Głos Pan (’68), trans. from Polish by Michael Kandel (1983)
Stanislaw Lem (1921 – 2006) was one of the great equalizers of my youthful reading habits; as I was escaping life’s absurdities via science fiction novels by Heinlein, Asimov, etcetera, I also chanced upon Ursula K. Le Guin, Olaf Stapledon, Stanislaw Lem, and others who bent my mind along more diverse pathways.
In Lem’s famous novel, Solaris, humanity was in an uncomfortably insecure, intellectual situation; after years of careful study, scientists were unable to comprehend — in any meaningful way — an alien intelligence. In His Master’s Voice (HMV), humanity is caught in a similar state of confusion (in Solaris, the characters are involved in a psychological morass, whereas in HMV a more philosophical aura pervades the narration).
The aliens in HMV are only oblique characters; their neutrino-stream message is discovered and a top-secret, scientific task-force (including formal, natural, and social scientists) is assembled in an attempt to decode the message; ultimately, the scientists are unsuccessful (the failure is stated at the beginning of the book: it is the pathway to failure that propels the story, which is, in reality, a backdrop to Lem’s philosophical monologues). There are some minor accomplishments, but the narrator, Peter Hogarth, remains cynical (“In my opinion, the code was not intended for a civilization as low on the ladder of development as ours…” page 93). Hogarth is critical of humanity’s maturity — at an individual and social level — and the concept of stretching the mind, rather than focus on specification, is a theme that ripples throughout the novel. Hogarth becomes annoyed at the reductionist approach employed by the scientific team; he believes that the team’s successes are trivial because they do not ponder the message as a whole. When Hogarth reaches out with his intellect, he senses something meaningful in the totality of the message; unfortunately, he cannot grasp anything tangible. However, even though he failed to find the answer, he was left with a delightful sense of contented-wonderment: “The oddest thing is that defeat, unequivocal as it was, left in my memory a taste of nobility, and that those hours, those weeks, are, when I think of them today, precious to me.” (page 131).
There were several themes within the novel, but the aliens’ message as a metaphor for valuable information hidden within noise struck an interesting chord. For example, Lem — through the novel’s narrator, Peter Hogarth — explains his frustration with the information age: there is too much information, and it is extremely difficult to sort through and extract the worthwhile from the useless (interestingly, the book was written in 1968, before the great proliferation of information — both worthless and indispensable — on the web). One of the main characters in the novel, the head of the project, Ivor Baloyne, is characterized as a genius; however, he is involved in so many projects, with so much competing information, that he “…will always remain greater than his achievements, because it very rarely happens that in so gifted a man all the physical horses pull in the same direction” (page 54-55). The modern age of specialization has created noise in its wake: it is difficult to acquire a view of the whole if researchers drill-down too thoroughly into specifics (it becomes difficult to ‘see the forest through the trees’). The concept of extraneous information is further developed with an attack on the modern excess of poorly written works. Lem was always critical of mainstream science fiction and eschewed the cliché, which he felt spoon-fed readers with a too-comfortable form of escapism (in HMV his criticism is expanded to the vast majority of writing in any genre: “…in bookstores one can find any number of books by persons without decency — let alone knowledge.” page 21). Lem’s irritation with formulaic science fiction (especially American SF) surfaced palpably several times in the body of the novel (see pages 38, 92, 99, 106-107). Lem expands on this theme when his narrator laments the modern world’s general level of reading and writing: he points out that reading and writing were, at one time, solely in the hands of the intellectual elite (not a desired state of affairs, but it helped control the quality of writing); however, in modern times anyone can write a book and economics trumps intellectual merit, which has produced a flood of drivel that makes it extremely difficult to find the worthwhile amongst the rubbish (see p.21). This theme of ‘valuable information buried in the noise’ is also revealed in the way the aliens’ message is discovered, serendipitously, via random astronomical data, con-artists, pseudo-science, tabloid journalism, curiosity, and chance.
I found His Master’s Voice difficult to appreciate at first, but once past page thirty — or thereabouts — I was sucked into its vortex; as usual, Mr. Lem’s imagination created an interesting pathway. The novel is firmly entrenched in the sub-genre of social science fiction (my preferred variety) and is really not about aliens, but about humanity’s failings. It contains scathing critiques of politics and scientific ethics and methods, and the choices about which ‘Master’s Voice’ is listened to. It is a philosophical work with shrewd depictions of the human psyche. At times the novel struck me as too cynical, but I sense that it is a deeply honest dialogue from the author to the reader.
By the end of the term of scientific study, several theories arise regarding the neutron signal’s creation, but Peter E. Hogarth remains convinced that the signal is a message from an intellectually superior being, and he insists that the message must include instructions regarding how to send a message back. “Skepticism,” he says, “is like a microscope whose magnification is constantly increased; the sharp image that one begins with finally dissolves, because it is not possible to see ultimate things: their existence is only to be inferred.” (page 198)
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Recommended
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db johnston
almost falling 