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A Voz do Dono
Encontrámo-nos no sopé de uma gigantesca descoberta, sem a mínima preparação e, ao mesmo tempo, tão confiantes quanto possível. Circundámo-la por todos os lados, rápida, ávida e habilmente, com as capacidades do costume, feitos formigas. Eu era uma delas. Esta é a história de uma formiga.
Quando é detectada uma mensagem vinda do espaço, uma comunidade de cientistas, reunida num projecto governamental no deserto do Nevada – Master’s Voice –, não se poupa a esforços para a decifrar. Porém, a primeira transmissão extraterrestre «era como a planta de uma catedral enviada a australopitecos ou uma biblioteca facultada aos neandertais», diz-nos Peter Hogarth, matemático envolvido na missão secreta e autor deste relato. Rapidamente, este enigmático código estelar suscita as mais diversas interpretações de físicos, biólogos, antropólogos e linguistas, apenas para revelar a dúbia relação entre governo e ciência, bem como as limitações do conhecimento em face do insondável. Agora em tradução directa do polaco, A Voz do Dono (1968), publicado em plena Guerra Fria, é um dos romances mais aclamados e densamente filosóficos de Stanisław Lem.
Quando é detectada uma mensagem vinda do espaço, uma comunidade de cientistas, reunida num projecto governamental no deserto do Nevada – Master’s Voice –, não se poupa a esforços para a decifrar. Porém, a primeira transmissão extraterrestre «era como a planta de uma catedral enviada a australopitecos ou uma biblioteca facultada aos neandertais», diz-nos Peter Hogarth, matemático envolvido na missão secreta e autor deste relato. Rapidamente, este enigmático código estelar suscita as mais diversas interpretações de físicos, biólogos, antropólogos e linguistas, apenas para revelar a dúbia relação entre governo e ciência, bem como as limitações do conhecimento em face do insondável. Agora em tradução directa do polaco, A Voz do Dono (1968), publicado em plena Guerra Fria, é um dos romances mais aclamados e densamente filosóficos de Stanisław Lem.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
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About the author
Stanisław Lem
505 books4,522 followersStanisław Lem (staˈɲiswaf lɛm) was a Polish science fiction, philosophical and satirical writer of Jewish descent. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is perhaps best known as the author of Solaris, which has twice been made into a feature film. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon claimed that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world.
His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humankind's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult and multiple translated versions of his works exist.
Lem became truly productive after 1956, when the de-Stalinization period led to the "Polish October", when Poland experienced an increase in freedom of speech. Between 1956 and 1968, Lem authored 17 books. His works were widely translated abroad (although mostly in the Eastern Bloc countries). In 1957 he published his first non-fiction, philosophical book, Dialogi (Dialogues), one of his two most famous philosophical texts along with Summa Technologiae (1964). The Summa is notable for being a unique analysis of prospective social, cybernetic, and biological advances. In this work, Lem discusses philosophical implications of technologies that were completely in the realm of science fiction then, but are gaining importance today—like, for instance, virtual reality and nanotechnology. Over the next few decades, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological, although from the 1980s onwards he tended to concentrate on philosophical texts and essays.
He gained international fame for The Cyberiad, a series of humorous short stories from a mechanical universe ruled by robots, first published in English in 1974. His best-known novels include Solaris (1961), His Master's Voice (Głos pana, 1968), and the late Fiasco (Fiasko, 1987), expressing most strongly his major theme of the futility of mankind's attempts to comprehend the truly alien. Solaris was made into a film in 1972 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972; in 2002, Steven Soderbergh directed a Hollywood remake starring George Clooney.
He was the cousin of poet Marian Hemar.
His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humankind's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult and multiple translated versions of his works exist.
Lem became truly productive after 1956, when the de-Stalinization period led to the "Polish October", when Poland experienced an increase in freedom of speech. Between 1956 and 1968, Lem authored 17 books. His works were widely translated abroad (although mostly in the Eastern Bloc countries). In 1957 he published his first non-fiction, philosophical book, Dialogi (Dialogues), one of his two most famous philosophical texts along with Summa Technologiae (1964). The Summa is notable for being a unique analysis of prospective social, cybernetic, and biological advances. In this work, Lem discusses philosophical implications of technologies that were completely in the realm of science fiction then, but are gaining importance today—like, for instance, virtual reality and nanotechnology. Over the next few decades, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological, although from the 1980s onwards he tended to concentrate on philosophical texts and essays.
He gained international fame for The Cyberiad, a series of humorous short stories from a mechanical universe ruled by robots, first published in English in 1974. His best-known novels include Solaris (1961), His Master's Voice (Głos pana, 1968), and the late Fiasco (Fiasko, 1987), expressing most strongly his major theme of the futility of mankind's attempts to comprehend the truly alien. Solaris was made into a film in 1972 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972; in 2002, Steven Soderbergh directed a Hollywood remake starring George Clooney.
He was the cousin of poet Marian Hemar.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 536 reviews
June 6, 2021
Theories about aliens and possible future implications of contacts with them enable Lem to imply and satirize everything out of ridiculous human culture.
There are different options on how to deal with this thing, difficult to talk about it, without spoilering, so I will just list a few possibilities:
Creating a utopia.
Building something good or bad with the help of the information.
Finding the origin of life.
Destroying oneself with the things built.
Understanding the universe.
Collapsing or starting a nuclear WW3 because of the ideological and political consequences.
Sending back a message. Getting no or the wrong, unexpected answer.
In general, what tribal stone age people would to with quantum teleportation, and why they have to hilariously fail trying.
The focus is on the philosophical implications, not much action in this one, but the complex mind games Lem is playing with the reader inspire too many hobby meta thoughts, so that it might be always wise to take notes while reading Lem, because one can´t get this stuff immediately. And rereading feels like, yuck, extra overachiever work. I am just doing it, but please don´t judge, I am not normal.
Lem takes a few of the listed elements and makes fun of the incapability of humankind to use this unique possibility to push cultural and technological evolution. Subjectively, if aliens wouldn´t appear over each large city and contact the whole population, but would think (of course not, because they would hopefully be hyperintelligent and not primitive apes in space, just imagine that, it would be a catastrophe if wild, animalistic, mostly mentally ill or at least a bit bonkers avian mammalians would begin colonizing the solar system or even the universe after having spread like a virus on their home planet) that the elected leaders are the ones to contact to find diplomatic solutions, trade agreements, technological transfers, and traditional wisdom…
Sorry, I just can´t finish that sentence without laughing really hard, all current political leaders would hide immortality, cold fusion, time travel, whatever aliens would offer, forever from the proletariat, be even too stupid to gain these advantages, or start the first big stellar war. I mean, now, autumn of 2020, look at who rules your country and imagine them deciding about the definitively most important step in human history. The politicians would deport them because they have no visa and the population would cheer and praise them for saving their jobs.
Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
There are different options on how to deal with this thing, difficult to talk about it, without spoilering, so I will just list a few possibilities:
Creating a utopia.
Building something good or bad with the help of the information.
Finding the origin of life.
Destroying oneself with the things built.
Understanding the universe.
Collapsing or starting a nuclear WW3 because of the ideological and political consequences.
Sending back a message. Getting no or the wrong, unexpected answer.
In general, what tribal stone age people would to with quantum teleportation, and why they have to hilariously fail trying.
The focus is on the philosophical implications, not much action in this one, but the complex mind games Lem is playing with the reader inspire too many hobby meta thoughts, so that it might be always wise to take notes while reading Lem, because one can´t get this stuff immediately. And rereading feels like, yuck, extra overachiever work. I am just doing it, but please don´t judge, I am not normal.
Lem takes a few of the listed elements and makes fun of the incapability of humankind to use this unique possibility to push cultural and technological evolution. Subjectively, if aliens wouldn´t appear over each large city and contact the whole population, but would think (of course not, because they would hopefully be hyperintelligent and not primitive apes in space, just imagine that, it would be a catastrophe if wild, animalistic, mostly mentally ill or at least a bit bonkers avian mammalians would begin colonizing the solar system or even the universe after having spread like a virus on their home planet) that the elected leaders are the ones to contact to find diplomatic solutions, trade agreements, technological transfers, and traditional wisdom…
Sorry, I just can´t finish that sentence without laughing really hard, all current political leaders would hide immortality, cold fusion, time travel, whatever aliens would offer, forever from the proletariat, be even too stupid to gain these advantages, or start the first big stellar war. I mean, now, autumn of 2020, look at who rules your country and imagine them deciding about the definitively most important step in human history. The politicians would deport them because they have no visa and the population would cheer and praise them for saving their jobs.
Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
July 29, 2020
Signal as Noise
As is typical with much of his other work, Lem explores a perennial philosophical issue in His Master’s Voice: How can we know that what we think we know has any claim to reality? Lem’s use of a very Borgesian pseudo-factual account of a mathematician’s encounter with a cosmic intelligence is brilliantly apt. Plato knew the problem well; Kant re-stated it ad nauseam; and Trump confirms its significance on a daily basis. Don Delillo‘s Ratner’s Star has a similar theme (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). HMV is, therefore, in a sense timeless and a persistent literary trope; it deserves a place in every thoughtful person’s bibliography.
Here is a sequence of numbers: 1415926535. Could you say with certainty what the next number in the sequence will be? It is in fact 9. But unless you already knew that the sequence is composed of the decimal units of the transcendental number pi, it is unlikely you would have a greater than 10% chance of getting the right answer. As an irrational number, pi can be expanded to an infinite number of decimal places without ever repeating the sequence. But obviously if one knows that pi can be calculated to any degree of precision required, the number in any decimal place is known with little effort.
This trivial exercise summarises a fundamental problem in information theory: how does one know that apparently random noise isn’t really a communicative signal? The sequence above, for example, could be analysed endlessly and yet no pattern, no meaning would emerge from its very real randomness. Unless of course one already has the key to the code, namely pi. The discovery of meaning, in other words, requires the presumption that there is meaning to be found. All of science, actually any inquiry from the interpretation of literature to forensic investigation, must start there. Put another way, meaning depends on a receptivity to communication, which means a high tolerance for listening to nonsensical noise in order to find the signal buried within.
The rub is that it is very difficult to prevent a hopeful presumption of meaning from transforming into an article of faith. When that happens, the result is... well, the X-Files, a mad obsession which cannot be satisfied until the presumption is ‘fulfilled’. So, the Kabbalist finds hidden patterns in the sequence of letters in scripture; the believer sees clear signs of the end times in natural disasters; the conspiracy theorists prove their presumptions about the Kennedy assassination or Area 51 or the Deep State; and geniuses like Immanuel Kant come up with wildly erroneous conclusions about the invariable ‘categories’ of which the world is constituted. The human need to find meaning seems insatiable, even when - especially when - there is no equivalent to pi to be found, no key except that which we impose without sufficient reason in line with our obsession.
Lem doesn’t solve the paradox of meaning of course; he merely documents it in a particularly interesting way. Perhaps there is no way out of the paradox, which makes the contradictions of quantum physics, for example, seem like a walk in the park. But that hardly matters when the writing is as intriguing as Lem’s. And he does provide a handy pocket-guide to dealing with the problem: “genius,” he says, “is, above all, constant doubting.” This, I suggest, includes maintaining doubt even about the meaning of meaning.
As is typical with much of his other work, Lem explores a perennial philosophical issue in His Master’s Voice: How can we know that what we think we know has any claim to reality? Lem’s use of a very Borgesian pseudo-factual account of a mathematician’s encounter with a cosmic intelligence is brilliantly apt. Plato knew the problem well; Kant re-stated it ad nauseam; and Trump confirms its significance on a daily basis. Don Delillo‘s Ratner’s Star has a similar theme (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). HMV is, therefore, in a sense timeless and a persistent literary trope; it deserves a place in every thoughtful person’s bibliography.
Here is a sequence of numbers: 1415926535. Could you say with certainty what the next number in the sequence will be? It is in fact 9. But unless you already knew that the sequence is composed of the decimal units of the transcendental number pi, it is unlikely you would have a greater than 10% chance of getting the right answer. As an irrational number, pi can be expanded to an infinite number of decimal places without ever repeating the sequence. But obviously if one knows that pi can be calculated to any degree of precision required, the number in any decimal place is known with little effort.
This trivial exercise summarises a fundamental problem in information theory: how does one know that apparently random noise isn’t really a communicative signal? The sequence above, for example, could be analysed endlessly and yet no pattern, no meaning would emerge from its very real randomness. Unless of course one already has the key to the code, namely pi. The discovery of meaning, in other words, requires the presumption that there is meaning to be found. All of science, actually any inquiry from the interpretation of literature to forensic investigation, must start there. Put another way, meaning depends on a receptivity to communication, which means a high tolerance for listening to nonsensical noise in order to find the signal buried within.
The rub is that it is very difficult to prevent a hopeful presumption of meaning from transforming into an article of faith. When that happens, the result is... well, the X-Files, a mad obsession which cannot be satisfied until the presumption is ‘fulfilled’. So, the Kabbalist finds hidden patterns in the sequence of letters in scripture; the believer sees clear signs of the end times in natural disasters; the conspiracy theorists prove their presumptions about the Kennedy assassination or Area 51 or the Deep State; and geniuses like Immanuel Kant come up with wildly erroneous conclusions about the invariable ‘categories’ of which the world is constituted. The human need to find meaning seems insatiable, even when - especially when - there is no equivalent to pi to be found, no key except that which we impose without sufficient reason in line with our obsession.
Lem doesn’t solve the paradox of meaning of course; he merely documents it in a particularly interesting way. Perhaps there is no way out of the paradox, which makes the contradictions of quantum physics, for example, seem like a walk in the park. But that hardly matters when the writing is as intriguing as Lem’s. And he does provide a handy pocket-guide to dealing with the problem: “genius,” he says, “is, above all, constant doubting.” This, I suggest, includes maintaining doubt even about the meaning of meaning.
March 7, 2021
Having read three books now by Polish author Stanisław Lem, I'm beginning to realize that he comes in two distinct flavours. On the one hand, there's the captivating, exciting, "fun Lem" of The Futurological Congress. On the other, the boring, deeply philosophical, incredibly dense Lem of Solaris.
For better or worse, His Master's Voice is firmly in the second category. It tells the story of a top secret U.S. government project team, sequestered in a remote desert, who are tasked with deciphering a repeating stream of neutrinos from space that appear to contain a message from an extraterrestrial civilization. Though I found some of the philosophical musings and discussions about the possible motives behind the message, what type of civilization could have sent it, and other such topics to be, at times, fascinating, the book was overall quite boring and fundamentally failed for me when very early on the scientist dictating his account admits to the reader that they never ended up solving the message.
And since this is well-documented to be one of Lem's most dense works, the reader, very early into this book, knows two things:
1. The scientists never solve the message, and therefore the most interesting thing this book could have told me (the content of the message) will never be revealed
2. There is something like 180 more pages of this incredibly dense book left, which, because of point 1, has no payoff whatsoever waiting at the end
Not exactly the most pleasant experience for the reader...
Recommended for those who would enjoy its philosophical content, but for anyone looking for a good starting point to get into Lem, I'd recommend avoiding this one and checking out one of the "fun Lem" works like The Futurological Congress instead.
For better or worse, His Master's Voice is firmly in the second category. It tells the story of a top secret U.S. government project team, sequestered in a remote desert, who are tasked with deciphering a repeating stream of neutrinos from space that appear to contain a message from an extraterrestrial civilization. Though I found some of the philosophical musings and discussions about the possible motives behind the message, what type of civilization could have sent it, and other such topics to be, at times, fascinating, the book was overall quite boring and fundamentally failed for me when very early on the scientist dictating his account admits to the reader that they never ended up solving the message.
And since this is well-documented to be one of Lem's most dense works, the reader, very early into this book, knows two things:
1. The scientists never solve the message, and therefore the most interesting thing this book could have told me (the content of the message) will never be revealed
2. There is something like 180 more pages of this incredibly dense book left, which, because of point 1, has no payoff whatsoever waiting at the end
Not exactly the most pleasant experience for the reader...
Recommended for those who would enjoy its philosophical content, but for anyone looking for a good starting point to get into Lem, I'd recommend avoiding this one and checking out one of the "fun Lem" works like The Futurological Congress instead.
January 3, 2016
His Master's Voice is probably best described as a grown up version of Carl Sagan's Contact. This is a very unique sci-fi, in a good way. It is first and foremost an ambitious and humbling philosophical treatise on humanity and our place in the universe. This is then grounded in a short story about a team of scientists in a project similar to the Manhattan Project who are trying to decipher a discovered message encoded in a neutrino signal. The book raises several intriguing possibilities about the nature of the message and its content, but ultimately (and I like this part) the mystery remains unresolved. The book is not a silly story about establishing communications with aliens. It is a story about our failure to do so and especially about why such aspirations could in retrospect be considered naive. I did not agree with some of the specific arguments raised in the book and I think the story was not as fleshed out as it could have been, but I admire what Stanisław Lem tried to do with this book; It is unique, intelligent, I support it, I like it, and I want more. 4.5/5, but I'll round down this time.
September 5, 2015
While Stanislaw Lem was not known as a writing man of action, neither was he Samuel Beckett for the most part either. But my goodness there is such a thing as taking it to extremes. Fortunately, Lem was a thinker on such a ridiculously intense level that if you're the right kind of SF reader then this is come across like manna from heaven. If you're the kind of person who seeks out authors based on George Clooney's starring film choices, you're going to be in for a bit of a surprise, because this novel makes that one look like "The Fast and the Furious" from an action perspective.
Lem was always more concerned with ideas and telling stories that allowed those ideas to coagulate and circle each other and debate. He's a writer of sharp satire and criticism, and you can somewhat get the sense from several of his novels that a) he didn't think much of what was commonly accepted as SF "tropes" and b) he wished more people were doing what he did instead of writing stories where bare chested heroes wrestled with bug eyed aliens on completely illogical worlds. Though there's a place for that sometimes too.
The biggest criticism Lem seems to have of SF, and I only say this because it seems to crop up repeatedly in novel after novel, is that time and again there is a assumption that if we were to run into aliens we are going to be able to communicate and find some common ground. Lem seems to suggest in his novels that it isn't that easy and question where we're even smart enough to pull off such a task, even if the aliens practically gift wrap their message to us. It's almost like he perceives the human race as having a history of continually misinterpreting messages or signals and allowing rather unpleasant disasters to happen because of it. Oh wait, he's probably right.
So in this novel you get what is probably as close to a cliche as Lem will ever get, which is the Alien We Do Not Understand situation. A signal has been received from outer space from a certain constellation and the US government has tasked several scientists of various disciplines to try and decipher it and see if it's something useful, like recipes, or something completely dispensable, like reality TV or movies starring their version of Adam Sandler. As it turns out, the signal is neither of those things but the scientists aren't exactly sure what the heck it is and thus spend the entire book debating theories that say more about themselves than it does about the signal in question (dubbed "His Master's Voice" because somebody has a sense of humor) without ever actually figuring out what the signal means or if it's even really a signal sent out by aliens and they're just spending all this time attempting to decode a star burp as something intelligent.
Noting that they don't figure it out isn't really a spoiler since it's pretty much the culmination of every Lem novel that deals with aliens (plus it's noted in the first chapter) but what Lem does here is turn the book into an almost extremely meditative essay on the nature of science and its theories as well as the relationship between science and the outside world as well as the sometimes unwelcome influence of the military. The book is structured as a memoir of one of the scientists who is brought onto the project and throughout his recollections of the events that led up to them not accomplishing much of anything are numerous asides sprinkled about the other scientists and their relationships to each other as as well as the government's attempt to get something useful out of all these brain trusts, preferably something that explodes (they do manage to synthesize a compound from the signal but if you think it leads anywhere vital this must be your first day at Cranky Polish SF Authors 101).
This approach to the novel means that its just nothing for first person recollections and musings for two hundred or so pages, subtracting all those pesky things like action and even dialogue for the most part . . . if Asimov could sometimes be construed as the narrative equivalent of ice water, this is probably closer to permafrost. There is a plot but the plot is almost about how there is no plot as everyone chases ideas down their own personal rabbit holes without actually coming to any real conclusions. Do not mistake this, however for a light beach read about physicist hijinks . . . for all its brevity it's a dense book and once you get the hang of the narration then the musings and ponderings and the process of trying to discover something unprecedentedly new while everyone around you is either falling prey to their own biases while insisting that isn't the case or the nice people in the uniform are dropping stronger and stronger hints that what they'd really love out of all this is a nice large bomb are actually quite fascinating. Lem is no slouch as a writer and knows how to keep the ideas flowing and also how to keep his target in sight at all times. While the book is most definitely a satire, its even closer to a condemnation of how everyone pretends the scientific process is above politics when that clearly isn't this to anyone with a functioning pair of eyes and while he's not as savage as he could be in other novels, this isn't exactly the book you want to give someone who is looking forward to a career working in the government sponsored sciences, unless their goal is to be completely at the mercy of everyone in charge.
The format hamstrings the book slightly in terms of impact, as it mostly consists of someone describing not very exciting events a long time after the fact, but for those willing to dig into it there's quite a bit to recommend it as Lem clearly never stopped thinking, not only about the ideas his books presented but how those ideas as presented. In its own modest way its successful and while it probably shouldn't be anyone's first choice (I'll go with the crowd on this and say "Solaris" and "The Cyberiad" are the go-to's, with the Pirx the Pilot stories a pleasant runner up), if you're willing to meet it on its own terms you'll find that it does what it sets out to do almost completely, and if the conclusions he draws aren't exactly cuddly, he states them so strongly its worth questioning how close to the truth he is, and from there how we let it get that bad.
Lem was always more concerned with ideas and telling stories that allowed those ideas to coagulate and circle each other and debate. He's a writer of sharp satire and criticism, and you can somewhat get the sense from several of his novels that a) he didn't think much of what was commonly accepted as SF "tropes" and b) he wished more people were doing what he did instead of writing stories where bare chested heroes wrestled with bug eyed aliens on completely illogical worlds. Though there's a place for that sometimes too.
The biggest criticism Lem seems to have of SF, and I only say this because it seems to crop up repeatedly in novel after novel, is that time and again there is a assumption that if we were to run into aliens we are going to be able to communicate and find some common ground. Lem seems to suggest in his novels that it isn't that easy and question where we're even smart enough to pull off such a task, even if the aliens practically gift wrap their message to us. It's almost like he perceives the human race as having a history of continually misinterpreting messages or signals and allowing rather unpleasant disasters to happen because of it. Oh wait, he's probably right.
So in this novel you get what is probably as close to a cliche as Lem will ever get, which is the Alien We Do Not Understand situation. A signal has been received from outer space from a certain constellation and the US government has tasked several scientists of various disciplines to try and decipher it and see if it's something useful, like recipes, or something completely dispensable, like reality TV or movies starring their version of Adam Sandler. As it turns out, the signal is neither of those things but the scientists aren't exactly sure what the heck it is and thus spend the entire book debating theories that say more about themselves than it does about the signal in question (dubbed "His Master's Voice" because somebody has a sense of humor) without ever actually figuring out what the signal means or if it's even really a signal sent out by aliens and they're just spending all this time attempting to decode a star burp as something intelligent.
Noting that they don't figure it out isn't really a spoiler since it's pretty much the culmination of every Lem novel that deals with aliens (plus it's noted in the first chapter) but what Lem does here is turn the book into an almost extremely meditative essay on the nature of science and its theories as well as the relationship between science and the outside world as well as the sometimes unwelcome influence of the military. The book is structured as a memoir of one of the scientists who is brought onto the project and throughout his recollections of the events that led up to them not accomplishing much of anything are numerous asides sprinkled about the other scientists and their relationships to each other as as well as the government's attempt to get something useful out of all these brain trusts, preferably something that explodes (they do manage to synthesize a compound from the signal but if you think it leads anywhere vital this must be your first day at Cranky Polish SF Authors 101).
This approach to the novel means that its just nothing for first person recollections and musings for two hundred or so pages, subtracting all those pesky things like action and even dialogue for the most part . . . if Asimov could sometimes be construed as the narrative equivalent of ice water, this is probably closer to permafrost. There is a plot but the plot is almost about how there is no plot as everyone chases ideas down their own personal rabbit holes without actually coming to any real conclusions. Do not mistake this, however for a light beach read about physicist hijinks . . . for all its brevity it's a dense book and once you get the hang of the narration then the musings and ponderings and the process of trying to discover something unprecedentedly new while everyone around you is either falling prey to their own biases while insisting that isn't the case or the nice people in the uniform are dropping stronger and stronger hints that what they'd really love out of all this is a nice large bomb are actually quite fascinating. Lem is no slouch as a writer and knows how to keep the ideas flowing and also how to keep his target in sight at all times. While the book is most definitely a satire, its even closer to a condemnation of how everyone pretends the scientific process is above politics when that clearly isn't this to anyone with a functioning pair of eyes and while he's not as savage as he could be in other novels, this isn't exactly the book you want to give someone who is looking forward to a career working in the government sponsored sciences, unless their goal is to be completely at the mercy of everyone in charge.
The format hamstrings the book slightly in terms of impact, as it mostly consists of someone describing not very exciting events a long time after the fact, but for those willing to dig into it there's quite a bit to recommend it as Lem clearly never stopped thinking, not only about the ideas his books presented but how those ideas as presented. In its own modest way its successful and while it probably shouldn't be anyone's first choice (I'll go with the crowd on this and say "Solaris" and "The Cyberiad" are the go-to's, with the Pirx the Pilot stories a pleasant runner up), if you're willing to meet it on its own terms you'll find that it does what it sets out to do almost completely, and if the conclusions he draws aren't exactly cuddly, he states them so strongly its worth questioning how close to the truth he is, and from there how we let it get that bad.
November 8, 2022
DNF pag.120
Dopo "Solaris" e "il Pianeta del Silenzio" capaci di catturare la mia attenzione già dalle prime pagine sfociando poi nel capolavoro, ero pronto ed ansioso di immergermi in questo "La voce del Padrone".
Purtroppo il protagonista si getta per metà del racconto (dove ho interrotto la lettura) in un continuo flusso di coscienza che allontana, pagina dopo pagina, il mio interesse.
Un messaggio proveniente dallo spazio siderale è senza dubbio un buon argomento da trattare ma Lem stavolta struttura la narrazione in modo tale da suscitare in me solo noia a frustrazione rendendo faticoso il semplice procedere oltre.
Sta di fatto che giunti alla metà del racconto ancora non si entra nel vivo e non si parla del tema principale.
Non avviene alcun evento di trama ma ci vengono dati in pasto solo infinite riflessioni e divagazioni su argomenti di varia natura come informazioni su altri personaggi e idee sparse. Nessun dialogo o interazione.
Mi rammarico di non essere stato in grado di procedere oltre, perdendomi effettivamente il cuore del messaggio che sicuramente il buon Lem aveva da proporre.
Forse il periodo, forse le mie corde, ma lontano dai due capolavori menzionati sopra.
Proverò a riprenderlo quando si allineeranno le stelle e l'influsso del Padrone toccherà la mia volontà di proseguire.
Ho riprovato ma nulla da fare, è troppo per la mia povera mente.
Dopo "Solaris" e "il Pianeta del Silenzio" capaci di catturare la mia attenzione già dalle prime pagine sfociando poi nel capolavoro, ero pronto ed ansioso di immergermi in questo "La voce del Padrone".
Purtroppo il protagonista si getta per metà del racconto (dove ho interrotto la lettura) in un continuo flusso di coscienza che allontana, pagina dopo pagina, il mio interesse.
Un messaggio proveniente dallo spazio siderale è senza dubbio un buon argomento da trattare ma Lem stavolta struttura la narrazione in modo tale da suscitare in me solo noia a frustrazione rendendo faticoso il semplice procedere oltre.
Sta di fatto che giunti alla metà del racconto ancora non si entra nel vivo e non si parla del tema principale.
Non avviene alcun evento di trama ma ci vengono dati in pasto solo infinite riflessioni e divagazioni su argomenti di varia natura come informazioni su altri personaggi e idee sparse. Nessun dialogo o interazione.
Mi rammarico di non essere stato in grado di procedere oltre, perdendomi effettivamente il cuore del messaggio che sicuramente il buon Lem aveva da proporre.
Forse il periodo, forse le mie corde, ma lontano dai due capolavori menzionati sopra.
Proverò a riprenderlo quando si allineeranno le stelle e l'influsso del Padrone toccherà la mia volontà di proseguire.
Ho riprovato ma nulla da fare, è troppo per la mia povera mente.
January 14, 2022
I love Stanislaw Lem, but I must admit I struggled reading this one. This is a novel almost devoid of plot, events and conclusion. You could say that this book is almost entirely philosophical. It's brilliant, but it's not for everyone. Narrated in the first person by the protagonist of the novel, a scientist/mathematician Peter H., the book is a philosophical memoir of sort.
As is often case with works by this author, this novel takes a pessimistic view of the first contact (or in this case an encounter with an alien message). I felt that I didn't quite get the ending, so I reread the two last chapters. They made a lot more sense on reread, so now I'm thinking that perhaps I should read the whole novel again. I'll give it a month or two and then decide on it.
As is often case with works by this author, this novel takes a pessimistic view of the first contact (or in this case an encounter with an alien message). I felt that I didn't quite get the ending, so I reread the two last chapters. They made a lot more sense on reread, so now I'm thinking that perhaps I should read the whole novel again. I'll give it a month or two and then decide on it.
February 18, 2022
This is a fascinatingly different kind of book. Not easily classifiable in the slightest. But here goes: the book reads like an autobiography of a scientist that was involved in a late 60's discovery of alien life, a message written in neutrinos, and the massive efforts across the world to decipher it.
Here's the thing: it's not a direct A to B story. Indeed, it reads like a real scientist's musings, a polymath, going through all the possible ideas, pitfalls of thought, philosophy, even the math that might go wrong or lead them all down dark alleyways of speculation.
Well now, that wasn't so bad. Was it?
But I should still underline the fact that the whole book reads like the smart but rambling musings of a polymath setting himself on the most important question of their time. As SF, it's extremely thought-provoking and reminds me a lot of what Sagan's Contact eventually became. As a history of science or an autobiography, it's complicated and dense and wonderful. As a story, it is what it is and doesn't pretend to be anything but a brilliant ramble.
Here's the thing: it's not a direct A to B story. Indeed, it reads like a real scientist's musings, a polymath, going through all the possible ideas, pitfalls of thought, philosophy, even the math that might go wrong or lead them all down dark alleyways of speculation.
Well now, that wasn't so bad. Was it?
But I should still underline the fact that the whole book reads like the smart but rambling musings of a polymath setting himself on the most important question of their time. As SF, it's extremely thought-provoking and reminds me a lot of what Sagan's Contact eventually became. As a history of science or an autobiography, it's complicated and dense and wonderful. As a story, it is what it is and doesn't pretend to be anything but a brilliant ramble.
April 26, 2025
I cried a little out of sheer magnificence.
January 30, 2012
His Master's Voice is the story of a brilliant mathematician, working on a Manhatten Project-like in an attempt to decipher a signal from space.
The attempt has only succeeded in deciphering a tiny fragment of the message (and that is not well understood). Thus the work fits in with Lem's many writings on the subject of the "alien" and how it may be impossible to understand something which is truly different from us.
These other works include "Fiasco", "Eden" and (most famously) "Solaris". "His Master's Voice" is the most realistic and the most philosophical in tone.
The tale is set in cold war America, and includes a fairly pedestrian plot line around the possibility the signal contains instructions for a weapon, but the bulk of the book consists of the narrator's fundamental observations on life and the universe.
I have always suspected Carl Sagan read this book before he wrote "Contact" as the high concept remains...
It is one of the best book I have read, and a book for those who love the struggle and satisfcation of a truly awe inspiring read.
The attempt has only succeeded in deciphering a tiny fragment of the message (and that is not well understood). Thus the work fits in with Lem's many writings on the subject of the "alien" and how it may be impossible to understand something which is truly different from us.
These other works include "Fiasco", "Eden" and (most famously) "Solaris". "His Master's Voice" is the most realistic and the most philosophical in tone.
The tale is set in cold war America, and includes a fairly pedestrian plot line around the possibility the signal contains instructions for a weapon, but the bulk of the book consists of the narrator's fundamental observations on life and the universe.
I have always suspected Carl Sagan read this book before he wrote "Contact" as the high concept remains...
It is one of the best book I have read, and a book for those who love the struggle and satisfcation of a truly awe inspiring read.
December 2, 2022
An excellent and enjoyable read in which nothing much happens other than the small thing of contemplating the meaning of our universe and our place within it. This was my first Lem novel (hard to believe) so I'm not sure how it compares to his others, but I found the writing style so darn engaging and enjoyable that I have to believe I will read more by him. Interesting modernist beginning (if textual brackets seem old hat now they might not have quite felt so when the book was written in the 60s). A bunch of scientists trying to figure out the meaning of what might possibly be a "letter" from a more advanced race running into the wall of realizing how impossible it might be to even determine if the signal is indeed a letter let alone what it might mean. Strongly recommended for those who enjoyed the questions and difficulties of language and the understanding of a wholly other culture displayed so beautifully in China Mieville's Embassytown or the movie Arrival.
December 14, 2021
Prima di tutto una confessione: non credo ne' di aver compreso del tutto ne' di essere mai entrato in sintonia con questo romanzo. Un libro SF per modo di dire, stante lo spunto del messaggio dallo spazio non certo originale e dirompente, ma evidentemente si tratta solo di un espediente. La comunicazione cosmica si rivela un cavallo di troia per instradare il lettore su percorsi ben piu' tortuosi e ardui: epistemologia, dinamiche sociali, rapporti di forza tra individui e nazioni, paranoie e ossessioni che mai abbandonano l'umanita' e in fin dei conti la ricerca di un fine, anzi "del" fine ultimo della vita, sia intesa in senso biologico che spirituale. Tutto bello, tutto ben scritto, ma non sono cosi' convinto che questa idea non potesse essere sviluppata in maniera meno pesante.
November 24, 2017
Jako komplikovana i kompleksna knjiga. Komplikovana zbog dve stvari. Prva je nacin pisanja a druga jer je stalno na granici da postane kakva naucna disertacija. I pored toga, uz povremenu upotrebu googla, vise ju je nego zanimljivo citati. Ovo delo vas tera na razmisljanje i poseduje neke od najvisprenijih metafora na koje sam nailazio. Jako zrelo delo. A poruka je vise nego jasna, barem ona po meni najvaznija, svako ce u necemu nepoznatom videti ono sto najvise zeli. Ljudska vrsta nravno oruzje. *Imajmo na umu da su ovakva dela SFa pisana u vreme Hladnog Rata.
April 16, 2021
Kolejny (planowo) krótki wpis, chociaż tym razem książka trochę dłuższa. No cóż, nie tego spodziewałem się po pierwszym spotkaniu z Lemem od czasów "Bajek robotów" w podstawówce... STOP przecież ja przeczytałem Solaris jeszcze pare lat temu, przepraszam za pomyłkę... ciekawe dlaczego o tym zapomniałem.
Gdzieś nazwano tę książkę traktatem filozoficznym i tak też bym ją traktował. Nietypowo się to czytało, bo z jednej strony przyznaję - było bardzo ciężko, ale z drugiej każdorazowo gdy zdarzało mi się nadążać za narratorem, czułem ogromną fascynację przeplataną z podziwem wobec intelektu autora.
Myślę, że za jeden z życiowych celów obiorę sobie docenienie jej w całości. Radzę uważać, ale z pewnością nie odrzucać. Tak jak u Dukaja mam czasem wrażenie, że komplikuje on na siłę, to tutaj bez bicia przyznaję, że jestem po prostu na to za głupi.
Gdzieś nazwano tę książkę traktatem filozoficznym i tak też bym ją traktował. Nietypowo się to czytało, bo z jednej strony przyznaję - było bardzo ciężko, ale z drugiej każdorazowo gdy zdarzało mi się nadążać za narratorem, czułem ogromną fascynację przeplataną z podziwem wobec intelektu autora.
Myślę, że za jeden z życiowych celów obiorę sobie docenienie jej w całości. Radzę uważać, ale z pewnością nie odrzucać. Tak jak u Dukaja mam czasem wrażenie, że komplikuje on na siłę, to tutaj bez bicia przyznaję, że jestem po prostu na to za głupi.
March 30, 2013
Let me start by saying that I've owned this book for around five or six years and have only just completed it. I've made several attempts over the years, the most recent of which involving swearing to myself that I would not read anything else until I completed it. Well, I've completed it, and the sensation is something akin to climbing a grueling mountain only to turn around afterward and discover that it was, in fact, an anthill.
Don't get me wrong. Lem's brilliant ability to misdirect the reader toward an ultimately unachievable goal of understanding is present and accounted for in His Master's Voice. I had three issues with His Master's Voice.
One, the characters were a little flat. While they all had an abundance of life from time to time, throughout the bulk of the novel they would lapse into monologues or dialogues - more on those in a minute - during which most of their character would be lost and they'd all take on the personalities of formal scientific papers. While the ideas they present are often engaging, the way they do so feels, as I said above, flat.
Two, the monologue/dialogue sections were a little overused. The vast majority of His Master's Voice is taken up by characters debating or explaining ideas. While Lem's work often includes a great deal of exposition, the amount in His Master's Voice is a little overwhelming. There were times where I was having a difficult time remembering that I was reading a novel.
Three, the hard science was a little too hard. I love well-written hard sci-fi, but I think I've finally been defeated. It didn't take long for His Master's Voice to soar blissfully over my head in descriptions of neutrinos and particle physics, and whenever readers get lost trying to understand the actual science behind hard science fiction, it makes the fictional science harder to spot. Coming away from this I have no idea what was real science and what wasn't (aside from the few obvious things) and that's kind of a problem.
Aside from these complaints, readers should be warned that this is an INCREDIBLY dense book. Between the near-constant exposition and extremely high-order science being discussed, it does not read particularly fast. Is it worth it? Meh. For fans of his work or people intrigued by the concept, sure. For anyone looking for a light read, no, and for everyone else, I'd recommend picking up Solaris before reading this one.
Don't get me wrong. Lem's brilliant ability to misdirect the reader toward an ultimately unachievable goal of understanding is present and accounted for in His Master's Voice. I had three issues with His Master's Voice.
One, the characters were a little flat. While they all had an abundance of life from time to time, throughout the bulk of the novel they would lapse into monologues or dialogues - more on those in a minute - during which most of their character would be lost and they'd all take on the personalities of formal scientific papers. While the ideas they present are often engaging, the way they do so feels, as I said above, flat.
Two, the monologue/dialogue sections were a little overused. The vast majority of His Master's Voice is taken up by characters debating or explaining ideas. While Lem's work often includes a great deal of exposition, the amount in His Master's Voice is a little overwhelming. There were times where I was having a difficult time remembering that I was reading a novel.
Three, the hard science was a little too hard. I love well-written hard sci-fi, but I think I've finally been defeated. It didn't take long for His Master's Voice to soar blissfully over my head in descriptions of neutrinos and particle physics, and whenever readers get lost trying to understand the actual science behind hard science fiction, it makes the fictional science harder to spot. Coming away from this I have no idea what was real science and what wasn't (aside from the few obvious things) and that's kind of a problem.
Aside from these complaints, readers should be warned that this is an INCREDIBLY dense book. Between the near-constant exposition and extremely high-order science being discussed, it does not read particularly fast. Is it worth it? Meh. For fans of his work or people intrigued by the concept, sure. For anyone looking for a light read, no, and for everyone else, I'd recommend picking up Solaris before reading this one.
July 31, 2012
Stanislaw Lem is a good author.
But his science fiction reads more like philosophical fiction.
There is some good particle physics stuff in this story, which I greatly appreciated.
The writing style is elegant, sometimes gaudy, but the narrator's pompous opining gets old.
I found myself hoping for less talk, more action a lot while reading this book.
I feel like the author didn't have the balls to chose mathematical and cryptographic details for The Message, so he left them out.
I would have loved to hear about how Frog Eggs was decoded, in detail.
I would also have loved to hear the how main character's important mathematics worked.
But I guess those would require more knowledge and imagination on the part of the author.
In particular, the author seems not to know about Shanon's information theory.
Oh, and what ever happened to the noise layer on top of the binary signal from an early chapter?
It's never revisited!
Why don't they build a more sensitive instrument to read that second, buried message?
I think the author just forgot about it...
Someday I'd like to re-write this book, but change things to be more realistic.
The narrator would be less of a rambler.
The project to decode The Message would be explained in technical detail.
I'd take that opportunity to make the message more structured and interesting.
I reject the major lesson of the book: that humanity isn't ready to understand what aliens have to say.
In the end, the project fails to decode more than a few percent of the message.
This isn't consistent with the premise that the senders are nice aliens.
They would have put in a "ramp" for any recipient of the message to build up shared, cultural knowledge.
Lem makes a big deal about how we can't understand their language if we don't share culture in common.
We share enough universals in common to walk up a ramp of understanding.
From math, to chemistry, cosmology, geology, biology, etc.
Humanity may be warlike on the level of the nation state.
But we have the capacity for understanding and frank communication.
Especially given the fact that such communication poses no threat.
But his science fiction reads more like philosophical fiction.
There is some good particle physics stuff in this story, which I greatly appreciated.
The writing style is elegant, sometimes gaudy, but the narrator's pompous opining gets old.
I found myself hoping for less talk, more action a lot while reading this book.
I feel like the author didn't have the balls to chose mathematical and cryptographic details for The Message, so he left them out.
I would have loved to hear about how Frog Eggs was decoded, in detail.
I would also have loved to hear the how main character's important mathematics worked.
But I guess those would require more knowledge and imagination on the part of the author.
In particular, the author seems not to know about Shanon's information theory.
Oh, and what ever happened to the noise layer on top of the binary signal from an early chapter?
It's never revisited!
Why don't they build a more sensitive instrument to read that second, buried message?
I think the author just forgot about it...
Someday I'd like to re-write this book, but change things to be more realistic.
The narrator would be less of a rambler.
The project to decode The Message would be explained in technical detail.
I'd take that opportunity to make the message more structured and interesting.
I reject the major lesson of the book: that humanity isn't ready to understand what aliens have to say.
In the end, the project fails to decode more than a few percent of the message.
This isn't consistent with the premise that the senders are nice aliens.
They would have put in a "ramp" for any recipient of the message to build up shared, cultural knowledge.
Lem makes a big deal about how we can't understand their language if we don't share culture in common.
We share enough universals in common to walk up a ramp of understanding.
From math, to chemistry, cosmology, geology, biology, etc.
Humanity may be warlike on the level of the nation state.
But we have the capacity for understanding and frank communication.
Especially given the fact that such communication poses no threat.
July 25, 2025
I read this book as a prolonged satire of the Principle of Sufficient Reason so beloved by the Western philosophical tradition. The principle states that there must be a rationally intelligible cause that suffices to explain any given phenomenon we might encounter. This principle is reflected in the Greek idea of Logos, which refers to the universal reason that inwardly structures all things, including human reason, which can know things only because it participate with them in universal reason. Logos is the pattern that maximally connects all things and that is also at work in the activity of the human mind, making possible knowledge of things. Much of the drama of Western philosophy is figuring out if the pattern that maximally connects things, and that in doing so, renders them intelligible for us, is "out there," discovered in things, or if it's "in here," constructed by our minds and projected onto things.
On the face of it, this cognitive need to encounter a thoroughgoing intelligibility in reality is as baked into humanity as is the need to procreate or excrete. Aristotle went so far as to argue that the human desire to know reality is even more fundamental, more essential to human nature, than the natural desires to feed and reproduce that we share with all other life forms. There is something to that view. When you're walking in the forest and hearing the rustling of leaves, your mind immediately leaps for the cause that ultimately makes sense of what you're hearing: is it a wolf, a deer, or just the wind? We are pattern-recognizing creatures. We live by bread only insofar as we first succeed in finding a pattern within which we, and the bread, intelligibly fit. But what justifies this fundamental principle? Why should we think that reality ought to make sense? What happens if we are forced, by our encounter with reality itself, to give up on our insistent, psychologically-comforting demand for thoroughgoing intelligibility?
Lem brilliantly depicts a limit situation in which the human animal's desire to optimize intelligibility breaks down. The human race encounters a signal sent by an alien intelligence so strangely framed, so radically Other, that it thwarts and repels any effort at assimilation within the human horizon of intelligibility. The refractory Other remains always inscrutable, always outside the luminous bubble of possible meaning secreted by the human animal, refusing assimilation into any conceptual scheme the humans studying it would impose upon it. Much of the dramatic impetus of this book arises from Lem's skillful depiction of the human mind's ever-renewed - and ever-repelled - attempt to assimilate the alien signal into a humanly meaningful pattern: a benevolent message from the gods, the Logos, the sufficient reason lurking behind things grown incarnate and speaking its secrets to us and justifying hope, etc.
IMHO, Lem's genius lies in exploring philosophical possibilities of the sci-fi genre that few others have managed to fully tap into. All quality sci-fi arguably tries to push the horizons of possible intelligibility just a little further. It tries to enjoin us to envision radically Other ways of making sense of things. In doing so, it exposes the blindspots of our usual taken-for-granted ways of interpreting things, interpretations that have become for us "just obvious" as we, through the force of habit, start to mistake them for the things themselves. Lem takes this feature of the genre to an extreme by considering the possibility of an Other, a Thou, in Buber's terms, that presents itself all right, but that does so as standing even further beyond the limit of our horizon of possible sense than does the human in relation to the dog's horizon of meaning.
He also presents and maps the possibility that the demands of intelligence for a total explanation that would reveal the purpose and value of things could come apart from life's visceral demands for the growth and preservation of structure. Over the course of the story, the scientists discover that the material substrate that carries the alien signal through space (which, in the story, turns out to consist of a configuration of neutrinos) has biophilic properties. That is, it contributes to the creation of conditions that support the growth of organic structure. The scientific community is led to a natural, human assumption: if the structure of the message is biophilic, it must be the product of good, benevolent senders. Such senders must love and affirm life and the cosmic order as good. However, Lem points out that a gap remains between the biophilic effect of the material structure of the message sent from the stars and the meaning of its informational layer. The latter remains inaccessible to us.
So, the human scientists could well capture the life-catalyzing, order-producing, structural features of the alien message, while utterly failing to penetrate into its semantic universe. We can see the structure without getting at the hidden sense. Nor can we get at the rational intention behind it. This is because we can only see reflected in the message the range of intentions we can find in ourselves. Every effort to bridge from structure to sense involves a projection of the sense the scientists themselves construct on the basis of their not-so-pure and all-too-human motives. And every effort to penetrate further into the horizon of meaning inhabited by this Other and to do so by stripping away every human projection of meaning is rewarded with failure.
Ultimately, Lem expertly shows us what it is like to attempt to push against the limits of the mind in the effort to make contact with and understand a genuine Other. The dramatic force of the tale stems from witnessing the dynamic of human collective intelligence, as embodied in the scientific process, as it stretches its tendrils to incorporate the signal into its inherited conceptual scheme, only to encounter pushback and recoil. With every failure to assimilate signal into meaning, the human animal is forced to recoil back upon itself as it only ever encounters a reflection of itself in each of its failed attempts to comprehend the Other. With each failed attempt to establish a meeting of minds, the human being only finds itself increasingly exposed in its egoism, greed, ignorance, aggression, and (possibly) irredeemable evil. And with each failed effort, we foreground the shape of the categorical filter that is both prison and inescapable home to our minds.
Lem leaves us with a stark possibility: that all that we have ever taken for "knowledge" and "discovery" of reality has really just been a more or less subtle form of anthropomorphic projection powered by our naked instinct for unchecked pattern-recognition. In other words, maybe reality doesn't respond to our desire for sense, after all. Maybe it will not play along and support our sense-making activities. Through it all, it remains intractably Other, and in it, we can only see ourselves. Maybe there is a sufficient reason in reality that makes sense of why the leaves rustled and explains the purpose of there being leaves at all with minds to know them. However, whatever that sense is that inheres in things themselves is not ours to enjoy, given what we have made ourselves to be.
So, Lem would reply to Aristotle that the desire for knowledge is itself propelled by far darker motives that lead us to a radical self-imprisonment. He seems to suggest that we are not capable of communing with reality and with others since we are never really open to conversing with anyone but ourselves. This being the case, if we don't manage to effect a radical transformation of the motives that viscerally propel us, including in our search for knowledge, we will only ever hit against the prisons of our own minds whenever we try to make contact with others and with the world around us.
I, for one, finished the book feeling a sad, inconsolable sense of claustrophobia. Thankfully, since I have limited capacities for reflection, it passed soon enough.
On the face of it, this cognitive need to encounter a thoroughgoing intelligibility in reality is as baked into humanity as is the need to procreate or excrete. Aristotle went so far as to argue that the human desire to know reality is even more fundamental, more essential to human nature, than the natural desires to feed and reproduce that we share with all other life forms. There is something to that view. When you're walking in the forest and hearing the rustling of leaves, your mind immediately leaps for the cause that ultimately makes sense of what you're hearing: is it a wolf, a deer, or just the wind? We are pattern-recognizing creatures. We live by bread only insofar as we first succeed in finding a pattern within which we, and the bread, intelligibly fit. But what justifies this fundamental principle? Why should we think that reality ought to make sense? What happens if we are forced, by our encounter with reality itself, to give up on our insistent, psychologically-comforting demand for thoroughgoing intelligibility?
Lem brilliantly depicts a limit situation in which the human animal's desire to optimize intelligibility breaks down. The human race encounters a signal sent by an alien intelligence so strangely framed, so radically Other, that it thwarts and repels any effort at assimilation within the human horizon of intelligibility. The refractory Other remains always inscrutable, always outside the luminous bubble of possible meaning secreted by the human animal, refusing assimilation into any conceptual scheme the humans studying it would impose upon it. Much of the dramatic impetus of this book arises from Lem's skillful depiction of the human mind's ever-renewed - and ever-repelled - attempt to assimilate the alien signal into a humanly meaningful pattern: a benevolent message from the gods, the Logos, the sufficient reason lurking behind things grown incarnate and speaking its secrets to us and justifying hope, etc.
IMHO, Lem's genius lies in exploring philosophical possibilities of the sci-fi genre that few others have managed to fully tap into. All quality sci-fi arguably tries to push the horizons of possible intelligibility just a little further. It tries to enjoin us to envision radically Other ways of making sense of things. In doing so, it exposes the blindspots of our usual taken-for-granted ways of interpreting things, interpretations that have become for us "just obvious" as we, through the force of habit, start to mistake them for the things themselves. Lem takes this feature of the genre to an extreme by considering the possibility of an Other, a Thou, in Buber's terms, that presents itself all right, but that does so as standing even further beyond the limit of our horizon of possible sense than does the human in relation to the dog's horizon of meaning.
He also presents and maps the possibility that the demands of intelligence for a total explanation that would reveal the purpose and value of things could come apart from life's visceral demands for the growth and preservation of structure. Over the course of the story, the scientists discover that the material substrate that carries the alien signal through space (which, in the story, turns out to consist of a configuration of neutrinos) has biophilic properties. That is, it contributes to the creation of conditions that support the growth of organic structure. The scientific community is led to a natural, human assumption: if the structure of the message is biophilic, it must be the product of good, benevolent senders. Such senders must love and affirm life and the cosmic order as good. However, Lem points out that a gap remains between the biophilic effect of the material structure of the message sent from the stars and the meaning of its informational layer. The latter remains inaccessible to us.
So, the human scientists could well capture the life-catalyzing, order-producing, structural features of the alien message, while utterly failing to penetrate into its semantic universe. We can see the structure without getting at the hidden sense. Nor can we get at the rational intention behind it. This is because we can only see reflected in the message the range of intentions we can find in ourselves. Every effort to bridge from structure to sense involves a projection of the sense the scientists themselves construct on the basis of their not-so-pure and all-too-human motives. And every effort to penetrate further into the horizon of meaning inhabited by this Other and to do so by stripping away every human projection of meaning is rewarded with failure.
Ultimately, Lem expertly shows us what it is like to attempt to push against the limits of the mind in the effort to make contact with and understand a genuine Other. The dramatic force of the tale stems from witnessing the dynamic of human collective intelligence, as embodied in the scientific process, as it stretches its tendrils to incorporate the signal into its inherited conceptual scheme, only to encounter pushback and recoil. With every failure to assimilate signal into meaning, the human animal is forced to recoil back upon itself as it only ever encounters a reflection of itself in each of its failed attempts to comprehend the Other. With each failed attempt to establish a meeting of minds, the human being only finds itself increasingly exposed in its egoism, greed, ignorance, aggression, and (possibly) irredeemable evil. And with each failed effort, we foreground the shape of the categorical filter that is both prison and inescapable home to our minds.
Lem leaves us with a stark possibility: that all that we have ever taken for "knowledge" and "discovery" of reality has really just been a more or less subtle form of anthropomorphic projection powered by our naked instinct for unchecked pattern-recognition. In other words, maybe reality doesn't respond to our desire for sense, after all. Maybe it will not play along and support our sense-making activities. Through it all, it remains intractably Other, and in it, we can only see ourselves. Maybe there is a sufficient reason in reality that makes sense of why the leaves rustled and explains the purpose of there being leaves at all with minds to know them. However, whatever that sense is that inheres in things themselves is not ours to enjoy, given what we have made ourselves to be.
So, Lem would reply to Aristotle that the desire for knowledge is itself propelled by far darker motives that lead us to a radical self-imprisonment. He seems to suggest that we are not capable of communing with reality and with others since we are never really open to conversing with anyone but ourselves. This being the case, if we don't manage to effect a radical transformation of the motives that viscerally propel us, including in our search for knowledge, we will only ever hit against the prisons of our own minds whenever we try to make contact with others and with the world around us.
I, for one, finished the book feeling a sad, inconsolable sense of claustrophobia. Thankfully, since I have limited capacities for reflection, it passed soon enough.
April 26, 2015
This extraordinary novel from the favorite writer of my youth, Stanisław Lem, defies categorizations. While on the surface it is a suspense novel or a "mystery" (more precisely, a scientific and philosophical mystery/suspense), it is actually more of a treatise on the human species' place in the Universe. Mr. Lem, who began in 1940s as a science-fiction writer and became the world's most widely read science-fiction author, left his mark on the 20th century as one of the deepest thinkers writing about science, technology, and the future of human race. He was a philosopher, serious futurologist, humanist, and popularizer of science. "His Master's Voice" (Polish title "Głos Pana") is one of his first "serious" books, and definitely my favorite. I read it for the first time in 1968, immediately after it had come out, and loved it. I have now re-read it, and it is still one of the most enthralling books I know and certainly one of the most thought-provoking.
The events described in the novel take place in the near future. A non-random, repeating pattern has been discovered in a neutrino stream recorded by astrophysicists at the Mount Palomar observatory. American government establishes a secretive project, dubbed "His Master's Voice", aimed at deciphering the "message from the stars". After a year of work, with the scientists no closer to understanding the message, new people are recruited to the project. A famous mathematician, Peter Hogarth, who is the narrator of the story, is among them. Dr. Hogarth is able to prove that the message has a topological property of "closure", which indicates that it is an object (a thing or a process) separate from the rest of the world. In the meantime, the project's biochemists and biophysicists manage to translate fragments of the message into physical substances that exhibit unusual properties. Perhaps most interestingly, it is discovered that the particular structure of the neutrino stream helps in creating the configurations of molecules that constitute the chemical backbone of life, and thus that the message increases the probability of creation of life.
However, let's not forget that the project is largely controlled by the military who are hoping that the message will help construct some kind of super-weapon. Of course, their argument is that the other side (the novel was written in the times when there were just two superpowers - the U.S. and the Soviet Union) is probably also working to decipher the message and convert its contents into a super-weapon. I will not divulge how this subplot develops, but it is extremely successful in portraying the mechanisms of arms race, and the denouement is - I am sorry for using big words but they fully belong here - phenomenally clever. Neither will I divulge the overall conclusion of this scientific suspense novel - it is absolutely credible and it uniquely fits the premise. Find it for yourself!
I am sort of a mathematician, albeit not a very good one, no wonder then that I totally love Mr. Lem's presentation of differences between mathematics and social sciences - I was laughing for an entire day having read how Dr. Hogarth's results were not recognized by social scientists working on the project because his "style of thinking [...] provided no scope for rhetorical counterargument". Hilarious! On the other hand, Mr. Lem expertly shows the natural arrogance of a mathematical genius, who knows that the statements he has proved will always remain true, regardless of current political trends and prevailing philosophy.
When I came back to this book after 47 years, I expected I will find it dated and full of obsolete references. Amazingly, this is not the case at all. Written in pre-Internet times, "His Master's Voice" reads like an absolutely contemporary novel; it could have been written last year. The translation from Polish by Michael Kandel is superb.
I have left what is the best for me for last - "His Master's Voice" does not read like fiction. It makes the reader feel this is a chronicle of actual events, something like the story of Manhattan Project from the 1940s or any other big-scale scientific project. Several times, when reading the novel, I caught myself thinking the events have actually happened, and I had to forcefully remind myself that what I was reading was only fiction.
Trying to maintain balance, I need to mention that I do not like the Preface and the first chapter. They are a little overwrought and pompous, which makes me chip a quarter of a star off the rating for this masterpiece.
Four and three quarter stars.
The events described in the novel take place in the near future. A non-random, repeating pattern has been discovered in a neutrino stream recorded by astrophysicists at the Mount Palomar observatory. American government establishes a secretive project, dubbed "His Master's Voice", aimed at deciphering the "message from the stars". After a year of work, with the scientists no closer to understanding the message, new people are recruited to the project. A famous mathematician, Peter Hogarth, who is the narrator of the story, is among them. Dr. Hogarth is able to prove that the message has a topological property of "closure", which indicates that it is an object (a thing or a process) separate from the rest of the world. In the meantime, the project's biochemists and biophysicists manage to translate fragments of the message into physical substances that exhibit unusual properties. Perhaps most interestingly, it is discovered that the particular structure of the neutrino stream helps in creating the configurations of molecules that constitute the chemical backbone of life, and thus that the message increases the probability of creation of life.
However, let's not forget that the project is largely controlled by the military who are hoping that the message will help construct some kind of super-weapon. Of course, their argument is that the other side (the novel was written in the times when there were just two superpowers - the U.S. and the Soviet Union) is probably also working to decipher the message and convert its contents into a super-weapon. I will not divulge how this subplot develops, but it is extremely successful in portraying the mechanisms of arms race, and the denouement is - I am sorry for using big words but they fully belong here - phenomenally clever. Neither will I divulge the overall conclusion of this scientific suspense novel - it is absolutely credible and it uniquely fits the premise. Find it for yourself!
I am sort of a mathematician, albeit not a very good one, no wonder then that I totally love Mr. Lem's presentation of differences between mathematics and social sciences - I was laughing for an entire day having read how Dr. Hogarth's results were not recognized by social scientists working on the project because his "style of thinking [...] provided no scope for rhetorical counterargument". Hilarious! On the other hand, Mr. Lem expertly shows the natural arrogance of a mathematical genius, who knows that the statements he has proved will always remain true, regardless of current political trends and prevailing philosophy.
When I came back to this book after 47 years, I expected I will find it dated and full of obsolete references. Amazingly, this is not the case at all. Written in pre-Internet times, "His Master's Voice" reads like an absolutely contemporary novel; it could have been written last year. The translation from Polish by Michael Kandel is superb.
I have left what is the best for me for last - "His Master's Voice" does not read like fiction. It makes the reader feel this is a chronicle of actual events, something like the story of Manhattan Project from the 1940s or any other big-scale scientific project. Several times, when reading the novel, I caught myself thinking the events have actually happened, and I had to forcefully remind myself that what I was reading was only fiction.
Trying to maintain balance, I need to mention that I do not like the Preface and the first chapter. They are a little overwrought and pompous, which makes me chip a quarter of a star off the rating for this masterpiece.
Four and three quarter stars.
November 16, 2020
Una obra maestra, aunque no para todos los gustos: no hay acción propiamente dicha, podría decirse que no "ocurre" apenas nada, aunque el libro está plagado de ideas y reflexiones relacionadas con la ciencia, la tecnología, el quehacer científico y la política científico-tecnológica y militar. En mi opinión, así es como tiene que ser la ciencia ficción hard: densa, filosófica, bien escrita, con ideas innovadoras cimentadas en una base científica sólida. Stanislaw Lem sabía de lo que hablaba, ya discurriera sobre las matemáticas o utilizara la física cuántica para explorar nuevos fenómenos. Por ejemplo una afirmación que me ha encantado (como matemático), por ser completamente cierta, es (parafraseo) que "la lógica adolece de esa plasticidad combinatoria que da vida a otras ramas de la matemática" (de hecho, la teoría de modelos surgió posteriormente para "subsanar" este "problema"). El único fallo científico que he encontrado es la alusión a que las plantas llenaron la atmósfera terrestre de oxígeno cuando antes no lo había (fueron las cianobacterias; las algas en general son aún responsables de la generación del 70% del oxígeno atmosférico, frente al 30% de las plantas).
La traducción de la edición de Impedimenta no es mala, se agradece que sea culta en vez de tosca, pero no me ha terminado de convencer. Hay frases difíciles de comprender que, cambiando alguna palabra por un sinónimo parcial, se entienden mucho mejor (da la impresión de que partes de la traducción provienen del inglés); y la novela ya es lo suficientemente densa en su contenido como para tener que andar descifrando también el continente. Además hay unas cuantas erratas, cuya frecuencia aumenta hacia el final del libro. Y no es lo mismo "infringir"que "infligir".
La traducción de la edición de Impedimenta no es mala, se agradece que sea culta en vez de tosca, pero no me ha terminado de convencer. Hay frases difíciles de comprender que, cambiando alguna palabra por un sinónimo parcial, se entienden mucho mejor (da la impresión de que partes de la traducción provienen del inglés); y la novela ya es lo suficientemente densa en su contenido como para tener que andar descifrando también el continente. Además hay unas cuantas erratas, cuya frecuencia aumenta hacia el final del libro. Y no es lo mismo "infringir"que "infligir".
August 18, 2018
An excellent treatment of the relentless march of scientific progress and discovery and its shortcomings. However, the book reads like a debate rather than an involving narrative. There is no plot.
A seemingly alien message is intercepted by Earth but it is a language and technology not previously encountered. The best minds of the democratic West are assembled to try and crack its mystery, including the mathematician narrator, whose main role turns out to be that of skeptic, providing the counters to each of the arguments forwarded by his fellows. The psychology of the narrator is delved into at the novel's opening, to suggest he has a natural mien to be intellectually destructive.
So what we get is a book seeped in the cold war politics of the 1960s and the consequences of the invention of the hydrogen bomb which I think lies at the heart of this book. Science is neutral, it deals with facts. Whether those truths turn out to be positive or negative in their effects, depends entirely on what man does with the knowledge. Inevitably the focus of the military sponsored project turns to see whether this alien tech can be weaponised. It can't, the technology remains impenetrable, not least because man cannot reason outside of his own experience and senses. And that's it really. The ideas were fascinating, but I couldn't give it 5 stars since it reads as a digest of ratiocination about scientific observation and objectiveness (undermined by quantum mechanics and the Uncertainty Principle). It's as dry as a scientific treatise.
A seemingly alien message is intercepted by Earth but it is a language and technology not previously encountered. The best minds of the democratic West are assembled to try and crack its mystery, including the mathematician narrator, whose main role turns out to be that of skeptic, providing the counters to each of the arguments forwarded by his fellows. The psychology of the narrator is delved into at the novel's opening, to suggest he has a natural mien to be intellectually destructive.
So what we get is a book seeped in the cold war politics of the 1960s and the consequences of the invention of the hydrogen bomb which I think lies at the heart of this book. Science is neutral, it deals with facts. Whether those truths turn out to be positive or negative in their effects, depends entirely on what man does with the knowledge. Inevitably the focus of the military sponsored project turns to see whether this alien tech can be weaponised. It can't, the technology remains impenetrable, not least because man cannot reason outside of his own experience and senses. And that's it really. The ideas were fascinating, but I couldn't give it 5 stars since it reads as a digest of ratiocination about scientific observation and objectiveness (undermined by quantum mechanics and the Uncertainty Principle). It's as dry as a scientific treatise.
January 1, 2021
Il libro è scritto come il memoir di un matematico che ha partecipato al progetto della Voce del padrone, il cui intento era di decifrare un misterioso messaggio arrivato dallo spazio. Dopo una nota introduttiva decisamente lunga, che mette un po' alla prova la resistenza del lettore, si entra finalmente nel cuore della vicenda con gli scienziati intenti a ricavare qualcosa da questo segnale neutrinico proveniente dalla costellazione del Cane minore. Come in Solaris, ci troviamo di fronte a un testo ricco di riferimenti scientifici, tosto, rigoroso dove l'analisi del messaggio (ma è davvero un messaggio, una "lettera", indirizzata a noi, sulla Terra?) diventa più un modo per riflettere sull'umanità che su questi presunti alieni alla ricerca, forse, di un Primo contatto. Gli esperimenti del progetto segreto su questa banda neutrinica dicono molto di più su di noi che sui Mittenti. E anche le conclusioni a cui ognuno arriva riflettono il pensiero del ricercatore più che il reale significato di qualcosa di inconoscibile perché ancora troppo al di là della nostra portata. Il testo è dunque soprattutto una riflessione filosofica sull'essere umano, sull'Universo, su ciò in cui scegliamo di credere; ma anche sulla ricerca scientifica e sulla scrittura, sulle potenzialità dell'essere umano e sui limiti che non riusciamo a imporci. Un testo pazzesco che, anche se ambientato nell'epoca particolare della guerra fredda, risulta un classico senza tempo.
March 6, 2025
a seedbed of sfnal ideas, later harvested by the opportunistic, whether conscious of their pilfering or not, shielded by the pontificating density of lem’s original artifact here, a BDO in novel form.
…
fun game: count all the ways Lem analogizes one “lower-order” form unable to process the detritus of a “higher-order” form. at least a couple dozen. we’ve got toddlers being given the instructions for a radio kit, New Kingdom Egyptians receiving a letter from C20 Americans, thieves robbing pocket change from a billionaire, children understanding the greeting of a congressman but not his speech on the budget, and (my favorite) ants coming across the carcass of a dead philosopher (which they can get some “good” out of, but not in a way equivalent to the way we would assess what’s “good” in the philosopher).
…
fun game: count all the ways Lem analogizes one “lower-order” form unable to process the detritus of a “higher-order” form. at least a couple dozen. we’ve got toddlers being given the instructions for a radio kit, New Kingdom Egyptians receiving a letter from C20 Americans, thieves robbing pocket change from a billionaire, children understanding the greeting of a congressman but not his speech on the budget, and (my favorite) ants coming across the carcass of a dead philosopher (which they can get some “good” out of, but not in a way equivalent to the way we would assess what’s “good” in the philosopher).
May 28, 2018
Lo siento, voy tan de c*lo que no puedo hacer comentario. Quedaos con que está muy bien.
March 26, 2023
More relevant now than ever. When a pulsating storm of neutrino radiation is discovered, a team of scientists are recruited to decode what seems to be some kind of message. The scientists are worried about everything except for science and doing their jobs.
September 27, 2013
This is a science fiction novel – but it is only sort-of science fiction, and, for that matter, only sort-of a novel.
It's in the form of a memoir – or musing – by a noted mathematician who worked in the upper levels of a secret government project code-named His Master's Voice – the purpose of which was to decode and comprehend a message, seemingly sent by intelligent beings from outer space, on neutrino waves.
We are told from the outset that the project was not successful – no communication was set up, nor was the message even comprehended – but at the same time it had a major impact on society, technology, and more.
So there isn't really any suspense in the book – or even all that much of a plot. It's really just the fictional Dr. Hogarth's thoughts on the matter. However, Hogarth is an erudite, brilliant, philosophical character. ‘His' character sketches of his colleagues are witty, vivid and, I would guess, accurate portrayals of the ‘types' one might find on such a research project. His frequently tangential thoughts cover not only the difficulty of communicating with theoretical aliens, but the nature of communication itself, the nature of humanity, the uses to which we put technology, and especially how culture affects comprehension.
So – although I said it was only ‘sort-of' science fiction, the work deals more with many of the ideas that science fiction as a genre exists to explore, than much of the sci-fi that I have read. And, although it was written in 1967 (not translated into English until the 80's, I believe) it hardly felt dated at all – an impressive feat.
It's in the form of a memoir – or musing – by a noted mathematician who worked in the upper levels of a secret government project code-named His Master's Voice – the purpose of which was to decode and comprehend a message, seemingly sent by intelligent beings from outer space, on neutrino waves.
We are told from the outset that the project was not successful – no communication was set up, nor was the message even comprehended – but at the same time it had a major impact on society, technology, and more.
So there isn't really any suspense in the book – or even all that much of a plot. It's really just the fictional Dr. Hogarth's thoughts on the matter. However, Hogarth is an erudite, brilliant, philosophical character. ‘His' character sketches of his colleagues are witty, vivid and, I would guess, accurate portrayals of the ‘types' one might find on such a research project. His frequently tangential thoughts cover not only the difficulty of communicating with theoretical aliens, but the nature of communication itself, the nature of humanity, the uses to which we put technology, and especially how culture affects comprehension.
So – although I said it was only ‘sort-of' science fiction, the work deals more with many of the ideas that science fiction as a genre exists to explore, than much of the sci-fi that I have read. And, although it was written in 1967 (not translated into English until the 80's, I believe) it hardly felt dated at all – an impressive feat.
September 13, 2020
#The philosophy of science is difficult to do right.
#Philosophers (ontologists) are mostly just winging it.
#Blind luck is an integral part of discovery in the natural sciences.
#Theoretical physics has a lot in common with philosophy.
#You cannot do scientific research on extra-terrestials without understanding humans first. Yay social science?
#The military-industrial complex deliberately and continuously distorts science.
#The Fermi paradox would be a tough nut to crack even if we were to receive a message from a different world.
#The SETI program is a product of US culture. It is essentially looking for space Americans.
#American sci-fi, just like the SETI program, is hopelessly biased.
#It is possible to write an exciting book on all these topics with just some people talking.
#Lem's intellect is staggering.
#This is a brilliant book.
A kajillion stars out of five.
#Philosophers (ontologists) are mostly just winging it.
#Blind luck is an integral part of discovery in the natural sciences.
#Theoretical physics has a lot in common with philosophy.
#You cannot do scientific research on extra-terrestials without understanding humans first. Yay social science?
#The military-industrial complex deliberately and continuously distorts science.
#The Fermi paradox would be a tough nut to crack even if we were to receive a message from a different world.
#The SETI program is a product of US culture. It is essentially looking for space Americans.
#American sci-fi, just like the SETI program, is hopelessly biased.
#It is possible to write an exciting book on all these topics with just some people talking.
#Lem's intellect is staggering.
#This is a brilliant book.
A kajillion stars out of five.
May 19, 2025
Refrito de reseña antigua.
Deeeeeeenso denso. Tema interesante como pocos: cómo contactar con extraterrestres con los que somos incapaces de comunicarnos debido a la distancia intelectual que nos separa.
No es para mí. Eso sí, reconozco que la cf auténtica es un género que tiene que ser denso, extenso y abrumador.
Deeeeeeenso denso. Tema interesante como pocos: cómo contactar con extraterrestres con los que somos incapaces de comunicarnos debido a la distancia intelectual que nos separa.
No es para mí. Eso sí, reconozco que la cf auténtica es un género que tiene que ser denso, extenso y abrumador.
February 7, 2019
1/10. Media de los 12 libros leídos del autor : 4/10
Autor polaco que se metió entre los grandes del género (eso decía la crítica) pero a que a mí nunca me gustó mucho salvo dos libros suyos : Relatos del piloto Pirx y Ciberíada.
Autor polaco que se metió entre los grandes del género (eso decía la crítica) pero a que a mí nunca me gustó mucho salvo dos libros suyos : Relatos del piloto Pirx y Ciberíada.
October 5, 2014
Sort of like the anti-Contact (or, as it precedes Sagan's novel, maybe Contact is the juvenile, safe-for-kids rose-colored version of HMV).
Works much better as philosophy than as a novel. The psuedo-memoir structure adds nothing, and deletes any sense of urgency about the message; despite the final third attempting (unsuccessfully) to instill something akin to a generic scientists vs. military conflict. The opening took me 2 tries to get through, and seems fairly unnecessary having finished the book. The extended musings about the nature of the main character's character - somewhat interesting in their own right, but like the rest of the book, dense beyond dense prose - set me up for a very different kind of story than what arrived.
Lem's thought experiments lead in unique directions which will forever color my thinking regarding any other SF which uses the Message From Outer Space trope. The points Lem makes about organizational anti-competence and the nature of communication are worthy explorations. I wonder if anyone has ever thought as long and hard about the implications and possibilities of communication with alien life as Lem; it really seems to be the singular obsession of his fiction.
As a novel this book is a failure though. It was frequently boring (when it wasn't thought-provoking - as inconsistent a rollercoaster of worthiness I think I've ever encountered) and finishing it became a chore. I don't understand the purpose of The Lord of The Flies, given Frog Legs. The characters had little to do and I trouble remember which scientist was which - this might be a thematic point, but it made for dull reading. I supposed Lem warned us in the prologue that this wasn't a story of pulling back the layers of a mystery, but there wasn't nearly enough meat at the center of this story to build a book around.
On the whole: an dense misfire far better to have read than to actually read.
Works much better as philosophy than as a novel. The psuedo-memoir structure adds nothing, and deletes any sense of urgency about the message; despite the final third attempting (unsuccessfully) to instill something akin to a generic scientists vs. military conflict. The opening took me 2 tries to get through, and seems fairly unnecessary having finished the book. The extended musings about the nature of the main character's character - somewhat interesting in their own right, but like the rest of the book, dense beyond dense prose - set me up for a very different kind of story than what arrived.
Lem's thought experiments lead in unique directions which will forever color my thinking regarding any other SF which uses the Message From Outer Space trope. The points Lem makes about organizational anti-competence and the nature of communication are worthy explorations. I wonder if anyone has ever thought as long and hard about the implications and possibilities of communication with alien life as Lem; it really seems to be the singular obsession of his fiction.
As a novel this book is a failure though. It was frequently boring (when it wasn't thought-provoking - as inconsistent a rollercoaster of worthiness I think I've ever encountered) and finishing it became a chore. I don't understand the purpose of The Lord of The Flies, given Frog Legs. The characters had little to do and I trouble remember which scientist was which - this might be a thematic point, but it made for dull reading. I supposed Lem warned us in the prologue that this wasn't a story of pulling back the layers of a mystery, but there wasn't nearly enough meat at the center of this story to build a book around.
On the whole: an dense misfire far better to have read than to actually read.
March 6, 2022
‘What is taking place is a certain play of forces perfectly indifferent to man.’
Excellent short story hidden among the philosophic musings of protagonist and narrator as Lem’s hand puppet. Like most character-driven novels, starts slow. Extremely slow.
‘In the course of my work … I began to suspect that the “letter from the stars” was, for us who attempted to decipher it, a kind of psychological association test, a particularly complex Rorschach test.’
Skip both prefaces. Prepare to wade through pages of self-referential bloviation. The story starts in Chapter Five.
‘From the moment I landed on the roof, through all the meetings and conversations, the feeling never left me that I was playing a scientist in a grade-B movie.’
More an alternate history of post-World War Two America than genuine historical fiction. I liked it, but your mileage may vary.
“One who puts a digital tape in a player piano is making a mistake, and it is entirely possible that we have taken precisely such a mistake for success.”
Excellent short story hidden among the philosophic musings of protagonist and narrator as Lem’s hand puppet. Like most character-driven novels, starts slow. Extremely slow.
‘In the course of my work … I began to suspect that the “letter from the stars” was, for us who attempted to decipher it, a kind of psychological association test, a particularly complex Rorschach test.’
Skip both prefaces. Prepare to wade through pages of self-referential bloviation. The story starts in Chapter Five.
‘From the moment I landed on the roof, through all the meetings and conversations, the feeling never left me that I was playing a scientist in a grade-B movie.’
More an alternate history of post-World War Two America than genuine historical fiction. I liked it, but your mileage may vary.
“One who puts a digital tape in a player piano is making a mistake, and it is entirely possible that we have taken precisely such a mistake for success.”
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