“In ‘His Master’s Voice,’ a 1968 sci-fi novel by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem, a team of scientists and scholars convened by the American government try to decipher a neutrino signal from outer space. They manage to translate a fragment of the signal’s information, and a couple of the scientists use it to construct a powerful weapon, which the project’s senior mathematician fears could wipe out humanity. ... In a cycle of melancholy sci-fi novels written in the late nineteen-fifties and sixties—’Eden,’ ‘Solaris,’ ‘Return from the Stars,‘ ‘Memoirs Found in a Bathtub,‘ ‘The Invincible,’ and ‘His Master’s Voice’—Lem suggested that life in the future, however remote the setting and however different the technology, will be no less tragic. Astronauts disembark from a spaceship into the aftermath of an atrocity; scientists face an alien intelligence so unlike our own that their confidence in the special purpose of human life falters. ...”
2011 June: Stanisław Lem, 2017 March: Pilot Pirx (1979-1982), 2017 April: The Star Diaries (1971), 2018 February: His Master's Voice (1968), 2021 December: A Century in Stanislaw Lem’s Cosmos
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