Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice
Jun. 26th, 2022 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinIn the desert of New Mexico, a top-secret American project seeks to decipher a message from space apparently encoded in a stream of neutrinos by an intelligent sender. By the time mathematician Peter Hogarth arrives on the scene, there's been just enough success to be tantalizing: much of the message remains mysterious, but a small portion of it has been used as a recipe for a colloid substance with seemingly impossible properties. Hogarth and his colleagues struggle with the Senders' apparent refusal to follow any of our assumptions about SETI, the strictures of the project's government handlers, and their own moral scruples, as the possibility arises that the reward for even this partial reading (if it even is a correct reading!) could be poison fruit.
Opening matter
I think His Master's Voice (which I read in Michael Kandel's translation) is one of Stanisław Lem's greatest novels, but despite being quite short it's one that is initially very hard to get into, because it's a book that, like its subject, willfully refuses to coddle the reader, and it throws this somewhat resentfully in your face. Hogarth, the first-person narrator, is a cranky, self-loathing cuss and the book begins with a long preface in which he dissects what he calls his own inclination toward evil, for what seem to be very ordinary human failings (such as his inappropriate childhood reaction to the trauma of the death of his mother). He explicitly says he intends this as a preemptive self-defense measure, given the airing of dirty laundry he does later in the book.
What follows is a lengthy survey of a fictitious literature of the project, in the spirit of Lem's reviews and introductions of nonexistent books. This survey makes it clear, right at the outset, that there was never any Rosetta Stone making the whole extraterrestrial message clear, and Hogarth considers the project a failure.
The Project
That the book manages to build some suspense anyway in the following chapters is a tribute to Lem's skill as a writer. But the actual action of the story doesn't begin until a few chapters in, and it accelerates as it goes on. Hogarth arrives at the project, and is introduced to what's already been discovered prior to his arrival, which is actually a lot by scientific standards: the neutrino message itself seems to have a subtle ability to encourage the chemical processes leading to the emergence of life, and there's this strange synthetic goop codenamed "Frog Eggs" or "Lord of the Flies", which is somehow able to harness nuclear energy to power baffling chemical and physical transformations.
Naturally, the military is deeply interested in all this. Just as in 2001 (and in most of our popular folklore of alien contact), the continuing Cold War and the security state demand that any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence must be kept secret and perhaps plumbed for military advantage. They've bugged everyone, put all sorts of restrictions on the project workers, may well be running a parallel project of their own that they're not telling these civilian scientists about (while worrying about what the Soviet Bloc might or might not be doing along the same lines). There are many parallels to the Manhattan Project, some of whose alumni are on the team. There are pointed character portraits of some of the people involved: the smarmy government apparatchik riding herd over the whole thing, the gregarious but anxious polymath who is the Oppenheimer figure leading the scientists... and the physicist who confides to Hogarth that he has discovered an effect that might make Frog Eggs a world-ending weapon.
Then there's Hogarth's confidant Saul Rappaport, a Holocaust survivor. I recently learned that Rappaport's horrific experiences as a captive of the Nazis were more or less autobiographical, taken from Lem's personal experience as a Polish Jew during the war. These events are recounted by Hogarth out of sequence, early in the novel, and are both chilling and insightful into what they say about the psychology of genocides and oppressors the world over, that most of the Nazis had to physically brutalize the Jews in order to convince themselves that their victims were subhuman.
On the basis of all this, Hogarth is no more optimistic about his species than Lem is, which is not very. However, he is sympathetic to the unseen, perhaps long-extinct Senders--he thinks, though it is no more than a guess, that they do exist (not everyone on the project agrees!) and that the life-promoting aspect of the signal indicates that they are essentially benevolent. The comparison to the Monolith Builders of 2001: A Space Odyssey and their project to farm intelligence everywhere is obvious. Hogarth even proposes that the recipe for Frog Eggs serves a purpose similar to the Moon monolith of 2001, though to say more would be more of a spoiler than I really want to give here. They may even be more benevolent and less hard-headed than the Monolith Builders. Unlike in Clarke's novel, Hogarth doesn't think we passed their test.
Satire and background
Lem wrote a lot of disguised satire on the Communist regime he lived under by portraying his targets as aliens, or robots, or Americans. In the latter case, he had a justification that the exigencies of the Cold War had turned the two sides into funhouse-mirror images of one another anyway. That's undoubtedly going on here too, but that quasi-symmetry means that it works as a direct satire on the US as well--except that some of his American scientists have attitudes that really read to me as more like an erudite European. But it still works.
It's unclear precisely when His Master's Voice is supposed to be taking place. There's a fictional introduction with a date that is contemporary for Lem, in the 1960s, but there are other indications that this is taking place decades in the future--Hogarth is supplied with an interestingly imagined IBM personal computer (!) that definitely didn't exist in the Sixties, there's a fleeting reference to hypersonic passenger aircraft, and one amazingly prescient passage about a failed program exactly like Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative refers to "the seventies" as a past decade. On the other hand, it can't be too long after World War II given that those events are still in living memory for many characters. So I more or less imagine it as a retro-future similar to that of 2001, perhaps in that timeline's 1990s, though we don't see much of the world beyond the confined surroundings of the Project.
The novel engages in some hilarious broad satire early on, in its account of how the message initially passes through the hands of a scientific crank, courtesy of a washed-up physicist who has built a predatory business procuring things for such people. The crackpot interprets it much as Richard Hoagland interpreted my amateurishly edited JPL photos of Iapetus, in this case correctly guessing that the thing is an extraterrestrial message, but taking the "message" to consist of a sequence of gaps in the transmission that are nothing but interruptions in operating the detection apparatus. And it doesn't help that the CIA is actually out to get him...
There's a bit that shows up in a lot of Lem's work, and this novel is no exception, in which a character attempts to turn to published science fiction for inspiration (much as has occasionally happened in real-life futurist projects) only to find that it's a bunch of crap and of no use whatsoever, an imaginatively puerile literature just projecting simple human fears and wishes onto the universe in a way that would have created stories of genies and devils in an earlier age. Of course, if you do this kind of extended diss in a science-fiction novel, you need the chops to back it up. Does Lem show it here? To some extent, yes--there's speculation put forth in this book that is weirder than what you'd find in most SF novels. But he sets the bar impossibly high. In the end, the hypothesis about the Senders that narrator Hogarth favors (without, he admits, conclusive evidence) is really no more sophisticated than what Clarke lays down in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lem leaves it open, of course, as to whether that's what Lem himself intended, or if it's just another emotional response thrown up by a very fallible human mind. It wouldn't be a proper Lem novel otherwise.
Opening matter
I think His Master's Voice (which I read in Michael Kandel's translation) is one of Stanisław Lem's greatest novels, but despite being quite short it's one that is initially very hard to get into, because it's a book that, like its subject, willfully refuses to coddle the reader, and it throws this somewhat resentfully in your face. Hogarth, the first-person narrator, is a cranky, self-loathing cuss and the book begins with a long preface in which he dissects what he calls his own inclination toward evil, for what seem to be very ordinary human failings (such as his inappropriate childhood reaction to the trauma of the death of his mother). He explicitly says he intends this as a preemptive self-defense measure, given the airing of dirty laundry he does later in the book.
What follows is a lengthy survey of a fictitious literature of the project, in the spirit of Lem's reviews and introductions of nonexistent books. This survey makes it clear, right at the outset, that there was never any Rosetta Stone making the whole extraterrestrial message clear, and Hogarth considers the project a failure.
The Project
That the book manages to build some suspense anyway in the following chapters is a tribute to Lem's skill as a writer. But the actual action of the story doesn't begin until a few chapters in, and it accelerates as it goes on. Hogarth arrives at the project, and is introduced to what's already been discovered prior to his arrival, which is actually a lot by scientific standards: the neutrino message itself seems to have a subtle ability to encourage the chemical processes leading to the emergence of life, and there's this strange synthetic goop codenamed "Frog Eggs" or "Lord of the Flies", which is somehow able to harness nuclear energy to power baffling chemical and physical transformations.
Naturally, the military is deeply interested in all this. Just as in 2001 (and in most of our popular folklore of alien contact), the continuing Cold War and the security state demand that any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence must be kept secret and perhaps plumbed for military advantage. They've bugged everyone, put all sorts of restrictions on the project workers, may well be running a parallel project of their own that they're not telling these civilian scientists about (while worrying about what the Soviet Bloc might or might not be doing along the same lines). There are many parallels to the Manhattan Project, some of whose alumni are on the team. There are pointed character portraits of some of the people involved: the smarmy government apparatchik riding herd over the whole thing, the gregarious but anxious polymath who is the Oppenheimer figure leading the scientists... and the physicist who confides to Hogarth that he has discovered an effect that might make Frog Eggs a world-ending weapon.
Then there's Hogarth's confidant Saul Rappaport, a Holocaust survivor. I recently learned that Rappaport's horrific experiences as a captive of the Nazis were more or less autobiographical, taken from Lem's personal experience as a Polish Jew during the war. These events are recounted by Hogarth out of sequence, early in the novel, and are both chilling and insightful into what they say about the psychology of genocides and oppressors the world over, that most of the Nazis had to physically brutalize the Jews in order to convince themselves that their victims were subhuman.
On the basis of all this, Hogarth is no more optimistic about his species than Lem is, which is not very. However, he is sympathetic to the unseen, perhaps long-extinct Senders--he thinks, though it is no more than a guess, that they do exist (not everyone on the project agrees!) and that the life-promoting aspect of the signal indicates that they are essentially benevolent. The comparison to the Monolith Builders of 2001: A Space Odyssey and their project to farm intelligence everywhere is obvious. Hogarth even proposes that the recipe for Frog Eggs serves a purpose similar to the Moon monolith of 2001, though to say more would be more of a spoiler than I really want to give here. They may even be more benevolent and less hard-headed than the Monolith Builders. Unlike in Clarke's novel, Hogarth doesn't think we passed their test.
Satire and background
Lem wrote a lot of disguised satire on the Communist regime he lived under by portraying his targets as aliens, or robots, or Americans. In the latter case, he had a justification that the exigencies of the Cold War had turned the two sides into funhouse-mirror images of one another anyway. That's undoubtedly going on here too, but that quasi-symmetry means that it works as a direct satire on the US as well--except that some of his American scientists have attitudes that really read to me as more like an erudite European. But it still works.
It's unclear precisely when His Master's Voice is supposed to be taking place. There's a fictional introduction with a date that is contemporary for Lem, in the 1960s, but there are other indications that this is taking place decades in the future--Hogarth is supplied with an interestingly imagined IBM personal computer (!) that definitely didn't exist in the Sixties, there's a fleeting reference to hypersonic passenger aircraft, and one amazingly prescient passage about a failed program exactly like Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative refers to "the seventies" as a past decade. On the other hand, it can't be too long after World War II given that those events are still in living memory for many characters. So I more or less imagine it as a retro-future similar to that of 2001, perhaps in that timeline's 1990s, though we don't see much of the world beyond the confined surroundings of the Project.
The novel engages in some hilarious broad satire early on, in its account of how the message initially passes through the hands of a scientific crank, courtesy of a washed-up physicist who has built a predatory business procuring things for such people. The crackpot interprets it much as Richard Hoagland interpreted my amateurishly edited JPL photos of Iapetus, in this case correctly guessing that the thing is an extraterrestrial message, but taking the "message" to consist of a sequence of gaps in the transmission that are nothing but interruptions in operating the detection apparatus. And it doesn't help that the CIA is actually out to get him...
There's a bit that shows up in a lot of Lem's work, and this novel is no exception, in which a character attempts to turn to published science fiction for inspiration (much as has occasionally happened in real-life futurist projects) only to find that it's a bunch of crap and of no use whatsoever, an imaginatively puerile literature just projecting simple human fears and wishes onto the universe in a way that would have created stories of genies and devils in an earlier age. Of course, if you do this kind of extended diss in a science-fiction novel, you need the chops to back it up. Does Lem show it here? To some extent, yes--there's speculation put forth in this book that is weirder than what you'd find in most SF novels. But he sets the bar impossibly high. In the end, the hypothesis about the Senders that narrator Hogarth favors (without, he admits, conclusive evidence) is really no more sophisticated than what Clarke lays down in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lem leaves it open, of course, as to whether that's what Lem himself intended, or if it's just another emotional response thrown up by a very fallible human mind. It wouldn't be a proper Lem novel otherwise.