His Master's Voice

Discovery of a unknown neutrino interaction begins a new era in neutrino astronomy. An indecipherable message is repeated in the neutrino stream. Once belatedly recognized, it sparks a secret project in the American desert, bent on decipherment. The more discovered, the more enigmatic, vital & potentially destructive it seems. The novel is written as 1st-person narrative, the project memoir of irascible mathematician, Peter Hogarth. There's a preface in which he dissects his own personality & two rambling introductory chapters, one of which reviews fictitious literature on the subject. It gets moving with a satirical 3rd chapter, in which the message passes thru the hands of a scientific crackpot whose delusions are almost correct. The narrative accelerates as Hogarth arrives at the project & learns two research groups have independently managed to translate part of the message into a chemical formula for a substance with remarkable properties. He & a physicist make a series of disturbing discoveries about what might be done with the stuff. Hypotheses about the origin of the message & revelations about its own properties fly like sparks. His Master's Voice might sound like one of Lem's most remote & forbidding novels, being about cosmology & the form & motives of extraterrestrial intelligence--& even more so given that, at the outset, we're told the true secret of the message was never discovered! It manages to fascinate, nevertheless. The reason is that between all of the exposition about contradictory cosmological theories, each more spectacular than the last, it's grounded in well-built characterizations of scientists, philosophers, bureaucrats, military officers & even pseudoscientists & their followers.