His Master's Voice Paperback – November 25, 1999

This is science fiction of the highest order: a meditation on man’s place in the cosmos, an examination of the limits of our knowledge, and a scathing condemnation of how politics influences the practice of science. Originally published in 1967, this title, along with a number of Lem’s other works, was reissued in 2020 by MIT press.Like Solaris, His Master’s Voice aims far above run-of-the-mill sci-fi. You can see it in the depth and breadth of the author’s reflections and in the quality of his prose. Lem touches on on the birth and death of the Cosmos; the structure and limits of language, culture, and mathematics; how the fundamental laws of physics and thermodynamics manifest in both biology and culture, and much more.It’s one of those books you can read a dozen times, coming away with a different reading each time. As in Solaris, Lem packs more thought into a single volume than many writers cover in their entire ouvre. Put this one on your list. You’ll be thinking about it long after you finish reading.

This novel is more of a philosophical treatise than anything else, and it does require concentration and active thinking on the reader's part. Lovers of space opera, or stories about monsters will be disappointed. There is no dialogue, no action sequences, no special effects in this book. However it is probably the most realistic depiction of how scientists would try to decipher a first contact message ever written. It is probably more realistic than the (rightly) highly praised movie The Arrival. What is most valuable to me in this book is how it reveals the mind set and attitudes of scientists as they attempt to solve a puzzle not knowing how many pieces there are, or if its even a puzzle. Views on government and military involvement in scientific endeavors will anger and frustrate. The ending will likely disappoint most readers. But read as a philosophy book gussied up in sci fi trappings, its a rich and rewarding read.

I am inclined to think of Lem as a Romanticist who writes in science fiction. His Master's Voice (much like Lem's masterpiece, Solaris) explores events and phenomena which elude or transcend rational understanding. The novel revolves around the discovery of an inexplicable neutrino emission. Examination leads scientists to believe the emission a kind of "letter" from other planetary beings. Despite their best efforts, and numerous complex theories and experiments (of which Lem has imagined at least two dozen), nothing about the code can be comprehended by the methodologies the scientists have available.Like the rambling Ishmael of Melville, or the detached Miles Coverdale of Hawthorne, the narrator's thoughts wax philosophical in long arcs of meditation on the nature of humanity and existence. The narrator, Dr. Hogarth, has been recognized in the field as an iconoclast of scientific principles; it is his ability to immediately draw out hasty assumptions of theoretical and mathematical proofs that is both his burden and virtue. The character is left wandering through a philosophical wasteland, a kind of temperate nihilism, though his own biases are soon unearthed by his colleagues.Ultimately, His Master's Voice is about the pretension of ultimate knowledge. For a work that insists on science, it is highly critical of the biases of the methodology; and yet, there are numerous diatribes against individuals who rest solely upon the imagination, as well. The hesitancy of the narrator (and I would extend this to Lem) to propose a positive argument with any hint of certainty is the epistemological crux of the novel. Even the narrator tires of the futility and impossibility of comprehending the signal, a signal that may very well originate from non-human organisms, in a language which does not presuppose the binaries at the base of our language (if such binaries even exist), from a civilization that has so surpassed our own that their reality is beyond our understanding. Or--particularly mystifying--the signal may be entirely natural in origin, a possibility which challenges our ability to distinguish between nature and artifice. In the final pages, the author tries to force an order onto the chaos of the project, and yet he cannot bring himself to any more evidence for his beliefs than intuition--a difficulty that he both rejects and embraces. There is a kind of Romantic postmodernism at play in Lem, and this novel is (in my opinion) a better expression of it than even Solaris.

"His Master's Voice" is a stunning and elegant book by an author who deserves to have been more popular in the United States. Many of Lem's books are allegedly science fiction, but very often (as in this case), the science fiction element of the book is a very thin wrapper around a series of long digressions, conversations, and observations. Here, the science fiction story is about a massive, failed effort to decipher an extraterrestrial signal. But the real focus of the book is on the limitations of human cognitive capacities, our failure to understand the world, the incessant need to impose arbitrary structure on the unknown, and how we come to terms with this. Our inability to understand the world runs through the book on every page; it's illustrated in human relationships, international relations, and political systems. Even the opening note by a fictitious editor of the present volume admits that the intended structure of the original manuscript it unclear.The experience of reading Lem is like that of reading Kafka. The text is dense, difficult, and draining. In fact, it's more difficult than Kafka because there are extremely dense (and very well-informed) philosophical discussions on various topics spread throughout the text. The protagonist (and the reader) often realize as the story progresses that they know less and less. This is certainly the case in "His Master's Voice". But Lem isn't nearly as bleak and hopeless as Kafka. Lem seems to think that there's real value in understanding our limitations, even if there's no way of transcending them.

His Masters Voice is the perfect antidote to all those mainstream Hollywood movies that have cannibalised the literary science fiction of the last 100 years. Unlike Sagan's 'Contact' this is a message from the stars that cannot be wholly understood even to the point of them doubting that it was a message at all. The question is left open, no ends are neatly tied and no conclusions reached. If SETI ever recieves a message from the stars I expect it to be as difficult to interpret as the message in His Masters Voice. Not for fans of Star Wars...

Great book, will make you think after you read and it is great read.

Bought for a present.

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