Solaris

Solaris is about a research facility hovering over a strange planet named, you guessed it, Solaris.  The planet is caught in the orbit of a binary star system, which isn’t supposed to allow life to occur.  Solaris, however, is covered with a living ocean that scientists suspect is a giant, self-aware brain.  It doesn’t seem to act intelligently, however, spending its time throwing up colossal structures made form the ocean’s slime and then reabsorbing them.  For almost a century, the planet resisted all efforts by the scientists to probe its nature or communicate with it, finally prompting frustrated scientists to blasting it with special radiation just to see what happened.   Psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives on the station shortly after this “assault,” and  finds that the planet’s response is to manifest human people drawn from traumatic memories or fantasies of the Solaris scientist’s psyches.  These copies cannot and do not provide an answer for their own existence, and do not act as agents of the planet.  Indeed, there is no validated explanation for why the planet has done this at all, or that it even cares or is paying attention.  Kelvin and the other scientists on the station try to fathom the purpose or motive behind these creations, while at the same time trying not to lose their minds when faced with living memories of people who have scarred their psyches in some way.

What Solaris Does Well

I’m going to approach my discussion of the things Solaris does well on two levels: the concept of the living planet as “other” and the emotional world of the protagonist.

Through the planet and its living ocean, this book achieves sensawunder (a Sense of Wonder) that is the hallmark of the best SF.  The planet itself is intriguing, both beautiful and terrible: from the never ending daylight of its red and blue dawns, to the towering structures the living ocean makes (is it play, communication, or just the mindless thrashings of the creature?), to the mystery of whether or not it is self-aware or if it even cares about the humans who have been studying it for the better part of a century.  One of the most intriguing aspects of the book is how much the planet is not like us.  This is a nice change from all the human-like aliens in many other works of SF, and through it Lem’s gives us a strong example of how an attempt at alien contact might occur: with frustration.  It stifles all efforts by the scientists to reduce it to something understandable by human science, philosophy, or religion.  In the face of such impenetrable alien-ness, we have to ask whether we really new worlds and contact or if we are simply looking for other tings like us to extend the boundaries of Earth.  This is a serious question that Lem puts, and its a definite strength of the book.

The more affective/emotional side of the book comes from the “visitors.”  Solaris, reaching into our protagonist’s mind for some unknown purpose, recreates Harey, his long-dead lover who killed herself ten years earlier after Kelvin walked out on her.  Her manifestation is a living reminder of his own guilt and trauma.  She knows nothing of her “death,” and knows little of herself outside of her love for and need to be close to Kelvin.  Is this a gift from the planet, a punishment, or an attempt at contact? It becomes clear that Harey is constructed from Kelvin’s memories of her, and so any deficiencies or eccentricities in her character/memories are the product of Kelvin’s own mental misrepresentations of her.  She is but isn’t the woman he loved over ten years ago, the women he could never get over, so there is this constant tension within Kelvin as to whether he should treat her like a hallucination, a freak, a child, like the woman he loved, or like a different person entirely.  Now, Lem isn’t much of a romance writer, so the love story between the two doesn’t get any development, but there are tender moments that feel very real and clearly establish how Kelvin wants to believe in this Harey but can’t.   Slavov Zizek writes of Solaris in his essay “The Thing from Inner Space” that “ Solaris is a machine that generates/materializes, in reality itself, my ultimate fantasmatic objectal supplement/partner that I would never be ready to accept in reality, although my entire psychic life turns around it.”  Of course, why it does this is a huge question since the creature’s motives are as inscrutable as God’s

I found the emotional content of the book to be surprising, especially considering the emotionally-dry nature of Lem's Fiasco.  It complimented the theme of contact very well: how much can we hope to understand a complete alien like Solaris when we can’t even see each other clearly?  While the technology in the book is pretty standard SF fare, there is lots of interesting speculation on how scientific discourse would react to a thing like Solaris, but the core idea that makes the book so fascinating is this tension between humans and what the planet has unwittingly done to/for them.

What Solaris Could Have Done Better

This book is not without those long lectures and literature reviews of fictional scientific histories and fields that Lem likes to have, but compared to some of his other workthose digressions here are thankfully fewer, shorter, and placed between character-driven scenes of dialogue and action.  Still, at times it’s easy to get lost in Kelvin’s review of the published texts on the sub-fields of “Solaristics,” and I eventually found my way fast forwarding through these once they started to feel too lengthy.   Lem likes showing how science has reacted to the phenomena in his book by creating a speculative scientific discourse and literature.  While it evidences a rich scientific imagination, it’s an aspect of Lem’s writing that many readers (non-academics in particular, perhaps) may not be able to enjoy or even stand.

I also wanted to know more about Harey.  Aside from her committing suicide, we really don’t know much about her.  She’s young, kind of impetuous, and…?  This seems to be the big hole in the plot that the movies tried to fill.  Why does Kelvin love her?  How did they meet?  What did they do?  Was it just young love, or was there some quality about her that made him fall madly, deeply, head-over-heels in love?  I just don’t know, from this narrative.  There’s a tenderness between them that could have been developed further through some back story.  Like I said earlier, Lem isn’t much of a romance writer, so he could write all day about “Solaristics” but very little on Harey!  Perhaps Kelvin, as the narrator, just doesn’t want to talk about it.  I don’t know, but I wanted to.

Kelvin also doesn’t strike me as a psychologist.  He really doesn’t talk much about psychology, nor does he seem to apply it much to his situation.  Dr. Snaut, the eccentric cybernetician, strikes me as more of a psychologist than Kelvin.  It’s a misleading label, and it’s better to just think of Kelvin as filling the generic mode of “scientist.”

Back to Earth: Closing Statements on Solaris

Despite these issues, Solaris is still an amazingly contemplative work with a heartfelt emotional core that makes it very compelling.  It has very engaging interplay between the epic mystery of the planet of Solaris and the personal, intimite tragedy of Kelvin and Harey.

I listened to this book as an unabridged audiobook recently released by Audible.com, which is the only Polish-to-English translation available due to strange copyright issues (current print versions in English are copies of hastily done Polish-to-French-to-English translations which Lem hated).  While I can't read Polish and therefore haven't read the original text, I do believe this audiobook to be a carefully crafted translation of Lem’s work that is really how the story should be experienced.  While there are some clunky moments that may be the result of cultural difference or translation, for the most part it is very accessible and engaging for a native English speaking audience.  The audiobook was narrated by Alessandro Juliani, who is probably best known for playing Mr. Gaeta on the rebooted Battlestar Galactica.  He was nothing short of amazing (and no wonder, as he was a Vocal and Opera student!).  If only more narrators could do this well!

All in all a great English translation of an SF classic.