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His Master's Voice, Stanislaw Lem, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich:
I checked this out of the library out of curiosity. It's one of Lem's serious SF novels, which made me apprehensive, but apparently my first experience with Solaris really was due to the translation. Once again, Michael Kandel renders Lem painlessly into English.
The story: A beam of neutrinos pulsing in a repeating pattern is detected, apparently from a star in Canis Minor, and an effort on the scale of the Manhattan project, code-named His Master's Voice, is mounted to decipher it. The story is told from the viewpoint of Peter E. Hogarth, a mathematician called in after the project had been under way for a while, who concludes from an analysis of the signal that it is a set of instructions for the construction of... something. Precisely what that might be is never discovered, though other results are extracted from the "letter", amazing and baffling. After a paranoiac interlude where Hogarth and others believe one discovery might be the basis of an ultimate weapon, he suspects that the senders have designed the signal in an inhumanly clever way so that no civilization but those they deem suitable can ever correctly decode it.
I liked this about as much as Tales of Pirx the Pilot, and a little less than The Chain of Chance, to compare it to other non-satirical novels by Lem. He comes up with a genuinely tantalizing enigma, but the mediations on the process of science in the context of the human condition, while cogent enough, aren't really new to me. You can read Algis Budrys's Who? or even Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed for an equally vivid presentation of a scientific world view.
Catalyst, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Tachyon:
This reads like a young adult novel, except that it's rather explicit for that category. On the other hand, perhaps the criteria have changed in the last decade or so.
Anyway, Kaslin is running away from a bully when he slips down a rabbit hole into a network of caverns, full of inventively strange technology and comparatively conventional aliens. Even their disregard for the sexual mores of the drug-cartel planet of Chuudoku is conventional, by tabloid news standards. He gets away from the bully Histly, but then the relentless press of circumstances and Kaslin's mother drag him back into her embrace, which is scarcely less alarming now that she suddenly likes him, if only because he's become an involuntary ambassador to the aliens, and hence a ready source of power for her and her wealthy, well-connected family. The aliens, however, are plenty powerful in their own right, and have their own ideas about things. Between them and the contending factions on the human side, Kaslin manages to scrape out a little self-determination for himself.
The setting is intriguing, a planet that is pretty much run as a commercial operation, but not as an absolutist tyranny. You can run a company town that way, but a company planet is not so easy, I guess. The details of how it works aren't available, and perhaps they're irrelevant to the purpose of a more-than-usually wacky coming-of-age story.
In other news, the Roomba was no longer running its battery down when set loose on the bedroom or the living room, with correspondingly little to be found in its dirt collection compartment or dust filter. I briefly entertained myself with the fantasy that my apartment is clean enough that it has no work to do, but on Wednesday morning I cleaned it and blasted it inside and out with difluoroethane, started it up on the living room and when I came that night the power indicator light was blinking red, as usual. I guess some sensor or other was blocked.
