Customer Reviews

Solaris

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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.

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

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.

To characterize Solaris as a "sci-fi" novel is unfair - it is a book of metaphysics, the perils of history, fears, acceptance, and life. As a previous reviewer stated, the limits of science are explored brilliantly, and as these limits appear, so does fear, both of the unknown and the ultimate uncertainty of what is accepted as fact. The book is not anti-science, though, and the reader comes away feeling that just because science has limits, it is science that can bring us to the starkest of encounters with the human mind. Lem does a wonderful job of creating a forlorn and ominous atmosphere aboard the station, and the first encounters of Kris and Rheya left me truly uneasy. In fact, the first half of the book has many elements of a horror novel, but these elements are presented in a technical, sanitary way that was new to this reader. Kris's explorations of the ocean and its meanings drive the plot, yet never does one accept this quest as an important part of the story - it is the canvas on which a man's encounters with the hidden elements of the universe is painted with a passionate restraint. It is a humane book of the very best sort that doesn't shy away from the terrors that consume us all.

Humans tend to classify everything they deal with - including the books they read. Clearly, every classification is imperfect. In certain cases this imperfection is especially damaging. Some books, labeled "Espionage", or "Children", or "Science Fiction" - are never read by many people just because they are labeled as such.

Stanislav Lem, clearly, is one of the most striking examples of this problem. Unfortunately, he became a victim of another damaging trend, which is endemic to the North American book market. Once you enter a Science Fiction domain here - the ratio of books to trash becomes much closer to zero, than in any other section.

How can one determine for himself the significance of a book in his life? I read Solaris for the first time when I was 15. There are many other books I read at the same age which I still consider to be very good - and read many-many times since then. Some of them, though I would - probably - never read again, because they ceased to bring anything new to me when I re-read them. I still do love them - but there is no mystery any more - no unanswered questions, no new landscapes around the corner.

There are other books, which you would read again and again - and every time you would find something new in them. "Solaris" is a book like this. Lem never was a SciFi writer - even in his earliest works - and "Solaris" is the most powerful proof of this fact. Space travel and scientific theories are here - but is this book about space travel? Or a scientific theory? What is this book about? I think it is about quite different things. It is conceived and written about the things which are most important for humans: love, shame, human dignity, and compassion.

Solaris is also a philosophical book: it offers only questions, no answers, but the questions asked in "Solaris" are formulated such, that a serious reader has no way to avoid trying to answer them. And the questions are - again - about the things which are of the greatest importance for the humanity: what is consciousness? are we able to overcome our xenophobia? how do we behave if we encounter something which is not hostile, but still - causes great pain to us?

The last two questions are offered in another great book of Lem: "The Invincible", which is - architecturally - much simpler, than Solaris, but - as it is frequently the case with shorter works of really great writers - "The Invincible" strikes the reader with this highly concentrated power, similar to a laser beam, equally disturbing thoughts and emotions - which is exactly what is expected from any work of art.

I only hope that over the years the world will reevaluate Lem's work and he will become as prominent a writer and philosopher as he deserves to be.

Stainslaw Lem's Solaris is a somewhat overlooked classic in the science fiction genre. As Robert A. Heinlein once ably pointed out, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne between them set up nearly all the basic science fiction plots in existence - one rarely comes across something truly original in science fiction, merely new takes on an old theme. Solaris is one magnificent exception to this general rule. It is, indeed, a type of "Contact" novel - but not at all in the way the we have come to expect. The non-human in question is not an alien - or is it? This is one of the truly original SF creations and subsequent phenomenons - on scale with 2001's monolith and Star Child. I will not here divulge any details of the plot: the fun for the reader lies in experiencing it for oneself the first time. Solaris is a truly captivating first read. Aside from its science fiction and fantasy elements, Solaris is also much else: elements of horror and mystery abound. It is a very suspenseful book, and quite an invigorating read. In it, Lem mines the depths of human consciousness and raises existential questions about our subconscious and the way our minds work. The novel definitely has a somewhat psychological bent. On top of this, it is quite the philosophical work: Lem raises many questions, but gives no easy answers. He invites the reader to answer them how one may, but asking them is the important thing. On top of this, the novel, though containing some fantastic elements, is told in pain-staking detail: the protagonist quotes from fictional textbooks about the fictional "ocean" on this fictional planet, but they read like real scientific journals, and are quite believable. This is a nice and rather neat effect that adds a lot to the novel. Highly reccommended for fans of the science fictional or psychological novel, or those looking for a thoughtful fantasy.

While Lem's Tichy stories and fictional book reviews and introductions are often amazing, and the Pirx stories and the Cyberiad are more fun, this is almost certainly his best. Solaris is the prime example of Lem's oft-visited theme - the difficulty of understanding something alien to us, illuminating the difficulty of understanding ourselves. Kelvin's grappling with his feelings for Rheya, and the "reality" of his situation, and his ultimate acceptance of them (as opposed to the other scientists' refusal), is contrasted with the effort to understand the ocean's "communication." As with most of Lem's novels, several explanations for a situation are put forward, with no definitive conclusion. This device works best in this out of all his novels. In spite of Lem's style, and the double translation, there are a couple of beautiful passages in the book, as well as some satire of scientific explanation. Worth reading many times.

Quite possibly the best sci-fi novel ever written, Solaris goes deeper in its [too brief!] 200 pages than the entire output of just about any other toiler in this generally mediocre genre.

It's a novel of ideas, and those ideas are as box-fresh right now as they were back in the day. Unlike most other sci-fi practitioners, Lem is never explicit about his dream technologies, and the science in his fiction is completely believable. Thus we are spared the laughably dated flights of fancy that occasionally pop up in the otherwise wonderful work of, say, Phil Dick or Alfred Bester (atomic teletypes, anyone?). And while the book is indeed a heavy piece of speculative genius, Lem's descriptive powers are truly awe-inspiring; the intricately detailed passages describing the various forms and structures generated by Solaris' living ocean are nothing short of psychedelic.

Buy it, read it, savor it. Truly an amazing trip.

The first thing, which surprised me, about the novel was the copyright date. Lem wrote this in 1961, which predates Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (written in 1968). There are some similar themes. I don't know if Clarke was familiar with this book, or if reading this after reading the book or Kubrick's film has caused this sense of deja vu.

The story concerns a space station where the scientists are studying, and attempting to make contact with, the planet Solaris. Each character has to deal with his or her own internal doubts, but also has to interact with the other members of the crew. These doubts are more important than you may think on a first read.

In the story, there are long sections where Kris Kelvin is going through the library reading up on the research of Solaris and neutrinos. In the initial read, I thought that a lot of this could have been cut to keep the novel more concise. Since there is so much of it, I wondered if Lem intended for us to focus on this. I believe he did.

The research and the history of research give us a mirror of our own scientific community. It also questions the SETI project and our attempts to make contact. His statement about this seems to be that our endeavor to contact something non-human is flawed because we are approaching it from a human frame of mind.

This is a very good book, and I would highly recommend reading it.

I'm kind of new to the story of Solaris, seeing the film with george clooney, that i really liked and then later seeing the drawn out Russian film. Although i know most of the story centers around Rheya and Kelvin, the sci fi side of me wanted to know more about the planet of Solaris. The book does just that, i loved reading along with Kelvin, the main character, how he peruses the library on the space station regarding the first explorations and what they had found. Solaris after all had first been discovered and visited 100 years ago resulting in volumes and volumes of books and film. Also, the book goes into great length to describe the structures that are miles high that Solaris constantly makes and destroys and how some exploration teams had been the victim of staying too long in studying these structures. This background i feel is essential to understand solaris crowning achievement of makeing a human "clone" from memories. I have heard that the hollywood movie of Solaris had much more footage that was cut by listening to the director's commmentary. If this footage contained more background of the planet it would more closely follow the book which really makes it a more complete story. Solaris is great sci fi discovery of an amazing and unique planet, as unique as the description of Arakis (DUNE) with its sandy sees and rock islands. Still, not all is explained in Solaris. Perhaps the unknown left unknown is the best type of story in the end, we keep trying to think of what Solaris is all about, just as the explorers in the story will continue to do.