When I was a kid my dad was obsessed with the idea of UFO’s and alien contact. He made me and my brother watch endless episodes of trashy American documentaries about sightings and abductions. In fact, I sat through so many of these that I started to have nightmares about bug-eyed extra terrestrial beings entering my room at night. I guess that for my dad – who did not have a partner, whose children were emotionally, if not physically, estranged from him, and whose job was not exactly stimulating – the promise of other planets and other species, of being whisked away from his humdrum life, must have been pretty appealing. While I too wanted to somehow escape the situation I found myself in, the prospect of other worlds or beings never fired my imagination. I found it difficult enough to get my head around the behaviour and motivations of humans, I had enough problems understanding my own world, that the possibility of engaging meaningfully with aliens struck me as, to all intents and purposes, impossible.For this same reason, I have never been particularly drawn to Sci-Fi. The writers and books I most enjoy are ones that I believe contain insights about human nature, that help me come to terms with who I am and how my world works. This is, I guess, where Stanislaw Lem comes in. First of all, Lem himself was not particularly enamoured of the genre, he thought the majority of it too reliant upon the adventure story formula. My introduction to the Pole’s work was His Master’s Voice, and, on the basis of that novel, I could see why he considered himself as a kind of outlier in the Science Fiction community. The plot is almost non-existent, and entirely plausible; there are no weird creatures, no space travel. More than anything, His Master’s Voice is a speculative, philosophical novel of ideas that says more about us than it does about what is potentially out there. And so is this one.Having said that, Solaris provides more conventional, less cerebral enjoyment than His Master’s Voice, and is therefore more approachable. Lem may have been critical of Science Fiction’s use of the adventure story formula, but the dynamics of Solaris’ plot are borrowed from the equally formulaic horror/thriller genre. Doctor Kris Kelvin arrives on the space station that has been studying the planet Solaris, and which is meant to be manned by three other people. However, Kelvin finds that one of them is blind drunk and clearly spooked, one has locked himself in his laboratory, and the other is dead. Of course, he is suspicious and senses that something is wrong. Not only is Snow visibly shaken, but he has blood on his hands; alarming noises are coming from Sartorius’ lab; and Kelvin himself feels as though he is being watched. As the narrative progresses things get even stranger: there are, it is revealed, other people on board and it is not clear how they got there or whether they are friendly.“Successive bursts of static came through the headphones, against a background of deep, low-pitched murmuring, which seemed to me the very voice of the planet itself.”While all this is lots of fun, and genuinely tense and unnerving at times, especially if you haven’t seen either of the two film adaptations, if it was all Solaris had to offer it’s unlikely that I would rate the book so highly. In order to begin to explain why I do I would, first of all, point to a quote from the text, which is ‘“How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?” This, for me, sums up the philosophical, emotional heart of the novel. The ‘ocean’ is the alien life-form [if it is indeed alive; it certainly displays behaviour consistent with ‘being alive’ and appears to exhibit some kind of intelligence] that resides upon Solaris. As with His Master’s Voice, Lem is interested in what ‘alien’ actually means. The ocean is absolutely non-human, and is, therefore, not accessible to us, can never be accessible to us, because we can only attempt to understand it by using human concepts, ideas, reasoning etc.The focus here is not on the ‘personality’ or capabilities of the ocean, but on our own limitations and arrogance. At one point in the book Lem writes that we, the human race, are not actually interested in the genuinely alien, but simply want to extend the boundaries of the human world. In other words, confronted with something that we do not understand, that we can never understand, we want to explain, to interpret it in human terms; in essence, we strive to find all things human. I found all this blistering stuff, and it is something I see around me every day. Not with aliens, of course, but with animals, cars, mountains, and so on. Consider how what most pleases or charms us about our pets are the moments when we can see ourselves in them, when they do something that we see as being recognisably human.“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is.”For a book that is on the surface concerned with our relationship [or non-relationship] with the alien, Solaris somehow manages to be extraordinarily moving. That is all down to Rheya. I must admit that she broke my heart. There are a number of ways to interpret her role in the novel, just as there is more than one Rheya. First of all, there is the original Rheya, the young woman who Kelvin was married to, who took her own life years before he came to be on a space station on Solaris, and whose death he feels responsible for. Therefore, the counterfeit Rheya, Rheya2, the one who turns up at the space station, could be said to be a physical manifestation of Kelvin’s grief or guilt. In this way, Rheya2 is a kind of tormentor; it is not a blessing for Kelvin to be confronted with a facsimile of the woman he feels as though he failed and treated badly, a woman who looks so much like her but isn’t her. No, it is a form of torture.It is also possible to interpret Rheya’s appearances in the text outside of any alien context. Throughout my reading I kept returning to that key line, ‘“How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?” We know that Kelvin and Rheya had a tumultuous relationship on earth, one that ended with an argument and the woman committing suicide. With Rheya2, Kelvin re-enacts this relationship. If you forget that she is non-human for a moment, the interactions between the couple are indistinguishable from the interactions of any couple going through a rough time, a couple that isn’t communicating well, who keep things from each other, who snap at and goad each other out of exasperation, who love and need each other but cannot, despite their best intentions, always show each other the patience and affection that they ought to. In this way, Solaris is a classic marriage-in-crisis narrative; it is a novel about the intense hardships of love.Finally, and most heartrending of all, there is the issue of personal identity. Rheya2 is, in the beginning, ignorant of what she is; she believes herself to be Rheya, a human woman in love with a human man named Kris Kelvin. She is, therefore, not a malevolent entity, not consciously anyway. As the narrative progresses, she senses that something is wrong; she doesn’t need to eat or sleep, she cannot be physically hurt, she remembers very little of her life before Solaris, and she cannot bear [i.e. it causes her intense physical pain] to be away from Kelvin for longer than a minute or so. Eventually, her true situation, the true nature of her being, dawns on her, and, I’m not ashamed to admit, I had a lump in my throat the size of a football.[A still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film adaptation of the book]There is something about this set-up, about a being who believes herself to be human, who feels human, who has a human consciousness, and human emotions, suddenly realising that she has been created by an alien presence, for reasons that are not clear, that really got to me. Her confusion, her anxiety, her struggle, her bravery and nobility [yes, I am aware of how ridiculous this sounds, but I’m in earnest here] in coming to terms with herself all but ruined me. And here’s the rub, who or what exactly is she? Isn’t she Rheya? She is not the same as the original Rheya, that is true, but what does that prove? There is a woman in front of Kelvin, whose heart beats, who breathes, who calls herself Rheya, so who, or what, else can she be? There is a point in the text, when Kelvin says that he no longer sees Rheya and Rheya2 as the same person, that he accepts and loves Rheya2 as herself. The nature of personal identity is thorny; just what is it that makes you, you? Your memories, your appearance, your personality? Rheya2 ticks all these boxes. Solaris makes you ask, is Rheya2 a facsimile or is she a distinct person? Is she a person at all? If not, why not?I could go into all this in more detail, but I’ll quit while some readers are still with me. Before concluding, I want to quickly deal with the translation. I have read Solaris twice, once, and first, in the most recent [and only] rendering directly from Polish. For this reread, I read the version that is widely available, which is a translation from a French translation from the Polish. I loved the book in both versions. Moreover, despite Lem’s claim that the Polish-French-English translation is inadequate, and taking into consideration my own concerns about authenticity and accurate translations, I thought it was smooth and not at all inferior to the version translated directly from the original. I would have to read both versions simultaneously, or at least close together, to be able to compare them in detail, but I do think, taking into account its negative reputation, that the Polish-French-English version ought to be defended. I criticise translations a lot, and no doubt some people think I am too picky, but I am genuinely happy that the version of Solaris that most people will come across is an excellent read, because, whether you like Sci-Fi or not, you should read Solaris. It is as engaging, thrilling, intelligent and beautiful as any novel you will ever encounter.
"Typical me, typical meI gave my cargo to the seaI gave the water what it always wanted to be." - Destroyer's Rubies Was the ocean a living creature? It could hardly be doubted any longer by any but lovers of paradox or obstinacy. It was no longer possible to deny the 'psychic' functions of the ocean, no matter how that term might be defined. Certainly it was only too obvious that the ocean had 'noticed' us. This fact alone invalidated that category of Solarist theories which claimed that the ocean was an 'introverted' world, a 'hermit entity,' deprived by a process of degeneration of the thinking organs it once possessed, unaware of the existence of external objects and events, the prisoner of a gigantic vortex mental currents created and confined in the depths of this monster revolving around two suns.A head hunched over in shame. The thinking man's pose. Rodin's arm on Odin's blade thinking deep space nine. By hook or by a crook, a head resting in arm. The world on your shoulder and the whole in his hand's. Who has the head? When Kris goes to sleep it is her head on his chest. Go to sleep from holding the position. A rush of something to the blood. He left the pills in a drawer. He didn't think she'd do it. No one would have thought she would have done it. A long time ago they thought if they told each other everything it would keep them together. The most important thing. A long time ago. The weight of the head feels real. I didn't know Rheya who was real or Rheya who is made. I felt like it would be a forever birth. Responsible for.Is someone fucking with you? Who has the head and whip the tail. Those little guys swim like the little fishy guys that could. Is she made of the Solaris ocean. The human body is something something percentage of water. Sea salt of sweaty palms. Held the thinking position too long. Built of dreams and what you forgot to forget. I don't care. Right on, Kris. I felt the weight on his head before he goes to sleep and before she pop goes the weasel into the atmosphere of his consciousness."A normal man," he said. "What is a normal man? A man who has never committed a disgraceful act? Maybe, but has he never had uncontrollable thoughts? Perhaps he hasn't. But perhaps something, a phantasm, rose up from somewhere within him, ten or thirty years ago, something which he suppressed and then forgot about, which he doesn't fear since he knows he will never allow it to develop and so lead to any action on his part. And now, suddenly, in broad daylight, he comes across this thing... this thought, embodied, riveted to him, indestructible. He wonders where he is... Do you know where he is?""Where?""Here," whispered Snow, "on Solaris." The flaming heads on lashing tails swim on the horizon somewhere beyond infinity. They would immediately locate the nearest Applebees that serves food that tastes like the Applebees at home. Time has told and heads put together split off into another on the same body. The waters of the Solaris ocean don't wash clean their feet. They traveled a long way to see what they wanted to see. Space ships and libraries and historians. Reveal to me all of your secrets. Kris studies a hundred years war. Defeated over books, a last breath effort. There's no time. The weight of wild undiscovery. It isn't on the tip of your tongue. I don't know how I feel about all of the exposition. There are an awful lot of exposition passages in Lem's novel. Maybe it was too many. Kris reads a lot. Kris goes to sleep, smothered in research. Reveal to me your secrets. It must be within reach of my fingertips.The three men float in their separate chambers. They are islands of men and they will swim to Kris' planet far away to plant flags of we know what is best for you. She is gone, whoever she is. I imagined Snow's horror of an obsession on his face that breathes in close quarters and does not coexist. He cannot leave until he has the answer that exists in an idea that could bleed. His horror is sealed behind high tech doors and locks. He went a long way to stand on Kris' shores and part his red seas by force. How could they do it? I don't know what Kris loved in his baby Rheya but I know he felt another presence on his own. The other two men come a long way to take it from him. They don't go anywhere at all that I can see in their recurring nightmares. Kris reads about the foot steps before him. A man flies away from home to find the face of a baby over the ocean. The water looks like muscles under skin. The ocean ripples red as if it could bleed. Does it feel them in their individual people planets? The theory is that Solaris sends their ideas to torment them. Maybe it met them where they already were. The weight and responsible for was what got me. The constructions other men built didn't get me as much, unless their waves reverberated through space that they came and saw and felt responsible for. They were alive, the men who were lost and didn't say they had the answers.I wanted to read about Solaris from these windows flying by. But it was also Kris hiding in a room. Sartorius hides behind his occupation in another life. Instruments and data are something to do with his hands. When the pilots forget themselves and go "missing" on around Solaris in every day it is a tightening of his organs. The ones he lives with. When Snow hunches on his stool and eats as if he is an echo of a man who still knows how to live he saw it in what he was made of to be afraid. They retreat into their echoes of themselves. Kris goes into the thinking man's pose. When his heart bleeds he retreats into a flight plan for the rest of his life. He's a transmission in some space inside of himself and who will ever meet it.In the end Kris tells himself how he will live by not living. I know this knee cap crushing way of walking through life. I would be afraid to meet Solaris, to meet the other person made of what comes from me. I knew he would go on living in this way.
What do You think about Solaris (2002)?
Always nice to take a break in the middle of a long book (Les Miz!) and read something nice and short. Solaris clocks in at only around 200 pages (I read the Kindle edition). It started off like a creepy haunted house story but quickly morphs into something very odd and mind blowing. Solaris is a planet with a single ginormous occupant, a living ocean of some weird alien liquid. When us puny humans set up a hovering station there and started messing about with the living ocean the latter does not retaliate exactly but sends the humans a copy of the person from their past who cause them the most guilt. Their motive for doing this is unknown, just a very alien alien alienating humans with their alieness, my guess is they just want to mess with their heads.I have seen the 2002 movie version of Solaris starring George Clooney (who adorns the awful paperback cover making out with his costar), I don't actually remember anything about the movie which is probably indicative of something, I probably fell asleep which I often do when watching a leisurely paced movie. The plot still interests me however, and this book has been in my TBR pile for the longest time. For me the book works much better than the movie because the quiet tone and the staidly pace is fine for books as reading is a more intimate experience than watching movies. I am happy to report that the Kindle edition I read was directly translated from the original Polish edition by Prof Bill Johnson*. For many years the only print editions you can find is the one translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox from a French translation (no idea by who) so what you'd get is a translation of a translation. That sort of thing is bound to play hell with the accuracy. In any event this is by no means an easy breezy read, there are passages of very dry infodump full of neologisms that caused by attention to drift into the unknown until the narrative return to the characters.Over all I find this to be a fascinating read when the author is not waxing lyrical about “mimoids,” “symmetriads’ and “asymmetriads,”and such. The concept and ramification of the copy humans (called "guests" or "G-Formations" in the book) fascinating as they are not androids or ghosts, they are more like simulations given flesh. They can not leave you even if they want to, and they are unaware of their true nature. This leads to some unusual human drama and heart breaking scenes. If you like thought provoking scifi (with hardly any action to speak of) this one is not to be missed.
—Apatt
Reason for inclusion on Reading List: Turned up recurrently in researching themes of interest in my project and I thought it might be a good example of philosophical speculative fiction.Brief synopsis of story: A psychologist, Kris Kelvin, boards a space station orbiting an alien planet that consists solely of a strange ocean that exhibits signs that it is a massive, intelligent organism. It has a knack, it seems, for recreating things it witnesses or perceives and seems to spontaneously run experiments of design. The scientists stationed there had forcefully intensified their investigation of the ocean, resulting in what seems to be the ocean experimenting on them. Simulacra of persons involved in traumatic events in the scientists’ lives appear and interact with those living on the space station. The simulacra can never be out of sight of those they are associated with. Their appearance results in psychological distress, madness, and even suicide. Together, Kelvin and the remaining two scientists aboard the station must fight through the disorientation and find a way to solve the problems presented by Solaris.Make a character list, with brief one-sentence backstories for each:Kris Kelvin—Main character from whose POV the story is told. A long time Solarisist, his boarding of the station is his first real contact with the planet. He begins as the most rational of the characters and devolves throughout the story to perhaps the most irrational.Snow—Maintenance officer. He is the first of the two remaining scientists on the station and is the human character that Kelvin most frequently interacts with.Sartorius—The second scientists. Deeply paranoid by now, he isn’t fully introduced until almost halfway through the novel and initially refuses to communicate with Kelvin.Rheya—Former lover of Kelvin who committed suicide due, in Kelvin’s mind, to his leaving her. It is the simulacrum of Rheya created by Solaris that takes residence with Kelvin. Solaris—The ocean planet. Alien and impenetrable, Solaris hovers over all of the events in the story.Gibarian—Kelvins fomer teacher. He had taken residence on the station in order to study the planet. He commits suicide before Kelvin arrives—an apparent collapse in the face of the psychological onslaught of the planet.Kind of work defined by basic elements —what elements are foregrounded? How do they fit together?: Interestingly, the first thing that strikes you is how the setting itself, the ever changing ocean of Solaris, is in itself a character. Albeit a mysterious and unknowable one. The ocean runs experiments that seem to have no results. Renders creation without understandable meaning. Its presence and opaque intelligence reduces human understanding to that of a flyspeck mote in universe we endeavor to parse and catalog.The scientists toil in psychological isolation. Aside from the ocean of Solaris, the only other setting is the inside of the space station—sparse, barren, clinical. A creation of the rational, scientific from which the scientists are supposed to run their experiments on the planet, but which now acts as a cage in which the planet runs its experiments on them.In a sense the planet functions as a mirror. How well, really, can we understand an alien intelligence except in terms of ourselves? Our concepts of life and meaning? Lem draws the spare elements of the story together and evokes a haunting scenario in which our attempts to communicate with an alien intelligence are reflected back to us and through us and meaning remains elusive and just out of reach.tKind of work defined by structure—how is it constructed? Lem tells the story through the POV of Kris Kelvin, who devolves from a fully cogent narrator to one who grows more and more unreliable as the story goes on. It’s an effective tack to take here, as the reader becomes immersed in the distorted thought processes associated with dealing with the simulacra. Rheya’s constant presence and her near-perfect humanness creates a schism between the rational thoughts of Kelvin and his deeper emotional life. What he knows and what he sees and interacts with are on two different planes. The novel takes place almost entirely on the station and within a span of a few days. And divided into seventeen short chapters. Sprinkled among these are some back story as Kelvin details the history of Solaris and his own path to the station.Kind of work defined by theme, interests--This is a work that touches on the very smallness of our understanding with the vastness of the universe. Lem posits that our first alien encounters might very well leave us to scratch our heads as a truly alien intelligence would be inscrutable. Further, this is a bit of a ghost story. We often think that if one were haunted by a ghost that the most frightening things about are what it might do to us. But the novel suggests that the most frightening thing would simply be the constance of their presence. The unnerving reminder of events long buried negating the distancing effects of time and memory.The really interesting thing is what happens when the constructs become aware of what they are: tools created by Solaris to observe the humans. So acutely rendered are they, that Rheya (to Kelvin’s horror) attempts suicide yet again, despairing over the nature of her existence.Overall effectiveness of piece—its strengths The novel worked very well. Again, a simple story told simply. The isolated setting of the station (and, indeed, the characters’ isolation from each other within it) serves as an effective backdrop against which the struggle in opposition to the demons of the self can become manifest. The 1st person perspective allows us to follow intimately the creeping approach of irrationality and madness in the face of personality laid bare. Though a translation, the prose style is lean and spare and adds to the overall effect.Where would you alter the text, why, how?—its potential weaknesses A few of the history chapters seem to go on a bit longer than they might need to and there are some instances where Lem withholds detail (for instance, the partial report of pilot flying over the ocean) in the name of verisimilitude, but I think full disclosure would have been ultimately more satisfying and illuminating.Overall analysis of this piece holistically We are such a vain species. We are surrounded by beauty and mystery, and yet all we are able to see is ourselves.Such is the spirit of the Lem’s novel. Not, he says, that this is necessarily a bad thing. There is a certain Zen inkling here—one can understand nothing if one cannot understand the self. The scientists here must confront their own psychological issues before they can begin to understand how to solve the problem of the simulacra. They must learn to work through them and around them without being overwhelmed by them. In a sense, each man is a microcosm of the human race. How can we understand something truly alien if we don’t understand ourselves? How accepting are we of what we really are?
—Randy
Many sci-fi authors think that they write about aliens. The truth is, they really don't. Instead, they essentially write about humans. Most sci-fi aliens are little more than an allegory for humanity, a mirror through which we can see ourselves - maybe slightly different-looking, with more (or fewer) appendages, different senses, funny names, different social structures - but still unmistakably human. And so, when we think of aliens as shown in popular literature/ cinematography, 99% of us will imagine these ...... .............. ... rather than this...Whichever way the sci-fi aliens are described, there is always something about them that we can relate to. Basically, it serves the age-old purpose of self-insertion of a reader into a book. (*) * This is the same excuse that Hollywood gives any time it wants to show us a society different from ours and inevitably sticks a "relatable" protagonist there - usually a macho white guy. That's when Lem strikes with his unusual and brainy unconventional sci-fi story. He takes the long-standing dream of establishing contact with aliens and turns the concept completely around. His planet-sized (possibly) living ocean is so ... well... alien that there is no way humans can comprehend or relate to its vast alienness. Even worse, the ocean does not seem interested. See, one of the worst things you can do to people is not care, ignore them. As a species, we crave attention and recognition. But, unlike the aliens of our space dreams that may love us or hate us or despise us, the Ocean of Solaris does not seem to particularly care. Which sends humans into a frenzy leading to volumes of scientific research. Does it not understand us? Does it not care? is it primitive? Is it unbelievably advanced? What's the deal? Are we nothing but annoyance to it, ants crawling on its surface? Is it even alive? As a matter of fact, what is "alive"?What I think is fascinating about this story is that we never get answers. The ocean remains there, vast and alien, with its secrets unrevealed. All we have is speculation and childlike wonder. And failure to comprehend why it seems to torture humans that study it, sending them living ghosts from their past - in case of psychologist Kris Kelvin, his long-dead wife Harey Rheya (not sure why the name was changed in the translation). Why? We don't know. The beauty and the power of this book is that we will never know. Some things are just not for us to understand. What makes us human is that we will keep trying.The movies based on this book - a beautiful Tarkovsky version and that other one with George Clooney - seemed to focus more on the human characters, which is natural. But to me this will always remain an brilliant, albeit a little dry story of a mysterious and alien ocean which may or may not be alive and may or may not even care.
—Nataliya
