A review by jaccarmac
His Master's Voice by Stanisław Lem

adventurous challenging funny mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

The introduction plus two chapters of His Master's Voice provide a litmus test for the novel. I was enchanted but uncertain of Lem's ability to land the project. Happily, it was entirely successful, though not via plot; Complaints of HMV's plotlessness are really the beginning: If you don't get it post-bloviating I can't imagine you'll ever start. Hogarth really does bloviate. The man's not unreliable in the textbook sense, but spends far too much ink justifying himself in the introduction and then keeps going. The first hilarious turn of the book. And the final such progression: From a metaphor two degrees removed from wine to urine. The payoff of assertions without explanation is, of course, for them to be dropped by the end. The justification for treating the signal as non-noise sneaks up, happens in fact out of the narrative time established for it. The dissolution leaves room for the novel to end as psychological or metafictional study, with none of the possible annoyances of those forms. Science fiction has been a subject of the narrator, after all, one of the things that don't really matter, the things with which Lem gives his story novel scale. As a silly mortal whose mortality, at least, remains distinct from language, I take solace in the sparks-between that seem more-or-less accessible.