Customer Reviews

Solaris

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

About 5 minutes into the new movie version of Solaris starring George Clooney I could tell it was going to be along the same lines as 2001:A Space Odyssey. We were going to have long extended shots of spaceships docking and very slow development, and with little or no external explanation from the characters. I was right. This could explain why in a recent internet poll, this most recent version of Solaris was voted the most disliked movie of the last 20 years. I liked the movie ok but I felt there were many more layers to discover underneath its sheen that could only be revealed by the original source. So I sought out this novel that was originally published in 1961 and translated from French to English in 1970.

As the story begins, Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, is headed to the planet Solaris, a planet that he has studied before. He is to dock with the 3-man orbiting space station above the planet. The unique thing about Solaris is that it appears sentient, but not in any way that human beings can understand. At one time it was a pressing issue to make contact with this planet organism but after decades of trying no real success has been achieved and most scientists have given up. Solaris has shown no response to repeated efforts to communicate with it. Kris doesn't expect that anything has changed but he soon finds out that contact has been made.

When he arrives he soon learns that one of the crew members has died and that another has locked himself in his room and refuses to come out and the other speaks in riddles. Then, his dead wife shows up, as real and material as the flesh and blood he remembers. Somehow, Solaris is dragging figures from their memory and making simulations that come to life in the real world. The question is why?

I loved this book. It was one of the best science fiction books that I have ever read and the first book in a long time that I have given 5 stars to. Much as the novel of 2001 gave a better understanding of its own movie experience, so too does this novel. There is much more of a history to the planet in the novel of Solaris than they had time to cover in the movie, which seemed to be trapped into making a romance. The simulated human beings in the novel are much more dangerous because they have super human strength and at one point, Kris' wife rips a locked metal door off its hinges in an effort to get to him. In the book, there was a lot more sense of suspense and menace lurking throughout. The writing in this translation is beautiful, ranging from the philosophical to the purely expositioning, and all points in between, from love to fear to wonder.

One of the things that Lem puts forth in the book is that Mankind does not TRULY want to find any aliens in the universe. He wants to see only reflections of himself because if aliens are really "alien" how could we comprehend them? Therefore, Lem sees the scientists in the book as failures in that they try to comprehend the behavior of Solaris by comparing it to humanity. If something is truly alien, we cannot predict or hypothesize why it acts the way it does. It is alien. I think this was probably the reason why the movie did so bad. Humans want explanation. They want to be able to go, "Solaris is doing that because it is lonely. It has emotions just like me" or something to this effect.

Another theme taken up by the book is the nature of identity. What really makes us a person, a human being? Kris' wife at the start does not know that she is an alien construct. If she thinks she is his wife, does that make her that person, even if she only has the memories? This becomes a mighty struggle in that Kris begins to believe he is being given a second chance to make the relationship work.

Once again, this was a great novel, and should be sought whether you have seen the movie or not. It will be a great experience either way.

Solaris is a truly remarkable novel. I'm happy Steven Soderbergh has remade Solaris as a film if only to draw a larger audience to Stanislaw Lem's work. While enjoyable viewing, neither Soderbergh's film nor Tarkovsky's 70's Russian version of Solaris fully capture the intelligence, depth and scope of Lem's novel.

This is science-fiction at it's best, boundary exploration. Epistemological and metaphysical inquiry in the guise of fiction. The beauty of Lem's work is in his thorough exploration of profound questions like, "What does it mean to be human?". He works from an oblique angle by plumbing the depths of premises like, "What if a planet were actually a giant alien living being that wished to communicate with humans who landed on it?", and, "How do two completely different life forms actually go about communicating?" He asserts that perhaps man doesn't really want to explore the universe and communicate with other life forms so much as he simply wants to expand "humanity" out to the cosmos indefinitely. A narcissistic solipsism at the level of species. Wow.

Consider this: At one point, the planet Solaris creates a living being from the memory of the protagonist, a psychologist, for the purpose of communicating with him. That the being is his dead wife who committed suicide years earlier and that he feels responsible for not being able to save her only serves to complicate things wonderfully. It brings about even more profound questions. Are we more than just our memory? And if so, when does a being created by another being become truly autonomous? There are only a small number of science-fiction writers capable of tackling this kind of material, and fewer still that do it well.

Lem is Polish with an IQ purportedly in the 180's. Apparently, he doesn't write his novels in his native tongue, but in French and German. His material is then translated into English, and there's the rub that explains only four stars. At times, the translation can be stiff. Think stereo instructions. But the sheer originality and weight of ideas largely overcomes the problem.

This novel stimulated tremendous introspection and reflection in me. IMO that's what the best of the best fiction does. It makes you think and experience a genuine sense of Wonder again.
Enjoy!

Almost all of Lem's science fiction centers around one or two variations of one theme. The theme is "What is intelligence?" and the two variations are "What would robotic life be like?" and "What would a truly alien intelligence be like?" Solaris is in the second category. The basic plot is fundamentally comical: for a century, scientists have been trying to establish if the ocean on Solaris is intelligent and to communicate with it without success. Finally they succeed, but the response is so unexpected and bizarre that they try everything they can to cut off communication again.

I first read this book over 20 years ago and was merely puzzled by it. Re-reading it as an adult, I find it a stunning work.

All of the above you can gather from other reviews here. Let me add some recommendations. If you like Lem, the other author to read is Phillip K. Dick (the subject of a Lem essay called "Genius among the charlatans"). If you like Dick, read Lem.

If you like Solaris, other Lem books with the same theme are "Fiasco", "Eden" and "His Master's Voice". "Fiasco" is the most approachable of the four (including "Solaris") and in many ways the best. "His Master's Voice" is somewhat difficult, and of especial interest as the model for Sagan's "Contact" which is a "popularized" version.

In Stanislaw Lem's classic sci-fi novel, Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, is sent to visit a station positioned over Solaris, a planet with unique attributes which has been explored by generations of scientists in the vague hope of establishing some form of `contact'. Kelvin's mission is to determine whether the entire Solarist project should be abandoned, once and for all. Solaris, as it turns out, is a colossal brain. The planet is almost entirely covered by ocean, though it also entertains a variety of spontaneously arising structures: whether the planet's processes represent intelligent cogitations or primitive, vegetative outputs remains a mystery. After being explored by human scientists Solaris begins to develop its own `investigations' of the crew, performing `psychic vivisections' - while the station's inhabitants sleep the planet is able to scan their memory structures and project physical representations of the most assimilated and stable memory traces. Soon, each of the station's inhabitants begins to receive their own `visitors'. These recreations are accurate to an extraordinary level of detail, their bodies deviating from human ones only at the sub-atomic level. Kris Kelvin's visitor is his late wife, whose suicide has weighed on Kris' conscience for years. Lem's book explores issues surrounding memory, regret and the nature of personhood, but perhaps more fundamentally it is concerned with problems of epistemology. Is our knowledge of the world, of the cosmos and even of our own selves, necessarily limited? In the course of trying to understand Solaris the scientists become guilty of anthropomorphizing - attributing human motives and characteristics to the planet. Are even the most abstract branches of knowledge anthropomorphic, in the sense that there are "correspondences with the human body...in the equations of the theory of relativity, the theorem of magnetic fields and the various unified field theories"? Is `true' understanding (an objective epistemology) impossible? Lem had worked for a time as a reviewer of scientific articles - his familiarity with scientific jargon is obvious in the passages where he describes (and pokes fun, tongue-in-cheek) the intellectual history of Solaris and the elaborate technical nomenclature that was developed to describe it. Parts of the novel offer intriguing insights into the sociology of science.

One of the problems with the English version of Solaris is that the prose is a bit choppy and at times, difficult to get through. Quite possibly this is because of a shoddy translation - from Polish to French and finally to English. Despite this, the book remains enjoyable to read, mostly for the ideas that it explores and its wonderful imagination. The novel, of course, has been adapted to the screen twice: first by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and more recently by Steven Soderbergh. Both of these films focused on the love story between Kris Kelvin and his wife, something that Lem insisted was not the book's main point. This book is especially recommended to those who have seen the films without having read the source material.

Recently deceased Stanislaw Lem once said, that his curse was watching his once-fantastic imaginative ideas come true. "Solaris" is one of the few, which have not come true yet.

The greatness of this science-fiction story about an space station and the members of the crew slowly getting mad and dying is the fact, that it was probably one of the first (and good) non-anthropocentric science fictions. Why in most of the S-F novels the aliens are similar to us? Because we cannot get beyond the limits of our knowledge, even our imagination fails (the proof can be easily seen in dreams). Lem has shown that this does not have to be true, but the realization of the fact too late can have tragic consequences.

The group of explorers is researching the planet Solaris, seeking contact. But they find the planet uninhabited and entirely covered by an ocean. Strange things start to happen, stranger even because perceived differently by different members of the team. The idea of intelligence coming from the ocean, which influences their mind, creating illusions, is instinctively rejected...

This book is good both in original (as I first read it) and in English translation. It became a classic of S-F, but it is full of fundamental questions. In fact, it may be more a book about people, about human mind, than about aliens, as we may think of S-F. Lem was a very wise man, a real intellectual, a philosopher, of a rare breed which is almost extinct.

And no, the recent movie with George Clooney is definitely not enough! (it is good that it was made, though, as a reminder, although, ironically, Lem hated Hollywood, and said that in American films each space travel ends with kicking ass...). The better movie is an old, Russian version, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, which I highly recommend as an addition to the book.

Solaris is the tale of Kelvin, a psychologist who is posted to the human space station above the planet Solaris. Solaris has been discovered centuries before and is unique in that its ocean is a single gigantic life form. To date all attempts at contact between the life form and mankind have been unsuccessfully, leading to long and heated scientific debate about the nature of the ocean, is it the pinnacle of evolution? Or is simply a single cell organism? Have we encountered it during its collapse and decay or is it in its infancy?

Upon Kelvin's arrival he finds that his mentor and station leader has committed suicide and something is affecting the other crew members, something that they refuse to explain. And then Kelvin wakes up to find the love of his life, Rheya who had committed suicide years before returned to him alive and very aware, but only possessed of the memories and understandings that he had of her. Is this an attempt by the ocean to communicate with or to test the station inhabitants? To gain an understanding of the human condition? Or is it simple a natural by product of the ocean? And now presented with his beloved Rheya again how will Kelvin react? Will he take the chance at a second beginning? Or will he recommit the acts of his past?

At its heart Solaris is an enquiry into the limits of human knowledge and scientific understanding and questions the very human trait of rushing to exploring the external while ignoring our internal "human" nature. As stated in the novel "Man has gone out to explore other worlds and civilizations without having explored his own dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind the doorways that he himself has sealed. "

SOLARIS is a fascinating if somewhat cold science fiction novel about the bizarre interaction between a semi-sentient ocean planet and the scientists sent to study it up close. In the novel, volumes of scholarship have been penned and schools of theory advanced about the how and the why of the mysterious entity/planet, but until the current expedition no one has really been privy to the secrets that ebb and flow in the waters of Solaris. The scientists soon discover that the planet has the ability to reach into the darkest recesses of their subconscious and make their most vulnerable thoughts and memories reality.

It's an intriguing premise, but unfortunately Stanislaw Lem intellectualizes his story to the point that the majority of SOLARIS doesn't even read like fiction. For a good chunk of the novel, you feel like you're reading a philosophical tract, or at times a psychology text. It's not uninteresting stuff, but it's not necessarily an easy or fun read, either. The characters are pretty thin, and in spite of the author's obvious passion for his themes, there isn't much emotion in the writing.

SOLARIS is a good book, but maybe not a great novel. It is, however, well worth reading if you like thought-provoking science fiction and know not to expect a pot-boiling page-turner.

As a side note, Steven Soderbergh did a fine job last year with his film version starring George Clooney. The movie, like the book, isn't for everyone, but if you can get into it, it does offer a certain detached poetic beauty.

I enjoy Lem's work very much, but this was translated from Polish to French and then from French to English. I'm glad that I read it, but I almost didn't finish it. It was a chore to read. I had the same problem with "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub," but I don't know if there was a similar translation. It's a shame, because Lem is a writer that transcends his genre. I would recommend much of his work to non-science fiction fans. For contrast, try "The Cyberiad," an effortless joy to read, to see Lem's mastery of language.

According to Solaris's back-cover blurbs, of all science fiction authors writing outside the English Language, Stanislaw Lem has been the most widely translated. I can believe it. Even in this somewhat jerky double translation, Lem's 1970 classic is intelligent, passionate, and intensely lyrical (despite which, it has recently been turned into a pretty good, moderately arty movie...).

What is life? What is the universe? And, can we know the one without knowing the other? These are the main questions asked in Solaris. The answers matter a great deal to the science mission on the planet, a true curiosity in that it has a stable orbit even though it orbits two stars. By way of explanation, it turns out that Solaris's gelatinous ocean is a life form of sorts. (How it evolved in the absence of natural selection is not explained.) But is it self-aware? Could be....

I won't rehash the plot of "Solaris". Suffice it to say that the story is about a team of scientists trying to decipher the purposes and mentality of a sentient ocean on a distant planet. They fail because human beings cannot, in the final analysis, exchange intelligible meanings with a truly alien intelligence -- and perhaps not even between themselves. As Lem does in many books, much of "Solaris" is given over to the history of a made up field of science (in this case, Solaristics). But unlike many of his books, the characters feel and speak like genuine people (even the "artificial" characters), and do not simply function as mouthpieces for philosophical ideas. I liked "Solaris" very much, and was touched by the tragic relationship between Kelvin and Rheya (she's an "artificial" person woven by the ocean out of Kelvin's dreams). "Solaris" isn't for sci fi fans looking for heroics, punk posturing, or fantasy. However, readers with a taste for philosophy or "serious" fiction will enjoy it.