Nice story, shame about the meaningless diatribes
Written: Feb 15 '02 (Updated Nov 25 '04)
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Pros: Great story about space, science and first contact
Cons: Lem gets sick of telling the story and waffles endlessly , and without meaning
The Bottom Line: Read this for a cool story about man finding his first message from the stars. Be prepared to wade through tonnes of dull crud thinly disguised as philosophy
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| snpmurray's Full Review: Stanislaw Lem - His Master's Voice |
Stanislaw Lem presents us with the fictional transcript of a manuscript found in the papers of one Professor Peter Hogarth after his demise. Hogarth , a mathematician, was known for his work in various fields of mathematics, but his most important contributions were to a secret project known only as “His Masters Voice”
His Masters Voice (HMV for short) concerned the discovery that a signal has been transmitting to earth for an unknown period, carried on tiny invisible particles known as neutrinos. The pattern of neutrinos, and their periodicity, constituted a pattern which revealed an intelligent source.
Hogarth is dragged into the project, required for his math skills in analyzing the signal. In top levels of secrecy, Hogarth and a large interdisciplinary team of scientists and humanists set up camp in the Mohave desert and spend two years analyzing the signal and conducting experiments based upon their findings.
The book is essentially Hogarth's journals. He describes every aspect of the project, and his feelings regarding it, and speculates about the meaning of it all…..
After a preface (to which we shall return), Hogarth tells the tale of the discovery of the message.
Sam Laserowitz, imaginative loner and small-time inventor, hits upon a scheme to make money easily. He sees a market for tables of random numbers. Now, truly random series of numbers are harder to generate than you might imagine, and they are of great use to scientists in producing accurate statistics. Laserowitz hits upon the idea that he can make tables of random numbers by purchasing data on the random patterns of neutrinos which come towards the earth from our universe. He does just that, and successfully publishes a book of random numbers. Shortly after this he finds he has a law suit pressed against him for fraud…..a scientist using the tables discovers that Laserowitz made his tables last twice as long by simply reproducing the first fifty pages of numbers over again in the second half of the book.
Or did he?
The tiny snippet of news attracts the imagination of one Dr Saul Rappaport, who makes it his business to acquire the same raw data that Laserowitz used. What if Laserowitz had in fact acted in good faith, and that the signal was repeating? Rappaport shows the signal record to other scientists, and pretty soon, mankind realizes it is in receipt of the first ever evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
Soon, deep in the heart of the Mohave, an enclave reminiscent of the Manhattan project is establishing itself. Hogarth documents the eclectic group: Scientists, mathematicians, humanists, CIA, pentagon officials and others all play a part, and each part is given its place in the journals. Scientists set about attempting to unravel the fabric of the message….what can be learned from it? Is it an equation, a language, a recipe for sponge cake? Each has a theory, and all vie for time to test their theories on the computers and hardware set-ups of the project testing grounds. Humanists and linguists construct complex theories of their own, arguing why, or why not, the message is good, bad, indifferent, or one of a hundred other possible interpretations. Meanwhile, the CIA and other shady characters from nameless agencies are busy bugging the entire complex, watching over everything, and doing everything they can do discover what weapons the message might describe, or even yield.
Hogarth uses the language of mathematics to form a proof that the message has , at least mathematically, an internal consistency. He cannot say at all what it may represent, but his findings are evidence that it is not a random. Despite this finding, and the basis it forms for exploring the text, Hogarth is doubtful that the true meaning of the message can ever be deciphered, and believes that any knowledge which may be gleaned from it will no more than scrape the surface of its true meaning.
Events get ahead of Hogarth, however, in the area of biological sciences. Geneticists, interpreting the text as a genetic blueprint, run the code through a genetic compiler. This results in a biologically active slime which they call “Frogs eggs” because of its resemblance to amphibious spawn. Its biology is a cause for concern….when one of Hogarth’s colleagues confides in him that he has discovered frogs eggs can be used to produce thermonuclear explosions. Not only that, but one can stimulate the frogs eggs at point “X” and have the explosion occur at point “Y”, which could be anywhere on the Earth.
Terrified that they have discovered a doomsday scenario, Hogarth and his colleague endeavor to bury their evidence, whilst at the same time secretly test the theory, hopeful they will have been mistaken.
Can the message be deciphered? Will Frogs Eggs lead to the ultimate weapon and the end of the world? Can you accomplish much living in the Mohave desert bugged by the CIA, and bitten by the flies, with sand in your ears? These and other questions are explored in “His Masters Voice”
And so much for the plot. Not a bad theme!
Well, what did I think of it?
I am sad to report, this book only works half the way. Saddest of all because I don’t think it needed to have gone the way it did. So let me explain…..
There is a terrible beginning to this novel, I should really have seen what was going to be the main fault with it then and there. The book begins with a rather long preface, supposing to be more musings from Professor Hogarth, only this time in the form of a kind of potted biography. It is as thick as treacle. The preface consists of the self-obsessed autobiographical ramblings of a character we have not been introduced to. Pages and pages concerning the “morality of genius” and other such bizarre topics, bewildering the reader to what is their point. I struggled through it, hoping, somewhere to find a plot.
The preface being dutifully dispensed with, the plot greatly improves at the beginning of the journal proper. I found the beginning section to be fascinating, thoughtful and original. It contains the well-balanced wit which Lem achieves less than fifty percent of the time in his work. Ideas and analysis of them, interspersed with irony and satire…perfect stuff!
Alas, this doesn’t continue forever. By the middle of the book, the style has unfortunately stultified somewhat. Lem has Hogarth musing more and more often, in more and more abstract ways. Taking the events and happenings of the HMV project as push-off point, Lem begins a rather intense philosophical treatise on subject “X”…
What, you may ask, is subject “X”?
Actually, I confess, having even this day finished reading the book, I still have no idea what exactly Lem was talking about. I further confess that having begun reading this book in search of entertainment, I discovered, in the depths of Lem’s psycho-babble, that whatever he was talking about, I didn’t care.
I don’t mean to be harsh. I only seek to give fair warning that this is a book which became bogged down during its construction by the constipated thinking of the author.
Let me furnish you with an example of Lem’s idea of entertaining diatribe…..
“But the potential of egalitarianism inherent in Christianity - though it came into conflict with class structures, though for periods it yielded to them - never altogether disappeared, and indirectly from it sprang physics, with all its consequences.”
Forgive my candor, but this is, what I think we would have called at school, a complete bag of crap.
I sigh, sadly. It seems often when I read Lem this kind of thing happens. HMV is an excellent idea, cursed with the need for self-indulgence of the writer. I would say almost the entire last forty pages of the book is an endless stream of reinterpretations of the message from space by many people from the book. Alas, by this point in the story (the story has vanished at this point I am sorry to report) the reader no longer cares to hear yet another theory, when it is apropos nothing in terms of the development of the plot. There is a limit to the amount of wool gathering that anyone will tolerate regarding a completely fanciful postulation, and HMV pushes that limit a little too hard.
To summarize my complaint with this piece, it feels like not an integrated novel, but a novella, followed by the authors plot-development notes, pasted on, in order to make the piece long enough to publish as a novel.
Depressed by yet another bummer book, I have had my two mentors in life furnish me with fresh reading suggestions….I hope to bring you a positive review in the near future!!!!
Some of my other science fiction book reviews:
Rama Revealed
Prelude to Space
Stand on Zanzibar
The Demolished Man
The Stars my Destination
Cat's Cradle
The Gods Themselves
Watchmen
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The Hammer of God
The Left Hand of Darkness
Flowers for Algernon
Lord of Light
Rendevous with Rama
The Tombs of Atuan
The Dispossessed
I am Legend
The Einstein Intersection
Earth Abides
Peace on Earth
The Farthest Shore
Methuselah's Children
A Call to Arms
To your Scattered Bodies Go
The Lion of Comarre / Against the Fall of Night
To Say Nothing of the Dog
The Doomsday Book
Frankenstein Unbound
Batman - The Dark Knight Returns
Imperial Earth
A Case of Conscience
Solaris
The Sands of Mars
The Land of Laughs
Eden
His Masters Voice
Citizen of the Galaxy
King David's Spaceship
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Double Star
The Fabulous Riverboat
Songs of Distant Earth
Way Station
The Fountains of Paradise
The Long Tomorrow
Lincolns Dreams
Alas Babylon
More Than Human
1984
The Forever War
All the Myriad Ways
I Sing the Body Electric
Gateway
Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said
This Immortal
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Recommended:
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