Betrayal

His Master's Voice and The Sparrow make for an interesting back-to-back read. Both books are essentially stories faith and betrayal. Obviously each book has a different substrate, so to speak. I read HMV, and I think SCIENCE. I read The Sparrow, and think GOD. The ingredients dropped into these drastically different broths are really quite similar. Both books end up saying a lot about faith, and how it feels to be let down.

In His Master's Voice, the main character and the people around him believe that science (well, maybe not all sciences), when applied to a problem should be able to solve it. When scientists in the US discover a radio signal that might originate with another intelligent species, the US government whips together a compound of 2,000something scientists of all kinds to decode the message, or at least determine whether or not it is really alien. The fervor with which they attempt to tackle the puzzle matches that of the Jesuits in The Sparrow.

Often in The Sparrow, the Jesuits insist that God is in the "why." One would imagine than scientists only concern themselves with "what," but His Master's Voice is a different scenario than most physicists or mathematicians are used to. As the narrator likes to point out often enough, there very well might be another sentient race on the other side of the beam, and that adds another dimension to its study. They don't just want to know what the beam is, but why is it there at all?

While Lem didn't let his characters get as far as Russell took the Jesuits, they were both confronted with failure of sorts. Ultimately, they were left with nothing but there faith in something they could probably never know for sure. Were they betrayed by what they believed in? Could be, but I don't think that there is doubt that there is potential that that "betrayal" could strengthen that faith, temper it. Maybe? We'll have to see what happens in the next book.