His Master's Voice by Lem
His Master's Voice (1968)
by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel
199 pages - Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
These are the papers of the deceased mathematician Peter E. Hogarth. He details his experiences in a scientific project at an old nuclear testing base in the desert in the American west. A neutrino signal, repeating every 416 hours, is discovered to be travelling from some distant point in the universe. It's believed that there must be some message encoded, and teams of scientists in different disciplines get to work on it, under top-secret conditions. Some properties of the ray itself are discovered, as well as a few other things (not entirely functional) are created from fragments of the message, but mostly it stays incomprehensible and enigmatic, allowing different people to spin all sorts of theories as to what it is, exactly.
Nietszche famously said that all philosophy is just autobiography. Lem's theme is that science is autobiography as well, not just the 'soft' sciences like psychology and sociology, but hard sciences like physics and mathematics. We're not finding any objective 'truth' or 'facts', we just pick the results we like and then build a story around them.
This book is really, _really_ dry. It reads a lot like somebody's rambling personal notes, and it's hard to describe it as a 'novel' as there's maybe one or two dialogue exchanges through the whole book, and there's not much in the way of action, emotion, or any kind of character depth. In a lot of ways it's like a scientific report that just happens to be made up. And I thought there was a lot of potential in the synopsis of the plot that was never explored in the book itself (i.e. We don't really get into all the possibilties, get different views...it stays pretty narrow to it being either a weapon or a communication device).
What I did like was some of the speculation, some of the ideas (though Lem is quite pessimistic in his outlook, which makes the book relentlessly gloomy along with its flatness). I also personally liked how a lot of the characters are really fully absorbed to the core of their being in their field of study, and how it is something thing that drives their existence, and occupies their idle thoughts.
by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel
199 pages - Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
These are the papers of the deceased mathematician Peter E. Hogarth. He details his experiences in a scientific project at an old nuclear testing base in the desert in the American west. A neutrino signal, repeating every 416 hours, is discovered to be travelling from some distant point in the universe. It's believed that there must be some message encoded, and teams of scientists in different disciplines get to work on it, under top-secret conditions. Some properties of the ray itself are discovered, as well as a few other things (not entirely functional) are created from fragments of the message, but mostly it stays incomprehensible and enigmatic, allowing different people to spin all sorts of theories as to what it is, exactly.
Nietszche famously said that all philosophy is just autobiography. Lem's theme is that science is autobiography as well, not just the 'soft' sciences like psychology and sociology, but hard sciences like physics and mathematics. We're not finding any objective 'truth' or 'facts', we just pick the results we like and then build a story around them.
This book is really, _really_ dry. It reads a lot like somebody's rambling personal notes, and it's hard to describe it as a 'novel' as there's maybe one or two dialogue exchanges through the whole book, and there's not much in the way of action, emotion, or any kind of character depth. In a lot of ways it's like a scientific report that just happens to be made up. And I thought there was a lot of potential in the synopsis of the plot that was never explored in the book itself (i.e. We don't really get into all the possibilties, get different views...it stays pretty narrow to it being either a weapon or a communication device).
What I did like was some of the speculation, some of the ideas (though Lem is quite pessimistic in his outlook, which makes the book relentlessly gloomy along with its flatness). I also personally liked how a lot of the characters are really fully absorbed to the core of their being in their field of study, and how it is something thing that drives their existence, and occupies their idle thoughts.