Solaris (Classic Science Fiction S) [Import] [Paperback]

Stanislaw Lem (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Penguin; n.e. edition (February 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140112731
• ISBN-13: 978-0140112733
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Stanislaw Lem is the most widely translated and best known science fiction author writing outside of the English language. Winner of the Kafka Prize, he is a contributor to many magazines, including the New Yorker, and he is the author of numerous works, including Solaris.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

95 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lem's visionary depiction of contact, November 26, 2002

By 

Virgil "Virgil" (Chapel Hill, NC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Solaris (Paperback)

One note readers should know beforehand is that the version of Solaris available in English is a translation from Polish to French and then translated from the French into English. For some irresponsible and bizarre reason, publishing house Faber and Faber who own the license have not authorized a direct from Polish translation of Solaris. The good news is that despite this the translators from the French have a good sense of literary style and did a fine job of making it readable and enjoyable, though obviously not as accurate a translation as could be.

At first glance Solaris seems hard science fiction. Set in the future after man has explored many systems the main character arrives at the space station orbiting the planet Solaris. Lem lets us know several things up front, the planet is suspected of being an intelligent life form and there is a long history of exploration, strange happenings and accidents that have occurred. By the time Kelvin arrives after almost two hundred years of study only a small team is left to record and study the planet.

More than hard science is really at the heart of this novel. There are musings on alien contact and the nature of what is intelligence. Is man really the measure of everything? As events occur, Kelvin the rational scientist succumbs to those most irrational of feelings, love and longing. Ironically, Kelvin, the person sent to investigate the occurrences among the crew is the one who is emotionally effected the most by the visitors that accompany everyone.

The genius of the novel is that the visitors are reflections or copy's of each individual in each person's memory. Every character is touched (or disturbed) on a level much deeper than a more conventional alien contact approach. Few readers will fail to imagine who from their own memories would take the form of their own visitor.

This is one of the most intelligent science fiction novels I've read in a long time. The story ends up not being about science but about what makes us human, what is intelligence and what may separate us from another life form. Moving, well written and highly recommended.

93 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incommunicability or Being In the World, September 30, 2002

By 

Thomas M. Seay (Palo Alto, California USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Solaris (Paperback)

This novel explores the theme of communication. Scientists explore a curious planet, Solaris, whose ocean appears to be an intelligent life-form. Scientists are sent to live on the planet
for purposes of establishing contact.

Contact is elusive however. What is to be the medium of communication? Even without the tool of verbal language,
humans can empathize and communicate to some extent with other mammals. We know that they share common instincts and emotions with us, such as fear, sex drive, hunger, etc. But what about something so "other" as this solarian ocean?

Finally indisputable evidence of contact arrives. Solaris is able to tap into the scientists brains and create exact replicas of significant persons from their past. These replicas look and act in the same way as the people they simulate. The main character Kelvin has before him Rheya, an ex-lover who had committed a suicide which he could have prevented.

This leads to another problem of communication: how to understand the intentions of this action? Has Solaris created the simulacra as a cruel joke, Or did Solaris do this to please the visitor? Is Solaris just doing it as a kind of experiment?
The scientists are tempted to judge the planet according to human behavior, but realize that would be folly.

Humans view others, not just Solaris, but any other species, or even any other human being through the prism of their subjectivity. To reach the other requires an incredible effort of will...it may be impossible. Kelvin is at once in love with the succubus and tormented that "she" is not really Rheya, in spite of the resemblance. The succubus is evertyhing that Rheya was to Kelvin because she is nothing but a collection of his memories. Fine, but who was the real Rheya? Just a scattered collection of a few bits of the real Rheya mixed in with Kelvin's own desires, fantasies, and fears. So this raises the question of how possible it is to go beyond ourself to another human being.

Another problem raised is that of self-communication. Another scientist in the book, snow, makes the point that humans only know about two percent of their thoughts and that Solaris probably knows more about them than they do themselves.

We humans do seem "walled off" and communicability at this stage of our evolution is pretty minimal. Science does seem a valiant attempt to get beyond our fears and fantaises, but as philosophers of science have proven, even our science is fraught with subjectivity. As for understanding ourselves, as Terence Mckenna say, the various schools of psychology sound like medieval hawkers.

Or is this seperateness all an illusion as Heidegger and some mystics claim? The difference between subject and object was reinforced by cartesianism. In that case, how to overcome the symptom of a seperated, isolated ego?

This is not the place to attempt an answer. However, this book will give you a lot to think about. I recommend that it be read at least two times succesively. You will probably miss many of the finer points during your first read. The time spent on careful readings of this book will reward you with many interesting ideas to ponder.

Thomas Seay

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The human condition explained by an entirely un-human entity, December 16, 1997

By 

C. Adam Kuhn [[e-mail]] (West Chester, Pennsylvania, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Solaris (Paperback)

Where to begin. As the first book I've ever read by Stanislaw Lem, it took me a bit to get into his style. Once I did, I was captivated. I couldn't get enough. Solaris, in brief, is the story of an astronaut (Kris Kelvin) who arrives on a space station orbiting Solaris, a world orbiting a binary star which has been of much interest to the scientific community over the last hundred years. Immediately upon landing, he discovers a friend (Gibarian) who had been the commander of the expedition, has died under mysterious circumstances. The man to deliver this information is the shady Dr. Snow, who babbles incoherently about "visions" before calming down and speaking lucidly. It's not too long before Kris finds himself seeing "visions," and to tell you anything else would be to spoil the story. Aside from a rip-snorting plot, the laborious attention to detail only enhances the story. The words create a perfect picture in your mind, and every person I've talked to who's read this novel has had more or less the same impression of the station. It has a too-large quality, as if there ought to be more than simply three people on it. This only adds to the suspense. The explorations of the planet's surface itself are fascinating scientific descriptions of formations the ocean creates. The grand "floral calyx stage" is incomprehensible to the human mind, yet Lem can describe it in sparkling clarity. The story also contains much human emotion. Kris is dealing with the suicide of his wife, which he blames on himself. Snow is half mad with "visions," and Sartorius, a third scientist, has locked himself in his lab, with only the odd sound escaping. As Kris strives to understand this colossal mind orbiting beneath him on the planet, he is unconsciously attacking his own brain, racking it for clues as to what he is really feeling. Thought provoking and ultimately tragic, Solaris is a classic from beginning to end. The only problem is the double-translation (Polish-French-English) which is at times clunky. This, however, is a minor complaint against a grand piece of literature.