Like many of the world's great scientific discoveries, the "letter from the stars" is discovered by sheer accident: a recording of a stream of neutrinos emitted from the region of Canis Minor, used--because of its presumed randomness--to generate random number tables for industrial use, proves not to be so random after all. In fact, it appears to repeat at a regular interval, a trait that should not appear if the source of the neutrino stream is natural. It is suggested that the neutrino stream may encode a message from a distant civilization; from this suggestion all the resources of the American military are marshaled in the distant Nevada desert, where hundreds of the world's top scientists are dedicated to a project codenamed, with a bit humor, "His Master's Voice."
Hogarth, the pugnacious mathematician whose reflections on the Project are recorded here, tells us from the very beginning that His Master's Voice has been a failure: "The reader who has plowed his way to this point and is waiting, with growing impatience, to be led into the inner sanctum of the famous enigma, in the hope that I will regale him with thrills and chills every bit as delightful as those he experiences viewing horror movies, I advise to set my book down now, because he will be disappointed." Only Stanislaw Lem could write a book about first contact in which no one is really contacted, or a book about aliens in which there are no aliens--and perhaps there never were. His Master's Voice, rather, becomes a treatise on exactly why translating the neutrino message is so impossible. Lem offers several deft metaphors to illustrate the disadvantage of our knowledge and our capabilities. Once we are like amoebas, receiving a telegram about a human funeral; next we are like ancient Egyptians trying to interpret a modern paper about the chemical composition of Amenhotep's funeral mask.
Science-minded folks, sometimes a little too glibly, like to say that there are no failures in science. Our knowledge is built on many such experimental failures. But such an attitude, and such glibness, are predicated on the perspective of those who have little interest in the way knowledge is really accumulated. His Master's Voice is, above everything else, a treatise on the function and practice of science, its history and limitations. Unlike people that follow the "I F*cking Love Science" Facebook page, Lem offers a fairly jaundiced view of the way science operates: balkanized into hermetic pursuits, ways of seeing the world that do not touch, and tainted always by the bias of the observer. Several fascinating hypotheses emerge from His Master's Voice--perhaps the neutrinos are a message from a dead universe, or perhaps it isn't a message at all, but a kind of cosmic excretion, like urine--but none will or can be disentangled from the hypothesizer. When knowledge is in short supply, Lem shows, what is human in us will fill in the gaps.
In many ways, His Master's Voice is reflection of the story of science in the 20th century: the great paradigm shifts of relativity and quantum theory, and the emergence of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which more or less did away with the idea that we can ever understand the universe from a position of true objectivity. (No doubt a real scientist would quibble with this formulation, but I think I got it more or less.) But it also reflects how the greatest discoveries of the 20th century became fodder for human history's bloodiest projects. One of the peculiar traits of the "letter" is that seems to be both a recipe for life and a catalyst for life: from the snippet that the researchers are able to "decode" organic compounds are created; these organic compounds in turn change and grow when subjected to the neutrino stream itself. For this reason some researchers believe the "letter" is meant to encourage life to grow throughout the universe. But these traits threaten to destroy life, also; Hogarth and his peers discover that these compounds are capable of propagating nuclear fission at a distance--imagine pressing a button that could release a nuclear blast anywhere on earth, of any size, without warning.
Is this property intentional? Is the "letter" the instructions for a weapon? Or is it "the kind of error, whereby someone reads, in a kitchen recipe, the word 'amanita' instead of 'amandine,' and concocts a dish that sends all his guests to their graves?" The question, like nearly all the questions surrounding the Project, will never be answered, even as it threatens the end of the earth. Lem seems to tell us that the process that led to the atom bomb was not simply the work of good scientists perverted by those with evil intentions; war, like science, is a process in which we take part but which we do not control:
A perfect equilibrium of forces, an exact equals-sign between them, was a state so improbable as to be virtually impossible. One could arrive at such a balance only by coincidence. Social fusion was one series of process, and the acquiring of instrumental knowledge was another series.
That is, perhaps the "letter" is a kind of poisoned present: for a society advanced enough in both social fusion and instrumental knowledge, it acts as an invitation to join a brotherhood in the stars. For a society advanced enough in instrumental knowledge but deficient in social fusion, like ours, it will rub us out before we become a threat. This is only one of many theories, and not the one that the more optimistic Hogarth prefers. But if it's the right one, we needn't have worried; for now, we haven't proved smart enough to end ourselves.
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