Instant Mesagging, Light-Years Away
Imagine if intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe could send us a message. What would it say? And more importantly — could we even read it? Such is the premise of Stanislaw Lem’s novella “The Master’s Voice” [Głos Pana, NWU Press, 1969].
Lem, the celebrated Polish author of the mid-late 20th century, puts his tale in the mouth of an astro-physics professor with a heightened moral sensibility. He’s not the “mad professor” persay, though he thinks he is, and the book opens with an extended warning to the reader regarding his own proclivity to act immorally. Buyer beware! Such an opening leads the reader to suspect the professor, if given the chance, will use the decoded message for his own illegitimate ends.
On the contrary, when the professor discovers a partial interpretation of the distant message gives humanity the unprecedented ability to warp a nuclear explosion through a space-time hole (and say blow up Moscow without the Kremlin suspecting), the professor collaborates with his lab buddies to render the device benign. They do, and in the denouement, Lem exhausts his polemic on the philosophical implications of light-year-long instant-messaging. Can we even communicate with distant beings? After all, their message would reach us long after its been sent. Thus the away message: “Parker is idle” would have to read: “The late Mr. Snyder’s grandchildren are no longer living.”
What’s it bear on *process*? Lem has dealt himself the book-jacket challenge: to write a predominantly philosophical treatise in the cloak-and-dagger guise of a Los Alamos suspense novel. Readers will come onto the book for its page-turning premise. They’ll walk away with a discourse on astro-philosophy and the nature of evil. But they won’t be disappointed. The work is valuable for its intimate and detailed cold-war portrait of life in a Los Alamos laboratory as perceived from behind the curtain.
His subject matter — a hypothetical message — presents one acute dillemma. What to do with the senders? There is, after all, a second half of the book somewhere “out there.” Lem leaves its to his reader to conjecture; *process* would have conceptualized the world, or even hinted at its unique character. After all, these mysterious beings are as interesting to a 21st century reader as Lem’s cold-war tale with geo-political underpinnings even more remote than the distant planet.
*process* gives it [6 out of 10], and recommends it to readers for its enigmatic digression into a man facing the firing squad — the escaping general compels himself to sustain a highly implausible belief in reincarnation for 15-20 minutes to distract himself from the fear of his impending execution. Brilliantly conceived, by the master’s own literary voice!
