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82 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lem's visionary depiction of contact, November 26, 2002
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.
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87 of 92 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incommunicability or Being In the World, September 30, 2002
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
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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
OH, NOW I GET IT, January 7, 2003
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.
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