Stanisław Lem

His Master's Voice is a science fiction novel written by Stanisław Lem, first published in 1968. It was translated into English by Michael Kandel in 1983. It is a densely philosophical first contact story about an effort by scientists to decode, translate and understand an extraterrestrial transmission. The novel …

These wickedly authentic introductions to twenty-first-century books preface tomes on teaching English to bacteria, using animated X-rays to create "pornograms," and analyzing computer-generated literature through the science of "bitistics." "Lem, a science fiction Bach, plays in this book a googleplex of variations …