A natureza dos habitantes da Quinta da novela Fiasco é conhecida?

Eu não conheço pistas em uma entrevista, mas acho que há strongs na história (que eu notei apenas na segunda leitura)

In the story, the cosmonauts paint pictures in the sky of Quinta to communicate. One of the assumptions they make is that every intelligent being moves about.
When the ice ring is destroyed, the cosmonauts see no attempt to evacuate the endangered areas of Quinta. However, at the climax of the story, when Mark Tempe is described as having finally seen the Quintans, he's looking at the immobile mound that are obviously injured and organic. The Quintans are the mounds.

Eu costumo ir com a terceira alternativa.

Elsewhere in the book it's said that the sensors of Hermes have identified a lot of underground activity on Quinta. Maybe the humans have missed the "window of contact". As they were already taking the risk of arriving at the planet in the upper region of this window, some three hundred years after the discovery of its first radio waves emissions on the gigawatts class and of the beginnings of electromagnetic bursts directed to planetary engineering of its poles. And then there is the information the scouts brought back, with images one could interpret as historical reminiscences of a multitude of tiny figures going inside huge stalagmites/space rockets that instead of taking off actually sank into the ground. From then on Quintians must have shut themselves away from the outside world and evolved to a race of motionless symbionts sharing a collective consciousness and being served by armies of nanobots. It would then make sense to abandon all previous large scale projects, in vicinity space or on the planet itself, and set up the noise generators and an aggressive automatic technowarsphere so as to not be disturbed in the foreseeable future by any prying alien eyes... Moreover, due to their physical form at the time of attempted contact; colonies of organic moulds/humps lost in a collective Nirvana, it would have been almost impossible for them to figure out what was actually happening. Only the imminent destruction of the whole biosphere of Quinta was able to push them out of their lethargy and force a humanly intelligible response. Sadly, due to escalation and fundamentally different paces, it was to late...

A ideia de uma espécie inteira recuar para a VR é típica dos livros de Stanisław Lem e é uma interpretação bastante interessante da IMHO, mas gostaria de compartilhar outra idéia possível sobre a Quintans.

No ano passado, tive o prazer de participar de uma discussão do clube de livros sobre o Fiasco . Como sou polonês e o evento aconteceu na Polônia, estávamos lendo o livro no original - não tenho certeza se esse fato tem algum significado, as traduções de Kandel são geralmente consideradas muito boas.

De qualquer forma, voltemos ao assunto: depois de alguns brainstorming, tivemos uma ideia de que os Quintans são

a fungi-like species.

Como as respostas anteriores já mencionam

Quintans may be stationary and "mounds" may be the their bodies (or part of them), for the reasons already described in mart's answer.

But there is more to add: when Marek breaks one of the mounds open, there is no bleeding or any movement - just a porous structure like bread, releasing some kind of dust like a puffball. That web of antennas (?) overhead? Does it look biomechanical?

And one more, even more interesting thing: the reader is tricked into thinking that Quintans are stuck in a kind of Cold War (this probably doubles as the mean of delivering some moral about our Cold War, which was very relevant topic at the time when the book was written). Do we have any evidence that this is a case? Certainly that's what the crew of Hermes (including GOD) concludes (or wants to believe), but...

Look at the "technosphere" of satellites centred around Quinta - maybe these are not war devices at all? Maybe it's just a "natural" mean of expansion for a specie with "fungi mentality"? (release the spores!) Maybe it's "natural" for individual satellites to attack/feed on others? And radio jamming actually serves some purpose for these satellites?

How can you comprehend the behaviour of such aliens? Go and try to talk about philosophy with grass in your backyard!

É claro que esta é apenas uma das possíveis interpretações - o livro é deliberadamente ambíguo.

Eu diria que todas as suas opções são parcialmente verdadeiras. A nanotecnologia tem papel importante aqui - toda ação da Quintans é realizada por ela - levaria a 2), mas isso + montes dá montículos sendo fonte de nanotecnologia e usando-a ao invés de olhos, mãos etc. Eles não devolveram e não estão corte do mundo deles - neste caso, a nanotecnologia teria mente por conta própria e montes não seriam necessários.

Eu acho que os 'Quintans' são cupins e Tempe reconhece esse fato. Ele os viu na Terra. É por isso que Lem colocou a história anterior.