Stanislaw Lem 1921-2006
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/stanislaw...
> Lem's IQ, as he mentioned in passing in an autobiographical essay (it was measured when he was in high school), was above 180, but no one who read many of his books needed that datum to conclude that here was an unusually powerful and wide-ranging intelligence. The son of a physician, Lem was trained in the sciences. Biology was his field, but in his mid-twenties he became a research assistant at what he described as a "kind of clearinghouse for scientific literature" in many disciplines coming into Poland from around the world.
Examples, I think especially are
- "Eden" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_%28Lem_novel%29
Not as extreme as the other two in highlighting the impossibility of meaningful contact. Lem becomes much more skeptical later in his career. Because they actually do make contact to one individual alien and communicate with it. In Fiasco there is some communication but it turn out to be all completely different than expected base don human assumptions (and it all ends in the humans destroying everything, of course all from good intentions). In "Solaris" there is no meaningful communication at all, one can't even say there are misunderstandings.
- "The Invincible" -- "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible"
This is about non-biological self-replicating swarming alien micro-robotic life forms.
- "Solaris" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%28novel%29
> Solaris chronicles the ultimate futility of attempted communications with the extraterrestrial life inhabiting a distant alien planet named Solaris. The planet is almost completely covered with an ocean of gel that is revealed to be a single, planet-encompassing organism. Terran scientists conclude it is a sentient being and attempt to communicate with it.
- "His Master's Voice" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_%28novel%...
> The novel is written as a first-person narrative, the memoir of a mathematician named Peter Hogarth, who becomes involved in a Pentagon-directed project (code-named "His Master's Voice", or HMV for short[2]) in the Nevada desert, where scientists are working to decode what seems to be a message from outer space (specifically, a neutrino signal from the Canis Minor constellation)
- "Fiasco" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_%28novel%29
> The book is a further elaboration of Lem's skepticism: in Lem's opinion, the difficulty in communication with alien civilizations is cultural disparity rather than spatial distance. The failure to communicate with an alien civilization is the main theme of the book.