His Master's Voice

I read Contact years before this and honestly I think that’s the wrong order to do it in. His Master’s Voice is basically what happens if you take Sagan’s version of humanity finally cracking an alien message and ask, okay but what if we just never actually crack it. A team of scientists decode a neutrino signal from space across the entire book and the project fails, on purpose, that’s the whole design, and Lem is using the failure to make a much larger point about the limits of what humans can actually understand about something genuinely alien.

Right around page 31 the narrator, a mathematician looking back on the whole project after the fact, straight up breaks the fourth wall and tells the reader not to expect thrills and chills, which felt like Lem personally managing my expectations before I even had a chance to have the wrong ones. I appreciated the honesty even as it made clear this was going to be a slower read than I’d braced for.

It is slow, I won’t pretend otherwise, and I get why some readers bounce hard off it, there’s a real complaint out there that you could skip straight to the first and last two pages of each chapter and lose nothing. I didn’t feel quite that harshly about it, the philosophical digressions are the actual point rather than padding around a plot, but if you’re coming in wanting a story with momentum, this isn’t it.

Four stars. Not the Lem book to start with, but a genuinely serious argument about why we probably can’t talk to aliens, dressed up as barely a novel.