Like many SF readers, I’ve read HP Lovecraft’s short fiction. Like many Lovecraft readers, I’m fascinated by his grasping portrayals of cosmic beings beyond the ken of man’s understanding but still left a bit wanting by his various idiosyncrasies, stylistic and otherwise. Fortunately, Lovecraft isn’t the last word on unknowable alien beings; for my part, I’ve found the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem to exceed Lovecraft in their portrayal.
I’ve read several of Lem’s books, but two of them in particular concern the subject under discussion: His Master’s Voice (1968) and Solaris (1961). In His Master’s Voice, government scientists attempt to decode a message from a distant star. In Solaris, a living ocean on another planet causes strange phenomena aboard a research station.
“His Master’s Voice” is the code name given in the 1968 novel to a US government project to decode the alien transmission – discovered by a UFO kook – and, later, attempt to weaponize a certain discovery made based on a partial decoding. Reflecting the experience of the first-person narrator, HMV describes in sometimes exhausting detail the quotidian and bureaucratic aspects of the decoding project, held on a Los Alamos-like isolated desert compound because of its secrecy. A minority of the “information” known or discovered by the narrator concerns the actual contents, decoding attempts, and implications of the message from the stars as compared to these “overhead” details.
I had no idea about this supposedly famous image before searching for a cover image. An animal listening to a record is, of course, an an apt metaphor.
The researchers (many of whom are nuclear weapons specialists) discover several tantalizing details during their project – which clearly comes from an extremely advanced intelligence – such as that exposure to the signal stimulates life, broadly defined, but most dramatically the “frog eggs”, cell-like constructions that rely on nuclear rather than chemical reactions for energy. The idea that even these very real results somehow reflect a misapprehension of the message torments the narrator. Some of the less practical scientists advance wild theories. Ultimately, the bigger picture never falls into place.
The government seizes on the military potential of the frog eggs, but weaponization attempts prove futile. Clearly, the signal is meant to “promote life” and has “failsafes” to prevent even the most devilish monkeys from turning the tiniest scrap of information to undesirable ends. The decoding project founders: humanity doesn’t have the mental or organizational tools to understand the message and the government isn’t going to keep wasting money in trying (I always visualized the government in question being Uncle Sam, but of course Lem wrote behind the Iron Curtain. It doesn’t matter.)
The narrator suggests that the message and its sender are fundamentally benign. “Incomprehensible benignity” isn’t any stranger than incomprehensible malignity, and Lem does better than Lovecraft in portraying and emphasizing the incomprehensibility, which remains mysterious no matter what powers of perception or learning humans match against it (there is no Pickman or Randolph Carter here).
The alien message in HMV is, in certain respects, rather eerie. In Solaris, alien communication enters the realm of horror. The main character visits a research station on a planet with a single, intelligent inhabitant: a living ocean that covers almost all of the planet’s surface and has a demonstrated ability to influence nearby astronomical phenomena via unknown means. The main character is a psychiatrist, and it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to figure out his mission is to investigate the apparent breakdown of the stations’ three scientist-crewmen. When the narrator arrives, he finds the station and its inhabitants a shambles before waking up to find his deceased wife Rheya by the window of his cabin, still bearing the mark of the lethal injection with which she committed suicide many years earlier.
From Tarkovsky’s film adaptation, which I haven’t seen. I haven’t seen the George Clooney movie either.
I greatly appreciated Lem’s brevity here: he must have saved at least 200 pages by immediately acknowledging that yes, the “ocean” is alive and has the ability to powerfully affect the environment, and it created and sent the “visitors”.
The narrator finds it immediately apparent that Rheya is human only in appearance and memory. She is an uncanny creation – she is conscious of an inexplicable need to observe the narrator, Kelvin, at all times, among other things – drawn from Kelvin’s memory. One of the crewmen, Snow, darkly suggests Kelvin be thankful that Rheya is the subject of his most intense thoughts and memories. Neither of the other living men let him lay eyes on their own “visitors”. They are, it seems, are not so innocent as he…
An implication that “only the pure of heart can face Solaris” exists, but Lem doesn’t pursue that thread. Using some very deft exposition (in the time-honored “character goes to the library” format) he instead suggests that the visitors are an uncomprehending form of mimesis by the planet while revealing (for the reader, not the narrator, who should already know this) that “ocean” is only an analogy, and not a very good one, for even the physical form of Solaris’s native inhabitant – this begins early on through descriptions of the ocean being apparently composed of blood, while avoiding the word itself. As an example: the ocean builds extremely elaborate structures called “symmetriads” for no apparent reason. At the very end, an analogy is suggested between the uncanny visitors and humans copying a symmetriad before dropping it into the ocean.
Rendering of a symmetriad by artist Herbert Fahnrholz (http://www.hfahrnholz.de)
Perhaps the ocean learned something about humans through the instrument of the visitors; there is no way to know. The researchers aboard the station learned about the capability of the creature(?) they study, but Solaris’s psychology and experience remain completely mysterious. Meanwhile, the rest of humanity has discarded the mystery long ago as pointless and irrelevant if not uninteresting. Quite the contrast to Lovecraft’s bombastic declarations about powerful beings doing as they wilt.
I enjoyed Solaris much more than HMV, which got tedious in several spots despite being slightly shorter; HMV is a solid book but Solaris is a masterpiece. Both recommended.
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