Rating: 
Summary: His Master's Voice Indeed
Review: Not for nothing did Lem named this book, and the Project, HMV. The helplesness of the greatest Human minds against an uhuman message is not at all different from the helplesness of the dog in the face of the gramophone.A word of causion, though. Altough Lem is depicted as a "Science Fiction" author, _HMV_ is not your regular "Arthur C. Clark"-like book. Dont expect racing starships or multi-handed aliens; it's a book about mankind, and it's failures, and is even more novel then Asimov's _I, Robot_, or Lem's own _Solaris_.
Rating: 
Summary: Pushesing the boundaries of the imaginable
Review: This book is a confrontations of our limitations, a powerful reminder of cosmic magnitudes. I notice that facets of this book tie into another brilliant work, Fiasco, also by Lem. The book warns that people expecting action should put the book down. I frankly don't know what he was talking about, I found my palms sweating, I found myself bursting into laughter - this is an exciting book for those willing to engage themselves intellectually.
Rating:
Summary: Pushesing the boundaries of the imaginable
Review: This book is a confrontations of our limitations, a powerful reminder of cosmic magnitudes. I notice that facets of this book tie into another brilliant work, Fiasco, also by Lem. The book warns that people expecting action should put the book down. I frankly don't know what he was talking about, I found my palms sweating, I found myself bursting into laughter - this is an exciting book for those willing to engage themselves intellectually.
Rating:
Summary: More than just a satire of the scientific establishment
Review: This book needs desperately to be reprinted. Though not as overtly humorous as many of Lem's other books, or as other scientific satires (Arrowsmith, The Black Cloud), it is nonetheless supreme in its genre. Its humor resides in the blindness of its characters; only one person in the book recognizes this, and his commentary probes concepts that are as disturbing as those revealed by Galileo and Darwin. Namely, that human intellect has fundamental limitations, and is more than likely to be utterly unable to comprehend the product of truly alien intelligence. Lem explores these themes in other books as well, but in not nearly as robust a manner.
Rating:
Summary: As fiction it's dry, but worth the read nonetheless
Review: While I recognize the brilliance in the philosophy of science that underlies this book, as a work of fiction it seemed to me to drag. Readers who prefer books in which things "happen" may begin to lose patience with this one before finishing it - I had mixed feelings about it myself but read through to the end. Readers who are attracted to philosophy portrayed in a creative way will love it. I wish the author had found a way to present the philosophy within a somewhat more compelling story, but in the end it's impossible to not admire this book for it's sheer intellectual power alone.
Rating:
Summary: an incredibly intelligent read
Review: Wow. HIS MASTER'S VOICE, as others have alluded, it's an incredibly intelligent read. Thick in it's diction, it demands your attention, to say the least. Admittedly, I had a difficult time with the first 50 pages or so, but I became completely engrossed by the halfway point. Told in essentially diary format, HMV tells the story of one scientist's involvement in a secret goverment project established to decipher what appears to be a message from possibly superior, intelligent life. While most scientists spiral their theories into the fantastic, ours manages to poke sensible holes in each assertion...unfortunately escalating the Project's sense of hopelessness and ineptitude along the way. Somehow, the scientists manage to produce possibly random effects from the recorded signal, but what does it all mean in the grander scheme? It's a wonderful moment when the main character finallly establishes his own theory of the signal, the effect, and his own short-comings. I loved it.
Rating:
Summary: Fiction Science
Review: Written in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War and the Space Race, "His Master's Voice" is about a top secret project to decode a neutrino transmission sent by an alien civilization. The project is sponsored by the military in the hopes of making discoveries that can be utilized for the construction of advanced weapons. The narrator is one of the scientists.
The book has all the virtues and vices associated with Lem's science fiction. On the plus side, Lem constructs detailed speculations about man and the cosmos on the basis of real ideas from epistemology, evolutionary biology, and systems theory. There is also much mordant satire at the expense of bureaucrats, soldiers, and the arms race. On the down side, the writing is constipated, the characters are thin, and the narrative bogs down repeatedly when Lem puts mini-essays into the mouth of his narrator.
It's hard to avoid the feeling that polymath Lem was more interested in the ideas than in the story. It's also hard to know whether his ideas are genuinely mind-expanding or just amazingly clever. He should have written philosophy rather than science fiction.
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