Customer Reviews

His Masters Voice

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

HMV is a very heavy read. Not in its weight but in its content.
This story reads more like philosophy than sci-fi so I can understand if people struggle with it.

Another point is that nothing is really ever solved in HMV. Just like the scientists trying to understand the message from the stars, the reader is left with the same frustration because we are told the outcome in the first few pages of HMV; defeat.

The message that Mankind has stumbled upon is an enigma so complex it would be like explaining the laws of physics to a baboon. The slight progress man does make is so subjective that it can't be considered true progress at all.

I would recommend HMV only to avid Lem fan's and to the others I would point in the direction of Fiasco, Solaris, or The Invincible.

A synthetic signal from outer space is detected. In Sagan's "Contact", the signal encodes plans for a spaceship; here it's not so simple. The signal seems to carry many levels of meaning, each one more bizarre and mind-boggling than the last. Lem, as always, weaves together ideas from the fringes of modern science. He also explores the human aspects of scientific research.

This book is not light reading. Many parts require a mental effort like, say, that needed to play chess. This can be irritating, even infuriating. For readers are up to the task, however, the book rewards the effort many times over.

In reading His Master's Voice at times the reader should be staggered by the powerful intellect of the author. Lem's understanding of psychology, and philosophy are greater than his considerable scientific knowledge. As an unorthodox textbook on those first two subjects I would recommend this book. As a Sci-Fi novel, however, I think it falls flat. There just isn't enough entertainment value in His Master's Voice to make it worth your while.

I regret saying this because the laugh, ultimately, is on me. It seems obvious throughout the book that one of it's main purposes is to satirize "Western" Sci-Fi as mindless escapism. Lem was often critical of popular Sci-Fi authors and their readers for not using the genre to create stories that ask deeper questions and created a more meaningful culture around them. By declaring this book, "not entertaining enough" I'm only proving him right.

Sorry Lem.

If you ever happened to watch the misfortune that is the movie "Contact" (I have to admit that I have not read Carl Sagan's book, but I do hope it was better than the movie), know that this book deals with many of the same topics. But, if "Contact" is a kindergarten-level treatment of the topics in question, "His Master"s Voice" is a PhD-level treatment. A must for anyone for who likes science fiction to be more than just badly written fantasy with a few techie terms thrown in.

While I recognize the brilliance in the philosophy of science that underlies this book, as a work of fiction it seemed to me to drag. Readers who prefer books in which things "happen" may begin to lose patience with this one before finishing it - I had mixed feelings about it myself but read through to the end. Readers who are attracted to philosophy portrayed in a creative way will love it. I wish the author had found a way to present the philosophy within a somewhat more compelling story, but in the end it's impossible to not admire this book for it's sheer intellectual power alone.

"His Master's Voice" is written as a brilliant mathematician's account of working on a Manhatten Project-like 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. The book in fact starts out quite difficultly with a dense introduction and first chapter full of allusions to modern philosophy before starting to tell the "story". Do not be put off by this initial section...it is certain no adventure thriller, but the book does become more approachable and at the same time remains very thought provoking.

I have always suspected Carl Sagan read this book before he wrote "Contact" as the high concept remains...

Lem's bibliography cosnists of a great variety of books. From fairytales (featuring robots) to incredibly difficult quasi-philosophical works. HMV can be placed somewhere in the middle of the scale.
It can be read even if you're not a scholar, at the same time being a very demanding book. The incredible and unique thing about Lem (whose death was a tragedy to me) is that he was able do describe truly ALIEN beings, their actions by definition impossible to comprehend with human minds. Where other accomplished writers give us descriptions like: "it was a kind of a hive" or "it was game hunter" Lem does not. OK, he gives out some hints, but these are not to be treated as any kind of explanation.
If you want to briefly touch a mystery read His Master's Voice or Solaris. Both masterpieces, they will open your mind to the unknown and make other Sci-Fi novels look ridiculous.
Having read the book, over the last 7-8 years I've been sometimes wondering what really happened in HMV. So far, 1:0 for Mr Lem. Rest in peace, my Master.