Lem, Stanislaw (1968). His Master’s Voice. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (199 pp.)

This classic story is presented as a single scientist’s memoir of a project he worked on long ago. There is virtually no dialog, no action, no character development, and almost no plot. Furthermore, the memoir is written at a high level of diction, with a rich vocabulary, including phrases in untranslated Latin. That’s the warning: it’s probably not for the average sci-fi/space opera fan.

The story is somewhat similar to Carl Sagan’s Contact. Lem writes in Polish and HMV appeared in English in 1983; Contact came out in 1985. In both cases, a signal is received on earth, from space, that looks like a communication, and the challenge is to decode the message. In both stories, various mathematical transforms are applied to the data and various assumptions are made. In Sagan’s story, the signal turns out to be the plans for a spaceship.

Lem’s story is not so obvious. First, there is the question of whether the recording is a signal at all. Maybe it was just an anomaly in ordinary neutron activity. This raises a crucial question: What is a “signal” and how would you recognize one? Is a signal strictly in the mind of the beholder, or would there be something identifiable about a phenomenon that would tell you it was intended as a signal? How do you discriminate a signal from noise without knowing something about the intentionality of the sender?

Prior to sending sending the two Voyager spacecraft into extrasolar journeys in the 1970s,  they were fitted with signs, symbols and recordings from earth, in case any alien intelligence should ever intercept one of the craft (though that probability is indistinguishable from zero). Carl Sagan was one of the designers of the “Messages from Earth,” Which included diagrams, pictures, and a sound recording. Disregarding the recording (which was like a pressed vinyl record album, depending on the piezoelectric effect for playback), and just looking at the pictures and diagrams, I remember marveling at how naive the assumptions were. (See https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html for a description of the Voyager messages).

Why would an alien assume that the pictures were pictures and not random scratches?  If they did see pictures, how would they know which end was “up” (assuming “up” had any meaning to an alien). Messages contain no meaning in themselves. They only contain meaning if you know something about what the other party intends. Which is exactly what we would not know about an alien, and what they would not know about us, by definition.

Not surprisingly, Sagan’s novel glossed over these philosophical difficulties. Lem doesn’t. In Contact, the signal could be transformed mathematically into a graphical representation that formed a perfect circle. Surely that could not be random noise! But why not?  Are aliens subject to Gestalt-formation in visual perception as we are?  Must be, the Sagan novel implies.  Far more likely, we would not recognize a signal in the noise because patterns are opinions, not facts. SETI researchers take note. Lem struggles with the question of what constitutes a signal.

Once you decide you have a signal, how do you interpret it? It’s not merely a matter of cryptography because you have no reference criteria. In Lem’s story, the scientists find what seems to be a pattern, though it constitutes only 4% of what they think is the total signal, and they make some very earthbound assumptions about what the pattern could mean, finally inferring a quasi-biological interpretation whose purpose remains a mystery.

Lem’s narrator goes on at great length (and tediously, some would say) to question whether or not they were even on the right track, knowing absolutely nothing of the alien culture. He gives this example: If you inserted a random computer punch card into a player piano, it could cause some sounds to be played, but would it be meaningful to interpret the music, even if you thought you detected a musical phrase?

In World War II, British cryptographers noticed that at the end of every Enigma-encoded message, the Germans had appended a short, identical pattern. What could it be? “Heil Hitler!” was an easy guess and just that little phrase turned out to be the Rosetta Stone for the entire code. You need something like that to decode a message. You have to know something about the mind of the sender. We have no such key for the ancient language, Linear A, for example, and it remains untranslated to this day.

As Lem’s narrator considers one hypothesis after another about what assumptions should and should not be made about the signal, the reader’s mind is whiplashed from side to side and front-to-back. What can you guess about alien epistemology that’s not merely a projection of unexamined human assumptions? Anything?

These are the sorts of questions that make reading this difficult, wordy, sometimes tedious sci-fi non-novel very enjoyable to someone who likes psi-fi. It’s all about the psychology of technology.