlag.

Andrej Karpathy found its alien contact story especially interesting, and called it inventive and cool.