His Master's Voice [Paperback]

Stanislaw Lem (Author), Michael Kandel (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 1984

A witty and inventive satire of "men of science" and their thinking, as a team of scientists races to decode a mysterious message from space. "I had the feeling that I was standing at the cradle of a new mythology. A last will and testament...we as the posthumous heirs of Them..."A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Polish (translation)

About the Author

Stanislaw Lem is the most widely translated and best known science fiction author writing outside of the English language. Winner of the Kafka Prize, he is a contributor to many magazines, including the New Yorker, and he is the author of numerous works, including Solaris.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 1st Havrest/HBJ ed edition (March 15, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156403005
• ISBN-13: 978-0156403009
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,548,468 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stanislaw Lem is the most widely translated and best known science fiction author writing outside of the English language. Winner of the Kafka Prize, he is a contributor to many magazines, including the New Yorker, and he is the author of numerous works, including Solaris.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an incredibly intelligent read, February 20, 2003

By 

chris romano "toonlets.com" (Topanga, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: His Master's Voice (Paperback)

Wow. HIS MASTER'S VOICE, as others have alluded, it's an incredibly intelligent read. Thick in it's diction, it demands your attention, to say the least. Admittedly, I had a difficult time with the first 50 pages or so, but I became completely engrossed by the halfway point.

Told in essentially diary format, HMV tells the story of one scientist's involvement in a secret goverment project established to decipher what appears to be a message from possibly superior, intelligent life. While most scientists spiral their theories into the fantastic, ours manages to poke sensible holes in each assertion...unfortunately escalating the Project's sense of hopelessness and ineptitude along the way.

Somehow, the scientists manage to produce possibly random effects from the recorded signal, but what does it all mean in the grander scheme? It's a wonderful moment when the main character finallly establishes his own theory of the signal, the effect, and his own short-comings.

I loved it.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lem's greatest work. And that's saying a lot., February 19, 1999

By 

"professorguy" - See all my reviews

This review is from: His Master's Voice (Paperback)

If you're familiar with Lem, you know he can dash off deep insights as asides. Now imagine his intellect focused on what it means to be human trying to understand the universe. A masterpiece.

This is not his best science fiction (Fiasco gets that honor) nor his most revealing psychological work (ironically that's Cyberiad). It doesn't explore technology to the greatest extent (try the Golem lectures). However, it may stand as simply the most important work of fiction of the information age.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars LEM THE THINKER, July 5, 2006

By 

Robert L. Brockett (Morris, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: His Master's Voice (Paperback)

Stanislaw Lem's HIS MASTER'S VOICE is a masterful work with issues. The story, simple on its face and straightforward enough, has an alien message sent via neutrino particle waves being intercepted by mid-20th Century humankind at the height of the Cold War. An ever-growing army of scientists from every conceivable discipline are gathered in the desert (think Manhattan Project) to decode the thing. This formidable assemblage quickly begins to resemble nothing so much as the Biblical Tower of Babel. Agendas are on parade, most noticeably that of the American military, always on the lookout for a new mega-weapon (they nearly get their wish). In the end, nothing is resolved and we are left with far more questions than answers. (Beware: some of those questions are themselves quite remarkable, with the power to twist the average mind into an intellectual pretzel overnight.)

What Lem really gets right here is practically all in the Introduction, a stellar piece that had me jotting quotes on bookmarks. The "story," such as it is, doesn't really get going until about the second chapter. Essentially, the depths of human intellectual limitations are mined throughout. Lem's deft use of the desertscape serves to remind us of our hopelessly remote place in the universe and of the sheer vastness of space. Lonesome, indeed.

Where the book goes wrong is in Lem's basic approach. Rendered as a sort of posthumous epistolic diary, there is scant dialogue and very little action. A more dramatic approach would have saved HMV from its utter dryness. My guess is, this time around, Lem only wished a room with enough scale in which to park his ideas, and this he has done to the point where too much of the time the piece resembles more a work of philosophy than fiction. A case of too much telling and not enough showing. Any dependable novelist would recognize the mistake.

In the end, HMV is not a display of Lem the Artist, but Lem the Thinker. And what a thinker he was.