His Master's Voice book cover

His Master's Voice

sci-fi
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Who recommended this book

Andrej Karpathy
Andrej Karpathy

Director of AI at Tesla

5
mentions
Finished first Stanislaw Lem book "His Master's Voice"; unique, fun, like!
Andrej Karpathy
2016-01-03onx.com
His Master's Voice is probably best described as a grown up version of Carl Sagan's Contact. This is a very unique sci-fi, in a good way. It is first and foremost an ambitious and humbling philosophical treatise on humanity and our place in the universe. This is then grounded in a short story about a team of scientists in a project similar to the Manhattan Project who are trying to decipher a discovered message encoded in a neutrino signal. The book raises several intriguing possibilities about the nature of the message and its content, but ultimately (and I like this part) the mystery remains unresolved. The book is not a silly story about establishing communications with aliens. It is a story about our failure to do so and especially about why such aspirations could in retrospect be considered naive. I did not agree with some of the specific arguments raised in the book and I think the story was not as fleshed out as it could have been, but I admire what Stanisław Lem tried to do wit
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