Solaris Paperback – November 20, 2002

For many years I postponed reading Solaris. Andrey Tarkovsky is my favourite film director, and having seen his film on Solaris I was afraid to be disappointed by the book. The easy availability of Kindle edition encouraged me to try. And I'm glad I did.The book and the film ... are similar in some ways, and different in others. Tarkovsky is more poetic, introspective, spiritual. Lem - rational, philosophical. It shows. Both are the best in their genre, in their approach.But that means that even though the themes are similar, the main message coming from Solaris experience is diffferent. It shifts from hope bordering on despair in ever being able to comprehend a totally different, alien rationality that exhibits some purpose but is never comprehensible in itself (Lem), to awareness that the only thing of value, the only precious substance worth preserving for eternity is humanity, human relations, human vulnerability - and hope/bordering on despair in ever being understood/preserved in time/saved by a totally different rationality (Tarkovsky). Even though it might seem like nuances, that's a grandiose shift of message. I now understand why Lem was unhappy with Tarkovsky's film.Solaris is primarily a book of ideas, but there is also a very deep psychological undercurrent. I picked some quotes from the book where you can see some ideas that you would notice both in the book and the film - but developed in different ways:1) The idea of humanity wanting to get mirrored, understood by The Universe, and being in horror when The Universe mirrors back the worst of humanity's traits.""A normal person," he said. "What is a normal person? Someone who's never done anything heinous? Right, but has he never even thought about it? Or maybe he never thought about it, but something inside him thought it, the idea popped into his head, ten or thirty years ago, maybe he fought it off and forgot about it, and he wasn't afraid, because he knew he'd never carry it out. Right, but now, imagine that suddenly, in broad daylight, among other people, he meets IT embodied, chained to him, indestructible. What then? What do you have then?" I said nothing. "The Station," he said quietly. "Then you have Solaris""We're not searching for anything except people. We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. We desire to find our own idealized image; they're supposed to be globes, civilizations more perfect than ours; in other worlds we expect to find the image of our own primitive past. Yet on the other side there's something we refuse to accept, that we fend off; though after all, from Earth we didn't bring merely a distillation of virtues, the heroic figure of Humankind! We came here as we truly are, and when the other side shows us that truth--the part of it we pass over in silence--we're unable to come to terms with it! [...] It's what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope!"2) The idea of defective/crippled God/Meaning. Lem ir very clear on this, Tarkovsky treats the subject less directly - through poetic expression, general ambiance of the film." I'm no specialist in religion, and I may not have come up with anything new, but do you happen to know if there ever existed a faith in... a defective God? [...] I mean a God whose deficiencies don't arise from the simplemindedness of his human creators, but constitute his most essential, immanent character. This would be a God limited in his omniscience and omnipotence, one who can make mistakes in foreseeing the future of his works, who can find himself horrified by the course of events he has set in motion. This is. . . a cripple God, who always desires more than he's able to have, and doesn't always realize this to begin with. Who has built clocks, but not the time that they measure. Has built systems or mechanisms that serve particular purposes, but they too have outgrown these purposes and betrayed them. And has created an infinity that, from being the measure of the power he was supposed to have, turned into the measure of his boundless failure. [...] It seemed to me very, very authentic, you know? It would be the only God I'd be inclined to believe in, one whose suffering wasn't redemption, didn't save anyone, didn't serve any purpose, it just WAS."3) failure to communicate with a Complete Other."I didn't believe for a minute that this liquid colossus, which had brought about the death of hundreds of humans within itself, with which my entire race had for decades been trying in vain to establish at least a thread of communication--that this ocean, lifting me up unwittingly like a speck of dust, could be moved by the tragedy of two human beings. But its actions were geared towards some purpose. True, even this I was not completely certain of. Yet to leave meant to strike out that perhaps slim, perhaps only imagined chance concealed in the future."To my mind, here Lem and Tarkovsky disagree with each other. At the very end of the film we see The Solaris mirroring back the Human World, though in a heavily distorted form, thus giving hope that some of it might be preserved for eternity. For Lem preciousness, sacredness, preservance of humanity is not the main point - it's more an awe in front of Unknowable who can exploit human weaknesses, vulnerability for purposes unknown, and desperate wish to come even one step closer to the Truth, to comprehending the Unknowable.Both Lem and Tarkovsky are geniuses. Their messages are almost always very subtle, and can be interpreted in various ways. But it is clear to me that they saw Solaris differently. If you've seen the film, do read the book! There are some important, interesting concepts/ideas that Andrey Tarkovsky didn't/didn't want to show in the film. The very idea of symmetriad, for example:" A human being is capable of taking in very few things at one time; we see only what is happening in front of us, here and now. Visualizing a simultaneous multiplicity of processes, however they may be interconnected, however they may complement one another, is beyond us. We experience this even with relatively simple phenomena. The fate of a single person can mean many things, the fate of several hundred is hard to encompass; but the history of thousands, millions, means essentially nothing at all. A symmetriad is millions, no, billions, to the nth power; it is unimaginability itself. What of it if, in the recesses of one of its aisles that is a ten-fold version of a Kronecker space, we stand like ants holding onto the folds of a breathing vault, that we watch the rise of vast planes grayly opalescent in the light of our flares, their interpenetration, the softness and infallible perfection of their resolution, which only lasts a moment, for everything here is fluid--the content of this architecture is motion, intent and purposive. We observe a fragment of the process, the trembling of a single string in a symphonic orchestra of supergiants, and on top of that we know--we only know, without comprehending--that at the same time, above us and beneath us, in the plunging deep, beyond the limits of sight and imagination there are multiple, million fold simultaneous transformations connected to one another like the notes of musical counterpoint. For this reason someone gave them the name of geometric symphony, but if this is the case, we are its unhearing audience."

1) Plot (3 stars) – A scientist is called to an outpost on an alien world to investigate what went wrong with an expedition, only to encounter and grapple with unexplained mysteries of his own. So, the engine that drives this plot is a first contact puzzle – what are these mysterious creatures and, more importantly, how does the human psychology deal with them? There were no big surprise twists, or really any answers. But the micro tensions of watching the main character’s psyche strain and bend was enough to keep me reading.2) Characters (3 stars) – Kelvin is the no-nonsense lead who gradually morphs from scientist to romantic. The other two human inhabitants of the space station are well drawn as analytic minds defending their craziness. The girl interest was fine as the innocent slowly learning the truth. But I probably won’t remember any of these characters in a week.3) Theme (4 stars) – Can we understand something that is truly alien to us? Or will our cultural bias always hamper our abilities to empathize? This is an interesting theme, and the book did a fascinating job of conjuring up what an arc of theories and frustrations could look like if we did encounter such an alien that interacted with the universe using a completely different rule set. It made me think of our own planet, and how little we even understand of what goes on in the heads of our fellow cultures, let alone our fellow terrestrial life forms, and how this poor track record of Earthly success doesn’t bode well for even seeing (let alone understanding) the truly alien.4) Voice (3 stars) – The prose was readable, but sometimes I grew frustrated with the way in which the history of the alien was conveyed. Lem told the history through the main character reading academic paper after academic paper. It seems to me there could have been more ways to convey the back story, and if he leveraged alternatives, those sections would have felt a little less repetitive.5) Setting (4 stars) – The base and the planet were described in interesting detail—the lighting from the twin suns, the strange ocean structures, the emptiness of the station—and I could imagine being there. But what was really impressive was the mood Lem conjured up. The book transported me into the creepy psychological state of these humans all trying to deal with the unexplained phenomena bombarding them.6) Overall (4 stars) – Overall, I’d recommend Solaris. It’s a story with an excellent mood that tackles some grand questions about the limits of the human mind.

This work of science fiction, at 224 pages, borders on being a novella. It is set in the far future, on a planet (Solaris) far, far away. Having seen the 2002 film, starring George Clooney, I was familiar with the story line, though it differs from the book in many respects.I found much of the book to be engaging and thought provoking, while other parts to border on sleep inducing. The setting is a largely abandoned scientific station on the ocean planet Solaris. The three scientists in residence begin to receive “visitors”, whose identity and actions appear to be drawn from the deep recesses of the subject’s psyche.The narrator is visited by his former fiance, whose suicide created a deep guilt within him. It is assumed that these “visitors” have been created by the alien intelligence believed to exist within the planet’s ocean.The author, Stanislaw Lem, is Polish, and I believe this work was written in French. There are instances where the translation is somewhat awkward, but not enough to be an issue. Solaris is widely considered to be a classic of science fiction, bordering on horror, for the psychological and philosophical issues it explores.