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His Master's Voice  By  cover art

His Master's Voice

By: Stanislaw Lem
Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
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Publisher's summary

Here is a witty and inventive satire of "men of science" and their thinking, as a team of scientists races to decode a mysterious message from space. "I had the feeling that I was standing at the cradle of a new mythology. A last will and testament...we as the posthumous heirs of Them...."
©1998 Stanislaw Lem (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

What listeners say about His Master's Voice

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Excelent and entertaining

If you could sum up His Master's Voice in three words, what would they be?

Funny, entertaining, and intriguing.

What did you like best about this story?

That it worked so real and was entertaining.

Which scene was your favorite?

None specifically, but the introductions of some of the characters were brilliant

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

The deception

Any additional comments?

Cool book.

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6 people found this helpful

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His Master-piece

Any additional comments?

This is by far the best book of Stanislaw Lem and to me the best SCI-FI book in general.
One can think of it as a anti-Contact from Carl Sagan. Although there is not much action here, Lem manages to tell an interesting story and push his ideas about how small and silly we people are in face of real problems and storyteller communication.
The book is hard to read (listen) but it leaves you with a seance of real discovery once you're done. Your views on humanity will not be the same ever again.

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5 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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Waiting for something to happen

If there were a contest to see how many words could transpire before ANYTHING happened in a novel, this book would certainly be a contender.
Stanislaw Lem is undoubtedly one of the most intellectual and competent of Sci-Fi writers, but in His Master's Voice, it's as though he challenged himself to present absolutely nothing but ideas, devoid of action or physical reality. Unfortunately, this writing style leads to obsolete scientific perspectives in short order. I found I really didn't care about this book, or whether anything was eventually going to happen or not. No characters caught my fancy, no events peaked my interest.
Nick Sullivan's reading is fairly impressive, although I would like to hear him describe some real action, or maybe something funny. There is one down side to the recording—his voice is unnaturally compressed, and the sound of it gets fatiguing after only a short while.

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4 people found this helpful

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well intentioned but dull

dreadfully dull. I have to write scientific papers for a living. I escape to fiction in order not to read such droll writing. Having to listen to somebody read it somehow makes it even worse.

I "get" what Lem was trying to do here, but he didn't stick the landing. The Ijon Tichy and Pirx stories talk about the philosophy of science in far more effective ways.

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3 people found this helpful

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Amazing Sci-Fi, one of the best I’ve read

This book is amazing. If you like slow, thoughtful, and reflective fiction, with an extreme philosophical bent (particularly Philosophy of Language related to Russell and Frege and so on), this book is one of the best I have read. In my humble opinion, almost as good as The Dispossessed, which is one of my favorite sci fi books. This one is very philosophical, illustrating how truly difficult it would be to decipher a message (or if such a message could be discovered) from outer space. The protagonist, Peter Hogarth, is absolutely brilliant, being witty, arrogant, and extremely pessimistic on the discussion of language between cosmic beings. The only critique I can see reasonably is that if you aren’t familiar with much of philosophy of language, this book can be intimidating. Likely for myself, I became familiar with this book from my readings of this subject. Fantastic book.

10/10

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    1 out of 5 stars

Boring!

This book is described thus "Here is a witty and inventive satire of "men of science" and their thinking" There is nothing witty in this book. It is a long and weary drone about nothing. I wish I had one good thing to say, but I don't.

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2 people found this helpful

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Science, but not Science-Fiction (missing fiction)

I don't think I've ever encountered a book with more expressed intelligence about science - especially in terms of its history and the philosophy of science. Unfortunately, this book lacks the story and character element I so look forward to in novels. I struggled to listen to this - though I did finish it just to see if there was a surprise ending or something. There wasn't.

If this is ever turned into a movie, the script writers are gonna have one hell of a job to do to bring life to this thing.

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Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy

Genius is one of those words that is overused. It seems like it just does not take much effort to qualify for such an honorific these days. However, there are those who truly deserve the title and, of these, Stanisław Lem is certainly one. His Master’s Voice is a powerhouse of philosophy, effortlessly weaving atomic age rhetoric together with high concept, hard science. The questions and answers pondered in this work trigger shift after shift of one’s paradigm, to the point that it is quite impossible to see the world the same way after turning the last page. While the lack of hard hitting plot points and extremely dense prose may not appeal to all, this book’s through-line has more utility and applications than a Swiss Army knife. Lem has constructed a true work of genius with His Master’s Voice, a work that could only have been conceived by a true master of the craft.

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Amazing insight for its time

Forbear the first few chapters; later on you’ll see their utility. An extremely engaging hypothetical situation that - who knows? - may become a real one any day…

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why, would you be so cruel to my ears?

A story like the lottery. You want it to be a winner but you are enetivibly let down.

No matter how many words are counted and obscure adjectives are inserted I couldn't have been happier when the volume was muted.

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