Stanisław Lem (1921–2006)

This is getting 2 stars only because it's amazing that one person could know this amount of science and I liked the ending. It was not a fun read, there wasn't a single female in the entire book, there was almost no characterization, only ideas. If you enjoy reading paragraphs like the one below for 300 pages then definitely check this book out, otherwise just ignore it. Definitely my least favorite Lem novel and I've read at least 6 or 7 so far. I would have never finished it if it wasn't on audio.

"The performance of nuclear fuels at near-light speeds fell, because the lion's share of
the kinetic energy was expended in the propelling flame that beat uselessly into space and only a
small fraction of the liberated power was transmitted to the rocket. A photon drive, also,
required the ship to be loaded with millions of tons of matter and antimatter as its annihilative
fuel. The flowstream engines, on the other hand, used interstellar hydrogen. Hydrogen atoms,
though ubiquitous, were so dispersed in galactic space that the engines of this type began to work
effectively only at speeds above 30,000 kilometers a second, and reached full capacity only when
approaching the speed of light. A ship with such a drive could therefore neither take off from a planet itself, being too massive, nor by itself achieve the velocity at which the atoms falling into the intakes of the reactors condensed sufficiently for ignition."… (more)

First, few words about the audiobook itself.
The technical quality is outstanding. The performance is coherent with the intellectual, somewhat pedantic voice of the scientist narrating his own memoirs, and, thanks to all gods, it comes from a pleasant, deep voice.

This said, let's talk contents.
In the last few considerations, the narrating voice muses about the mixed blessing of not being capable of total empathy. The whole novel unravels the attempts of the best minds amongst humanity to first decipher, then simply to intellectually (and physically...) survive what seems a message from an intelligent cosmic civilisation, with the narrator oscillating between the temptation of creating a mythology for himself and humanity and the awareness of the inanity of such an outcome.
Part of a series of novels centred on the impossibility of communication between alien civilisations, this book is typical Lem: apparently slow and next to plot-less, it unfolds via logical necessity from premise to result, at the same time unravelling under the weight of contradictions too complex from the human mind to wrap itself around.
This unravelling reflects in the marvelous inconsistency in the pace of the narration: from the narrator's childhood as preface fragment of a memoir, to the events leading to the Manhattan-project-like effort at translation, to the endless musings on the nature of the effort itself, to the quasi-spy-story with scientists opposing the Pentagon's war hounds, to the further musings shedding a new light on the childhood memories of the preface fragment and on its very reason for being, the novel seems to tumble down in a disordered avalanche only to gather itself in a coherent whole in the last chapter. We are left with a reflection on the advantages of being more similar to snails than we would like, since we cannot be similar enough to beings who may as well be gods.

WARNING: since one is a hopeless sloth, you may find the same review on Audible. Don't hate. Words come difficult enough for one to optimise their diffusion, once uttered. Thank you for understanding.… (more)