The Voyager Record: A Transmission

Not sure what I expected, but this certainly wasn’t it! Just a rambling, meandering essay stretched out across enough pages to call it a “book.” Some pages have a couple paragraphs. Some pages have a few words. None of them are interesting.It is generally about Voyager’s Golden Record, but it veers off on so many tangents, you have to constantly check the cover to remember what the book is supposed to be about. It’s a fascinating subject for sure, but this book didn’t do it any justice. Don’t waste your time with it.

The Voyager mission, and more specifically the Golden Records they carried with them, provide for Millennials an intriguing problem: what does it mean to be the first generation to be born after the launch of craft that carry what was purported to be the cultural story of humanity? (As a late Gen-Xer, I'm aware that most of us didn't have much input on the story either, but at least we were represented.) Anthony Michael Morena's collection of lyrical essays examines the story behind that story, who chose the representative music and languages and why, and the budding relationship between Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. These essays cause us too to question now only how we should view the Golden Record but also how we should see any story that claims to be in any way global. A fascinating read, delicately balanced between history and Morena's reflections.

Loved it, especially the imaginative scenes hypothesizing aliens’ responses to the record. For example – “The aliens who find the record have no ears, no auditory system of any kind. They communicate through a series of signs that they tap on each other’s chests. One tap for yes, two taps for no. They have no audio technology because they never needed to listen to anything before. The data on the Golden Record that they can understand—the images—is all that makes sense next to the rest of this gibberish. But they want to understand, so they build two massive speakers, lay their curling heads between the boxes, and let the woofers rattle their brains.”

This was such an interesting hybrid-- I felt as though I was spinning around and around. I learned a lot about the Voyager, and his form and tecnique was amazing. I will be looking into the Rose Press myself, as this was his first novel. The pages were squared and the book resembled the same disc from the voyager! I highly recommend!

In 2020, when the whole world faces the threat of a pestilence, we might take comfort in knowing that a part of us is far away from this place. Morena's musings, poetry, and delightful thought experiments have the power to transport his readers to the beautiful valley of interstellar space. For those of you who read the book after the pandemic has either subsided or become a permanent fixture in human life, let the book, like the Golden Record itself, remind you of what humanity once was.