His Master's Voice

Slow going for the first forty pages, I’ll say that up front, the kind of slow where you check how many pages are left more than once. Fitting book for a radio-check-twice-a-day kind of season though, all about a signal nobody can actually talk back to.

A mathematician named Hogarth, already dead, memoir found after the fact, roped into a Manhattan Project style facility in the Nevada desert to help decode a message coming out of deep space. They never crack it. That’s not a spoiler, Lem tells you up front the whole thing fails, and somehow the book is still worth the time because the failure is the actual subject. People call it the evil twin of Contact, or the anti-Contact, written the better part of twenty years before Sagan’s, and once I read it that way the rest of the book clicked into place for me.

The part that snagged me was the Frog Eggs, the synthesized substance they build off maybe five percent of a message they never fully cracked. One review I ran across called it a gaping hole Lem left unexplained, and reading it up here with nothing but time to circle back over passages, I felt the same snag, decoded just enough to build something, not enough to know what it does or why.

There’s a quieter layer under all of it too, Lem writing this out of Warsaw Pact Poland in the sixties, setting it in America and burying his real arguments about Hegel and the state in a scientist’s private grumbling so the censors would let it through. You can feel that pressure in the prose even without knowing the history.

Four stars. Dense, sometimes a genuine slog, but I’d rather have read this than most books I finished faster.