This is one of the best novels about science and scientists that I have ever read. The discovery of a heretofore unknown neutrino interaction leads to a new era in neutrino astronomy, and one day an indecipherable, repeating message from space is received in the neutrino stream. Once it is belatedly recognized as such, it sparks a large, secret project in the American desert, bent on unraveling the message. But the more that is discovered about it, the more enigmatic, vital, and potentially destructive it seems to become.
The novel itself is written as a first-person narrative, the project memoir of a somewhat irascible mathematician named Peter Hogarth. It takes a while to get started; there is a long preface in which Hogarth dissects his own personality, and a couple of rambling introductory chapters, one of which reviews a fictitious literature on the subject. It really gets moving with the brilliantly satirical Chapter 3, in which the message passes through the hands of a scientific crackpot whose delusions happen to be almost, but not quite, correct. After that, the narrative accelerates: Hogarth himself arrives at the project site, and learns that two research groups have independently managed to translate part of the message into a chemical formula for a substance with strange and remarkable properties. Then, he and a physicist make a series of disturbing discoveries about what might be done with the stuff. In between, hypotheses about the origin of the message and revelations about its own properties fly like sparks.
His Master's Voice might sound like one of Lem's most remote and forbidding novels, being, as it is, a novel about cosmology and the possible form and motives of extraterrestrial intelligence--and even more so given that, at the beginning of the book, we are told that the true secret of the message was never discovered! It manages to fascinate, nevertheless, and the reason is that between all of the exposition about contradictory cosmological theories, each more spectacular than the last, the novel remains grounded in strongly built characterizations of scientists, philosophers, bureaucrats, military officers, and even pseudoscientists and the people who humor them.