“His Master’s Voice” by Stanislaw Lem
October 12th
The absurdity of people who think that we (as a human race) might have any ability to establish contact with other life forms is on the perfect display in this book. I am going now through a binge reading of Stanislaw Lem’s works and my mind is working in overdrive. There are two sides to Lem — funny Lem, writer of “Tales of Pirx the Pilot” and “The Cyberiad” and the serious Lem, writer of “Solaris” and “Memories Found in the Bathtub”. This book “His Master’s Voice” is firmly in the second, serious oeuvre of Lem and an absolute classic of hard Sci-Fi. It is curious that Stanislaw Lem, even though is well known to Sci-Fi aficionados is not held in the same esteem (especially in the USA) as Robert Heinlein or Philip K. Dick, or Isaac Asimov — and he should be in my opinion.
As to the main subject of this book — the possibility of communication with alien civilizations — the answer is unpleasant and bleak, there is simply no way to establish communication between different species on vastly unequal development levels. This book should be required reading for all those Hollywood types that come up with utter drivel like “The Arrival” or “Close Encounters of Third Kind” that tries to pass as “scientific” in any way. Aliens will not arrive in their spaceships and contact political leaders (or as is a common theme just an American leader), they will not share their technology or science with us. It is preposterous and downright pathetically parochial to think otherwise — we only have one frame of reference as to how culture develops. To think that other alien cultures might share anything that we do as humans is dangerously anthropocentric. We don’t know anything about any possible alien cultures — what are their morals, ethics, politics, or even if they have any. And that book shows the impossibility of any possible alien contact very clearly.
