Solaris

Lem builds a complicated philosophical novel around one of the hoariest chestnuts in science-fiction, the "first contact" between humans and an alien life-form. What happens, Lem asks himself, if the alien life-form is so different from us in every possible way that we find we have nothing meaningful to say to each other, and no way to express it even if we had something to say?

Astrophysicists and planetary scientists have been studying the planet Solaris for decades, having first noticed it because it is in a stable three-body orbit that appears to contravene the laws of physics. It seems that the planet's "ocean" is actively correcting the orbit to optimise conditions for itself, and scientists are eventually forced to the conclusion show more that the ocean itself is a planet-sized organism. Through a new arrival on the planet, the psychologist Dr Kelvin, Lem takes us through the development of human ideas about Solaris. Which parallel, in curious ways, the history of human ideas about ourselves and our own world...

This wasn't really what I was expecting from a novel about an alien planet: the foreground story about the research station and the strange events that Kelvin encounters there is really only a skeleton, and the bulk of the book turns out to be a sophisticated, ironic meditation on the history of ideas (and the follies of science) that wouldn't have been out of place in Swift. And some unexpectedly poetic language when describing the strange and beautiful world of Solaris and the human attempts to impose meaning on it. Very interesting.

In passing, but of course quite irrelevant, it was fun to find a lot of very 1960s peculiarities in Lem's description of the "future" - the research station's library is full of paper books and microfilms, the electronics they use has to warm up its tubes before it does anything, they record electronic signals on photographic film, and the researchers obtain privacy by hanging a cloth in front of the screens of their video-phones...

(I read this in German because that was what happened to come to hand first; after reading it, I found out that there is an ongoing controversy about the 1970 English translation, which was based on a French version and is said to be of inferior quality.) show less

I was rereading Solaris for a discussion at the bookclub and this second reading made for a much more favorable impression.

A halflife ago I got into the book with certain expectations. First, I was looking forward to Lem's quirky humor familiar from his Ijon Tichy book series I had read before. I was surprised to find Solaris nearly devoid of humor as the satirical touch in the description of academia was lost on me. Second, I had just watched Tarkovsky's Solaris and expected serious parts to closely correspond to the great director's take. I found to my disappointment that the book was very different from the film.

A quarter of a century or so later, I start reading the book in English and find the translation atrocious, more like a show more script for that other movie I don't intend to watch. Turns out it is a rushed translation into English from the French translation of the Polish original. No wonder! Luckily there is a later much better direct Polish to English translation by Bill Johnston, which I would recommend. What is incredible is that the faulty first translation is still the one you are most likely to get if you buy Solaris in English today.

Restarting on the correct translation I settle into the atmosphere of Solaris at once. I almost expect the blinding blue sun to rise following a beautiful red sunset. I almost expect dead or gone people to suddenly reappear in my life. I almost start developing a key missing hypothesis in the field of solarintology.

The book strikes me as much more cinematic than what is captured by Tarkovsky (imagine someone like Kieslowski switching from Red to Blue!). Now the film seems a simplification, a reduction, it chews on the same old topic and misses the key concepts of the book. Here is what Lem himself had to say:
"I have fundamental reservations to this adaptation. First of all I would have liked to see the planet Solaris which the director unfortunately denied me as the film was to be a cinematically subdued work. And secondly — as I told Tarkovsky during one of our quarrels — he didn't make Solaris at all, he made Crime and Punishment"

The book primary focus is philosophical, it's a return to Kant in the age of science. It's the reintroduction of the Thing-in-Itself, the Unknowable, das Ding an sich when the technological progress brings the starry heavens closer possibly at the expense of the moral law within. Lem's insight about inherent limitation of scientific discovery is remarkable. His view on the inability to connect with The Other is frightening. Whether this Other is a sentient ocean orbiting a double-star or someone we love by our side. show less

No one is better than Lem at creating terrifying, mysterious, horror at the unknown. I really enjoy this author's skill. Stephen King and others of the horror genre have nothing on Lem - and imagine if Lem had actually intended to write a horror-genre novel!

But this novel has some things about it that I felt did not work. 1. Never is it really truly explained why the main character went to Solaris or what his role there is, officially. 2. There is a chapter that adds to the hard-future-science of the novel, but it's really tedious to read. 3. The last three chapters are dissatisfying and a bit too soapbox-y.

Somewhat similar to "Gateway" by Pohl. Reminiscent in places of "The Engines of God" by Jack McDevitt

4.5/5

A really different perspective on science fiction. Lem brings all sorts of fresh ideas to the table, and explores some really interesting ideas, including the frailty of the human subconscious, the purpose of human exploration into the universe, and how we seek purpose in our individual lives. I loved the concept of the ocean-like entity, that can not be probed by even the most competent of humans.

There were some long sections of the book dedicated to describing in detail the history of scientific experimentation on Solaris, that I found to be very dry and long-winded. That being said, the book is really short, and is almost exactly how long it needs to be to get across it's ideas.

Lem creates a wonderful sense of existential show more dread and anxiety that seeps into the fabric of the story. The characters, the planet, and the laboratory all drip with melancholy. Overall, I really enjoyed it. Lem leaves you with some serious ideas to chew on after you're done, which is one of the best ways a book can end. I'm sure I will read it again. show less

This is both a gripping story set on the space station Prometheus flying low over the planet Solaris and a consideration of how we see the world. Kelvin arrives on the space station and finds one scientist is dead and the other two are acting very strangely. It turns out that a figure visits each member of the team and Kelvin's figure is Rheya, his wife who died by suicide. He is torn between his emotional love and grief for Rheya and his logical thinking, knowing she is not real. The novel discusses former research about Solaris and the many theories about the 'ocean' that the planet is covered by. This ocean has some amazing characteristics and is thought to be a living being. It is not malicious but is it playful or researching. The show more novel reveals how human understanding is limited when we encounter something so novel and how we constantly relate back to what we know. And yet even though they labelled the 'ocean' it is soon clear it is far removed from the ocean on planet Earth. The novel thows up questions, rather than answering them. Knowing when the novel was written it seems plausible that Solaris is a metaphor for the Soviet Union and colonialism. show less

This is a classic, originally published in Polish in 1961 and translated into English from a 1964 French version. It’s often compared, especially the Russian film version of it, to 2001, and both are confounding, but in good ways.

The plot involves a long-running research project to study the distant planet Solaris. Solaris is an ocean world orbiting two suns. Its ocean appears to be alive, in some sense. Various shapes arise from it and sink back into it — shapes that are too geometric, complex, and even architectural to be dismissed as lacking any intention or design. It seems intelligent.

The protagonist of the story is Kris Kelvin, who travels to the research station above Solaris to join the current research crew. Something show more mysterious and ominous is going on.

When Kelvin arrives, he finds that one of the three researchers, Dr. Gibarian, has died by suicide, and the other two, Dr. Snow and Dr. Sartorius, are behaving strangely. Snow seems to rant gibberish and act incoherently. Sartorius has locked himself in a lab doing who knows what and refusing to allow anyone else in.

Snow’s rantings turn out to reflect an incoherent reality that he allows Kelvin to experience for himself. Kelvin, like the others, is joined by a “guest,” his former wife Rheya. How she got there or why is a mystery. And the actual Rheya of Kelvin’s past committed suicide, the defining tragedy of Kelvin’s own life.

Snow and Sartorius appear to have their own “guests” as well, but we only meet Rheya.

Rheya obviously has something to do with the planet’s ocean, or with whatever the ocean gives shape to — some sort of intelligence. But Rheya doesn’t speak for or in any sense represent that intelligence. In fact, she knows nothing of her own origin or of the nature of the ocean below the station.

Kelvin comes to accept Rheya’s presence, treating her as “real,” but even Rheya comes to understand that she is not the real Rheya. Exactly why she’s there or how she got there is something no one knows.

Kelvin is driven to understand the ocean (and the intelligence seemingly embedded in it) and also to resolve the puzzle and problem of Rheya’s presence. After all, she’s not just a mystery, she’s the return of a tragic loss, someone he still loves.

Everything about the planet, and about Rheya’s presence gives the impression of a kind of mirror that Kelvin looks into whenever he looks down onto that ocean, a murky mirror with a mind of its own.

Every effort to “contact” the ocean fails to get a response. Some, like bombarding the ocean with concentrated bursts of radiation, are just bent on riling it. But it just goes on in its own way.

A long rant by Snow about a third of the way through the book is poignant. The researchers, both the current crew and the many who have preceded them at Solaris Station, have been driven by the “holy goal” of contact — contact and communication with this alien intelligence.

But Snow sees through our conceit, that we aren’t really looking for or ready to find a truly alien other. As he says, “We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos . . . We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man.”

We're trying to resolve something about ourselves by trying to contact the other, the alien — “We need mirrors . . . At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don’t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us — that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence — then we don’t like it any more.”

I think Snow’s rant is insightful. Think even of how we attempt to understand non-human intelligences on our own planet. We test the intelligence of apes with human tasks. We try to teach them to speak our own language rather than trying to understand theirs. Only when they speak like us will we regard them as intelligent peers. But then in speaking to them, we are only speaking to ourselves. We’ve missed them, we’ve missed the “other” completely.

This can’t be what Socrates meant when he advised us, “Know thyself.” It’s a kind of nightmare where we can’t escape our own blinders.

Obviously this is not just about how to go about communicating with aliens. How can we understand anything or anyone other than ourselves unless we can get beyond ourselves, unless we can stop imposing our own intelligence, our own emotions, our own reason on everything and everyone we encounter? show less

"Only now did I realize that I was not in the least concerned with the mimoid, and that I had flown here not to explore the formation but to acquaint myself with the ocean." (pg. 212)

The above statement by Kris Kelvin, our protagonist, delivered in the final pages of Stanisław Lem's Solaris, went some way in reconciling me to a novel that had proved difficult and sometimes disappointing. The book sees Kelvin arrive at a near-abandoned space station orbiting a strange planet known as Solaris. The few occupants of the station have been driven mad, apparently by the effects of proximity to the gigantic "protoplasmic ocean-brain enveloping the entire planet" below (pg. 22). Kelvin finds himself drawn into their madness when his former show more lover, who had committed suicide years earlier, manifests in front of him as a living, organic body.

It's a great premise and the novel at its best is very disturbing; the station above Solaris a sort of sci-fi counterpart to the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King's The Shining (the encounter with the "Negress" on page 31 reminded me of Room 237). There are plenty of odd, hallucinatory happenings in the story and the reader develops some queasy, mind-warping feelings. Unfortunately, however, the story lacks the through-line of plot or character that makes King's Overlook Hotel so compelling. We're never quite sure what's going on or why, and whilst Kelvin's relationship with the manifestation of his former lover has some dramatic power, it's not really clear what his plans or motivations are, or those of the other people on the station. The book isn't helped in this respect by the unfocused English translation of the story (Lem himself wasn't a fan) or by the lengthy digressions and expository passages.

The most intriguing part of the story is that protoplasmic ocean-brain mentioned above. Kelvin spends most of his time contemplating it – and so do we, the readers. Lem has some surprisingly coherent scientific explanations for how it works, and we're drawn into the trap of trying to figure out what its nature is and what it means. Is it trying to communicate, or is it indifferent to humanity? Is it a god, or is it even sentient at all? Is it forbiddingly complex, or simple but just so far removed from human understanding of reality that it appears inscrutable? The book, for all its flaws, is consistently fascinating on this.

Lem seems to mean for this to be a comment on the folly of mankind's ventures into space, for Man has not yet even mastered himself. "Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed" (pg. 164). Kelvin being confronted with the manifestation of his former lover, and the unresolved emotions resulting from this, seems to illustrate this literary sentiment. The strangeness of Solaris' psychedelic ocean challenges not only our understanding of the universe, but our approach to understanding. "We observe a fraction of the process" and cannot grasp what lies "beyond the limits of [our] perception or imagination". Reality may well be "a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it" (pg. 126).

This is why, when Kelvin delivers the statement with which I opened this review, I became reconciled to Lem's book, despites its frustrations. Solaris doesn't give us any answers. only further questions. But it is a pleasant sensory experience to, like Kelvin in the moments after his statement, press our hand to the strange ocean surf and try to understand its myriad complexities. Contemplation, speculation and intelligent thought can be exhilarating experiences by themselves, without need for any resolution. And we find that we're quite happy to grapple with mysteries, even if they remain mysteries when we close the book. show less