His Master's Voice
"Twenty-five hundred scientists have been herded into an isolated site in the Nevada desert. A neutrino message of extraterrestrial origin has been received, and, under the surveillance of the Pentagon, the scientists labor on His Master's Voice, the secret program set up to decipher the transmission."--BOOK JACKET. "Among them is Peter Hogarth, an eminent mathematician whose posthumous diary makes up the novel. Hogarth joins His Master's Voice after all efforts to decode the message prove futile and, after an early success, gives up on the project to pursue clandestine research into the so-called TX effect. Hogarth comes to realize that the TX effect could lead to the construction of the ultimate weapon - a fission bomb - and that such knowledge must not be allowed into the hands of the military."--BOOK JACKET. "Originally published in 1968, His Master's Voice takes to task the military takeover of scientific research, Cold War - era politics, and humanity's perpetual capacity for (self-)destruction. It remains a mordant satire on scientific microworlds and the monstrous political and military systems bankrolling them."--BOOK JACKET.
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- Blindsight (and the excellent sequel, Echopraxia) is indeed great.
Solaris by Lem is perhaps the one above all. Lem wrote several of these "inscrutable alien first contact" novels: His Master's Voice, The Invincible, Fiasco, and Eden are basically all variations on this theme, each one unique and highlighting a different aspect of humans' inability to understand the universe. The last three are a little dated now, but still enjoyable to read. HMV is rather dry, a Borgesian essay on an investigation into an alien signal, with lots of references to fictional scientific papers. (Len also wrote two collections of very Borgesian essays that are basically reviews of fictional books: A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude. They're interesting and funny, but I wouldn't put them among his most entertaining work.)
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is also a masterpiece. They also have a few stories about unseen aliens manipulating the history of humanity by placing traps or transforming humans into infiltrators. The Max Kammerer books (e.g. Beetle in the Anthill) involve this storyline and are very good, probably not well known today.
I tried Tchaikovsky (both Children of Time and Shroud) and found him to be completely unengaging as a writer. Just really dull writing and flat characters. Watts and Reynolds are much better writers. Watts in particular can really pack a punch.
- For a somber, deeply intellectual view of what could happen, I can't recommend enough Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_%28novel%...
"Given that our civilization is unable to assimilate well even those concepts that originate in human heads when they appear outside its main current, although the creators of those concepts are, after all, children of the same age—how could we have assumed that we would be capable of understanding a civilization totally unlike ours, if it addressed us across the cosmic gulf?"
- Comparing to old sci fi. (For anyone who still cares!) Chiang can be pitched as today's Stanislaw Lem. (And maybe a modern PK Dick but with much less insanity.) I'm thinking especially of His Master's Voice, which is my favorite Lem story and maybe his most Chiangian.
Very cerebral and great storytelling. The Chiang story where the mathematician discovers the horrible truth that 1+1=3 while her husband discovers he doesn't love her is ... I think Lem (or Dick) would be proud to have pulled that off.
Note: someone else commented that Chiang often seems dryer than PK Dick, which can make C feel like more work to read. Maybe that might be true sometimes :). But maybe it's only on the surface. If that makes sense. Chiang is condensed. Dick is ... not condensed.
- Stanislaw Lem was far too much of a genius to believe his works were directed by any sort of committee, communist or otherwise.
He is still overlooked far too much - people seem to regard Solaris as his only work of note. But he has so works, all bizarre, imaginative, and insightful. Fiasco and His Master’s Voice are two of my lesser known favorites.
- For me:
- His Master's Voice by Stanisław Lem
- Permutation City (and the whole trilogy) by Greg Egan
- Anathem by Neal Stephenson
- I'd recommend Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, or maybe His Master's Voice.
You'll get a fascinating blend of psychological realism and eastern-euro science fiction, which I find fascinating (it is much more analog/mechanical, and also refreshingly real about scientific progress / knowledge creation vis a vi the human condition).
They are both rather short, also.
