His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem. New York. 1983. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. . Translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel. 228 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration: detail of Rene Magritte, ‘Le siecle des Lumieres’.
DESCRIPTION - ‘The task of His Master's Voice is to study every aspect of and attempt to translate the so-called message from outer space, which is, in all likelihood a series of signals sent intentionally by a being or beings that belong to some undetermined extraterrestrial civilization.’ A pulsating stream of neutrino radiation from a source with the power of a sun has been detected on Earth. A message of some sort, a stellar code—but what does it mean? Perhaps is purely a natural phenomenon, explainable through fancy scientific footwork as the ‘last of a dying Universe.’ Or perhaps. . . A secret project called His Master's Voice, employing some 2,500 specialists, has been established under military surveillance in the desert of the western United States to study and decode the neutrino emission. The assembled scientists—from physicists to psychoanalysts to pleiographers—advance diverging and utterly unprovable hypotheses. Is the code a description of its sender, a recipe telegraphed to Earth which would enable us to materialize that being? Is it a technological gift, an attempt to hand across space, from one civilization to another, a sophisticated tool for processing information? The formula for the ultimate weapon? Through the papers left by a now-dead member of the research team—and the consummate literary skill of the novelist Stanislaw Lem—the reader is led into the very heart of the project. As the scientists wrangle among themselves, clashing and conspiring while jockeying for favor and position, Lem provides a witty and inventive characterization of ‘men of science’ and their thinking. His novel grapples with the problem of communication between civilizations (of course), but also with the problem of communication between societies, between human beings.
Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.
See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author
