The novel “The Hercules Text” by Jack McDevitt was published for the first time in 1986.

Abnormal cosmic signals from a pulsar are detected by the Hercules project’s radio telescope, causing considerable excitement among NASA scientists. Harry Carmichael works at the agency’s administration and needs to get the details explained by the scientists, who tell him that the signals’ characteristics point to an artificial nature.

The signals cease for some time and then restart with the sending of a considerable amount of data. Their decipherment reveals a great variety of information with mathematical formulas and other scientific data but with the passage of time also what seem philosophical texts and poems arrive, whose translation turns out much more complex and ambiguous.