When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Stanislaw Lem. I read everything that was translated into Slovene. As an adult, I am still fan of Tarkovski's Solaris. So, I've listened to this book in an audio version on the way to work. Nearly 15hours of stuff. I like science fiction books that progress slowly and this is one of them. The production from Audio Frontiers was high quality stuff, reading was convincing and clear. The content however, is very much crap, however. Stanislaw can be repetitive, in about 5 different places of the book he goes on about how being in weightlessness can be tricky. Yes, i can imagine. But much worse, for all the musing about anthropocentricity that main characters indulge in, the story falls into anthropocentric traps really badly many times. For example, when they finally establish contact with foreign civilization using some sort of code (it is not explained modulo that it is transmitted by laser), they beam to our earthlings something like "Welcome. We expect you in peace". Come on, 'welcome' and 'peace' are utterly human concepts, they do not transcend species. Surely, we could agree on the value of pi or fine structure constant, but give me a break with welcomes...
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