Peter Cawdron's Blog

Gold Rush

Hollywood and Netflix love to dramatize historical waves like the California gold rush and glamorize the hardships, but the reality is that during gold rushes, most wealth was generated not by miners, but by those who supplied and supported them.

Samuel Brannan, a merchant during the California Gold Rush, bought up mining supplies from around the country and resold them in California at massive markups, earning upwards of $5,000 a day (or roughly  $120,000 a day in today’s economy). Merchants, boarding houses, saloons, laundries, gambling and entertainment parlors earned far more money—and importantly—more consistent income than miners themselves! The economic boom around gold made more money in California than the gold itself, and led to the phrase, “Sell the shovel, not the gold.”

Gold rushes were important drivers of expansion, far outstripping the actual gold, and set up states like California and even countries like Australia and New Zealand with thriving economies.

What would it take for us to see a gold rush in space?

It’s easy to look at ideas like mining asteroids or the Moon or setting up colonies on Mars as the 21st-century equivalent of a gold rush, but like historical gold rushes, the real value won’t come from anything shiny and glamorous.

In my latest novel, I propose that Venus, rather than Mars, the Moon or any asteroid, is better suited for a gold rush.

But isn’t Venus a seething, boiling, crushing hell? Why, yes, it is… We could no more build a city on Venus than we could build one at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, but here on Earth, we avoid places that would crush us like a bug on a windscreen. Instead, we float above them in cruise ships.

How feasible is this on Venus?

It’s actually realistic. The insane density within the Venusian atmosphere means that a nitrogen/oxygen mix on Venus works roughly as well as hydrogen or helium in blimps here on Earth, and that means instead of being limited to just the basket beneath a blimp, we could live INSIDE them, breathing the air they use to float among the clouds. NASA’s HAVOC project even explored this idea, although there are no plans for this to proceed.

From a practical perspective, the real problem is the insane wind speeds and the sulphuric acid in the clouds, but (as discussed in my latest novel, Gold Rush) these could largely be resolved by crashing a modest-sized comet into the planet! It’s terraforming done easily.

Also, from a practical perspective, it’s important to note that at the altitude these blimps would float at, the temperature would be balmy, around 50-60F or roughly 10-15C and the air pressure is almost the same as here on Earth. If the acid were removed from the atmosphere, you could walk around outside your blimp with little more than SCUBA gear on!

And then there’s the industrial potential… Venus gets almost TWICE as much sunlight as Earth, so energy is super-abundant. Ah, but you can’t mine resources on Venus. No, and for rare metals and things like iron and copper, that is a problem, but ALL the carbon in biology comes from the air. It’s all come from plants turning CO2 into sugars and that propagating throughout the ecosystem to build your body, bones and brain, etc. In terms of percentage of body mass, carbon is second only to oxygen! Carbon is an astonishingly versatile element, and there is no shortage of it on Venus. Oh, and the byproduct of mining carbon out of the atmosphere of Venus is oxygen! It’s win-win.

Mars gets all the airtime from pundits, but physically, it is closer in size to the Moon than it is to Earth, and this means it is problematic. Even if Mars was terraformed, its gravity is so weak it can’t hold onto an atmosphere and without a magnetic field, it gets pummeled by cosmic radiation.

Not one planet in our solar system measures up to Earth, but Venus is far closer than it might at first seem.

Realistically, we’ll settle Mars before we get to Venus, but it is interesting to consider just how astonishingly viable Venus is as a planet. Far from being hellish, it might be a better long-term option than Mars and second only to Earth.

Crashing comets into planets is a rare event in the universe, but it’s not entirely implausible, with Comet 31/Atlas soaring past Mars later this year!

Somewhat fortuitously, as the book launches, this interstellar comet is racing through our solar system, having come from elsewhere within our galaxy. As this scenario is the set-up for my story, I’d like to think the cosmos is helping out with a marketing stunt. Seriously, though, there are even some astronomers suggesting this is a deliberate fly-by being conducted by an extraterrestrial intelligence, but I still think my cosmic marketing suggestion is far more realistic.

Gold Rush is available now as an ebook, paperback and hardback, with the audiobook coming soon. If you want to explore the possibility of First Contact with an extraterrestrial civilization settling on Venus, grab a copy today!

What’s for Dinner?

Somewhere around 1760, Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.” Ever since then, Eat the Rich has been a rallying cry for inequality.

Modern society is based on what we call the social contract, being an understanding that ALL of us are better off if we ALL follow the rules. And the social contract works beautifully. Preppers and libertarians will tell you that you can do it alone, but that’s a lie. Ever since we first formed tribes, well over a hundred thousand years ago, we’ve learned that there is strength in numbers. If someone wants to go and live in the woods by themselves, wonderful, but if you’re using solar power or gas or a knife made in China or a gun, you are NOT living off the grid. You are very much still dependent on the grid, as that’s where all that stuff is made—you’re only fooling yourself.

So what’s for dinner? What are we going to eat? The reality is, if we all work together with fairness and equity, there is plenty to go around, but at a certain point, the ultra-wealthy violate the social contract by squandering resources like Smaug and his pile of gold.

Violating the social contract, though, is deceptive. It may look like Elon and Jeff have billions, but they’re short-sighted. Ultimately, they’re like the mythical snake Oroborus, which ate its own tail.

That absurd, crazy dollar value that indicates their wealth is calculated by multiplying the stock price by the sheer number of shares they hold—and it continues to grow over time, but at what cost? It’s easy for billionaires to think they really are sitting on a pile of gold, but they’re actually eating their own tails. They’re undermining the very system that has allowed them to succeed. Nowhere is this more obvious than when it comes to climate change.

The fossil fuel industry has made TRILLIONS since the 1970s when it first realized human emissions were causing the atmosphere to warm. If you earned ten thousand dollars a day, it would take you 275,000 years to earn a trillion dollars—that’s roughly the amount of time Homo sapiens has existed as a distinct species! It’s an absurd amount of money, and the fossil fuel industry has done it in just a few decades!

Wait, did I say they made a trillion dollars since 1970? I meant to say they’ve made a trillion dollars a year in pure, unadulterated PROFIT since 1970. That’s more than 50 trillion dollars! If you earned ten thousand dollars a day, it would take you almost 14 million years to earn 50 trillion dollars. For context, 14 million years ago, to put this in context, back then, our ancestors were diverging into the Great Apes! And they’ve accomplished this in just a few decades!

All this is to say, the excesses of the fossil fuel industry and its Smaug-like greed are clearly NOT sustainable and a breach of the social contract. Destroying the planet and the environment for insane corporate profits will go down as well as Oroborus eating its own tail. No one will be spared. Already, we’re seeing insane changes in the climate, from the increase in frequency of cyclones and hurricanes, to the warming of the ocean, to rampant flooding. We—as a society—are eating our own tail. Well, the fossil fuel industry is because governments want eternal economic growth.

To say we’re shortsighted is an understatement.

We’ve been sold a lie.

I know… I know… capitalism is the best. It’s lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system, but unrestrained capitalism is madness. It’s like handing the keys of a Ferrari to your 16-year-old son and saying, “This is the best car on the road.” It sure is… until it’s the best car wrapped around a telephone pole.

We can’t afford to stick our heads in the sand. We need to demand change from our politicians. We need to hold the fossil fuel industry to account. We need to stop giving the dragon Smaug a free pass and start demanding that those profits go into fixing the problem they’ve created.

We don’t need to eat the rich. We need the rich to accept that we are all in this together. We need to return to a system that values equality.

If you want to make America great again, then how about instituting the tax rate in the 1950s, when America became an economic powerhouse. A 90% tax rate may sound absurd, but in practice, the wealthiest 1% of Americans ended up paying roughly 40% income tax. But taxing the super wealthy and taxing corporations like the fossil fuel industry is the only way we’re going to stop them from eating their own tails. If it costs them to pollute, they’ll do something about reducing emissions.

The Age of Misinformation

When the internet came of age in the early 2000s, the hope was that a single source of information would unify humanity. Since then, it’s become more like Pandora’s Box, where what should have been a gift has been corrupted and weaponized against us.

Humanity’s crowning achievement is knowledge.

Knowledge allowed us to depart from the animal kingdom. It was the knowledge of how to build stone axes and how to make fire that set us apart as a species. Over time, that transformed into the knowledge of how to cultivate crops and farm animals for slaughter. With these two inventions, the necessity of the hunter-gatherer came to an end. The invention of writing appears to be related to commerce, allowing trade to be undertaken, ledgers to be kept, debts to be collected, and taxes to be raised. Armies arose as a means of stealing wealth and resources and conquering rivals.

Woven throughout history is the importance and ascendancy of knowledge. The counterpoint to knowledge is lies. As knowledge has grown, so have lies, as BOTH provide a means of influencing others and getting people to band together. From at least the time of the pharaohs, the divine right of kings has been a lie used to subjugate people. And then arose the Age of Reason, where philosophers dared to challenge the norms of politics and religion, marking the birth of modern democracy.

The Age of Reason is a spectacular triumph of human intellect. For Kant, Voltaire and Rousseau, it seemed as though a new world was awakening. After several world wars and untold conflicts, humans have failed to advance to live in reason, to build a society based on logic and evidence. Instead, we have fallen into the Age of Misinformation, where lies are peddled as truth.

It is both tragic and fascinating to see how quickly people seize on lies they agree with instead of having the honesty to hold to the truth. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the irrational response to the pandemic, where vaccines have been criticized as though there were no lethal virus sweeping the world. The problem is… human instinct is to rush to judgment.

“To prejudge other men’s notions before we have looked into them is … to put out our own eyes.” John Locke (1632–1704)

And this raises an interesting question… why are we so susceptible to lies? Why are we so susceptible to grifters manipulating us for their own greedy gains? Why do we distrust good science in favor or self-grandizing liars? Perhaps the most odious example of this is the supposed “wellness” industry that has set itself up as the champion of the people, protecting us from the evils of Big Pharma. Challenging evidence-based medicine is a 7 trillion dollar a year industry—and for what? Because “Big Pharma” is the problem with our health. And yet that industry comes in at less than 2 trillion dollars a year! Lies, it seems, are highly profitable, but not helpful.

Why do intelligent people fall for lies? Why haven’t we moved on from the Age of Reason and Enlightenment to something greater? Why have we gone backwards so easily under the onslaught of misinformation?

The answer is right there in our history if we care to look for it.

Humans are intelligent. Of that, there is no doubt. But consider how small the Age of Reason is compared to the Age of Superstition and Religion that preceded it. Even if we take a modest estimate and start counting from the advent of cultivation, allowing civilizations to arise, it’s a few hundred years set against ten thousand years. Why did it take so long for the Age of Reason to occur? The answer is chilling…

We like to think for ourselves. We like to reason things through. We pride ourselves on our opinions. But the act of reasoning isn’t what we think… Our ability to reason didn’t arise because we needed to solve problems; it arose because we needed to defend our positions.

“We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem, which is threatened.”
― James Harvey Robinson, The Mind In The Making

And that’s it… Reasonable people are people who will reason to protect their beliefs.

Skilled arguers are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. — Mercier & Sperber

And this is why we’re so vulnerable to misinformation. Reason should give us the tools we need to think critically and see through lies, but our ability to reason is a defensive measure. From an evolutionary perspective, it is designed to protect our beliefs rather than challenge them.

If we are ever to escape the snare of misinformation, we must learn to reason openly and honestly, being willing to abandon our beliefs if proven wrong.

[When it came to my beliefs] I was ready to sacrifice every one of my previous convictions. — Max Planck

We’re suspicious of new ideas when what we should be questioning is the old ones!

“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.” — John Locke

We live in an age where confidence and certainty are valued, but we should treasure doubts. It’s only an inquiring mind that can be curious. And without curiosity, there’s no ability to learn.

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.” — Voltaire

I’ve never met anyone peddling misinformation who wasn’t absurdly confident and certain, and that alone means their ideas should be subject to closer examination.

Jean‑Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) observed that “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” Rather than doubling down and defending the chains that bind us, we need to reason honestly and logically to escape them.

Immanuel Kant said, “Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own reason.” To which, I would add… just be sure it is your own and not someone else’s reason you are defending.

Dark Beauty

No one is an island unto themselves. In particular, writers draw upon the inspiration of other authors. For me, my favorite authors growing up were Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Michael Crichton and one oddball in particular, an eccentric American author who could spin a story that seemed equal parts insane and profound—Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five left a searing impression on my mind. It’s utterly bonkers and yet based in reality. Rather than sugar-coating war or glamorizing it, Vonnegut exposes the heartache of those who fought for freedom.

I grew up a generation after Vonnegut. For me, the Vietnam War was the dominant conflict of my childhood. I was born toward the end of the war, but my step-father served two tours with the ANZACs in support of the Americans, the first on artillery, the second as an evac medic. It left him scarred and broken. Alcohol enflamed his PTSD, and he took out his trauma on me and my mother. So, for me, writing Dark Beauty was cathartic.

If you read Dark Beauty, please take the time to leave a review, as I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this unconventional story.

Damn You, Entropy!

Last year, a prominent US journalist approached me about using quotes from my novels in a reference book called 1001 Science Fiction Quotes: Damn You, Entropy! The book has been out for a while now, but I only just got my copy, so I thought you might enjoy seeing me reading a few quotes.

Also, my cat photobombs me at one point—she’s very cute and knows she can get away with anything. https://www.youtube.com/embed/jaeB5An98l0&ab_channel=PeterCawdron

You can find Damn You Entropy! on Amazon.

How rare is life in the universe?

Rare events can be common when dealing with large data sets. For example, the odds of being struck by lightning are more than one in a million, but as the US has a population of 350 million, two to three hundred people are struck by lightning every year!

When it comes to life in outer space, we know there is at least one occurrence among the 10^24 stars in the universe. We don’t know how common or rare Earth is, so we can’t calculate how often life will arise, but we can calculate the reverse odds, ie, how likely is it that Earth is the ONLY planet with life? 

Please forgive a little math.

If we assume life arose due to some unknown number of rare independent events and we use a binomial model, our baseline is…

This means that all we know for sure is that life occurred at least once around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. Although we can’t calculate if life would occur elsewhere, we can use this information to calculate the reverse odds that no other star will have life.

 Which would be…

We can then use the Poisson approximation, which is defined as a “distribution [that] can be applied to systems with a large number of possible events, each of which is rare. The number of such events that occur during a fixed time interval is, under the right circumstances, a random number with a Poisson distribution.”

In essence, the Poisson approximation will give us the worst-case scenario where utter chaos and completely random events resulted in life arising on Earth. In reality, evolution and natural selection (although being biological concepts) are notably NOT random. They’re naturally improving systems.

It’s important to realize we have no reason not to consider life arising naturally on other planets. We’ve found amino acids on comets. These are the building blocks of life on Earth. That these are naturally occurring and easy to find within our solar system suggests they’re everywhere.

And the scaffolding of life can be formed by something as simple as volcanic glass. Experiments have shown that amino acids on obsidian glass can naturally form into chains of nucleoside triphosphates in strands similar to RNA that are up to 200 letters long! That’s not enough for a cell to function, but it’s well on the way to a level of complexity where life could arise. The point being, we have every reason to think life can arise spontaneously in the right circumstances. 

As we learn more about how life arose on Earth, we may find that the first lifeforms were driven by some proto-evolutionary process that wasn’t entirely random. And we have good reason to believe such systems exist in non-living objects, as the production of elements like carbon and oxygen in the heart of a star isn’t random. We can define these with accurate models. The same may be true of abiogenesis at some point as we learn more about the process, but for now, we’ll consider it to be entirely random and assume a worst-case scenario.

If life were completely and utterly random, the odds of there being no other life in the universe are…

Basically, there is a one in three chance we are entirely alone in the universe.

Or, if you’re an optimist, a 2/3rds chance we have neighbors

Full disclosure, I used ChatGPT to help with the calculations. You can find the output here.

Unbalanced Equations

When astrophysicists look at exoplanets, they’re not looking for life as such, as life is impossible to detect at a distance of light years. What they’re looking for is an unbalanced equation.

Think about rust. What is rust? It’s iron oxide. The chemical equation for your rusting pickup truck is…

This is a balanced equation.

Put oxygen, iron and water together and you’ll get rust. Understanding this, we can look at a planet like Mars and see rust on the surface and realize there must have been oxygen and water in abundance there in the past as that chemical equation has balanced itself.

If an alien civilization looked at Earth, they would see an unbalanced chemical equation in our atmosphere. They’d see lots of oxygen and trace amounts of methane. But that isn’t possible. The oxygen and methane in our atmosphere should have reacted just like oxygen, water and iron react to form rust. Oxygen and methane combine to form carbon dioxide and water. That this hasn’t happened would tell them that there’s something changing the equation—and that something is life! Life keeps producing methane faster than it can be converted into CO2 and water. These hypothetical aliens would be able to look at Earth and say, “Well, there must be life there or with that much oxygen in the atmosphere, we’d never see any methane.” And they’d be right.

Measuring chemical compounds in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star at a distance of a hundred light years is akin to detecting the polysaccharide in a mosquito’s wings as it flies in front of a spotlight at a football game. It’s an astonishing achievement in its own right and allows us to sample the atmosphere of planets we’ll probably never visit, ever.

Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope detected dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide in the atmosphere of a gas giant orbiting a red dwarf star 124 light years from Earth, but what does this mean? How could this reveal the presence of alien life?

Dimethyl sulfide (CH3)2S gives us the smell of cooked cabbage, while dimethyl disulfide CH3SSCH3 smells like garlic. On the surface, we’re getting a hint of Masterchef: Red Dwarf Edition.

Seriously, though, these compounds have been detected with a three-sigma level of confidence in the measuring process. In a normal distribution (bell curve), 68% of values fall within ±1σ, 95% fall within ±2σ, and 99.7% fall within ±3σ, so the chances of this detection being a mistake is a mere 0.3%.

The question then becomes—what could produce these compounds? Could they be made by natural processes or are they the result of life?

Dimethyl sulfide has been found on comets, so it can be produced by processes other than life.

Here on Earth, dimethyl disulfide is produced by marine phytoplankton, so it’s a really good candidate for evidence of life.

The question then becomes what other processes produce dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide in quantities similar to what we see on the planet K2-18 b in the constellation of Leo?

Prof Nikku Madhusudhan, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, said, “I don’t think there is any known process that can explain this without biology.”

So… have we found life elsewhere in the universe? Maybe.

For now, the question shifts to looking for other natural mechanisms for producing these chemical compounds, but it may be that the natural mechanism is life itself.

The planet K2-18 b will be the focus of further studies as we seek to understand the origins of this unusual, unbalanced equation.

Welcome

Like all writers, I’d love to see one of my novels brought to life on the screen. In reality, very few novels are ever optioned, let alone made for TV or cinema—and if they are developed, they often fall into production hell, so my expectations are low. Back in 2017, my novel Retrograde was optioned by Miramax just a few months before Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a sexual predator and eventually arrested. Needless to say, the Retrograde option died along with his career.

My adult daughter, Sarah, is an award-winning screenwriter. She has turned several of my novels into screenplays and has produced mood boards like the one below to show how the visuals would work in practice.

Welcome to the Occupied States of America just won Best Screenplay at a US Film Festival.

There are no directors or producers attached to the project, so it’s not likely to go anywhere, but the film festival enjoyed the story so much that they did a table reading where actors sit around and practice the screenplay. This may very well be the closest I ever get to having something made. It is flattering to be in consideration.

If you’d like to listen to the opening of Welcome to the Occupied States of America, here it is!  

If anything is ever made, I’ll be sure to let you know, as it sure would be fun. For now, a table reading will have to do

Why Amazon?

Why are my books published (almost) exclusively on Amazon? It’s a good question. I hope this blog post helps explain my position.

I get a lot of flak for having my books on Amazon. And I get it. Amazon’s employment practices suck. Although Amazon seems like a monopoly with 40% of US online retail sales, it only accounts for 10% of total US retail sales, with Walmart and Target eroding its influence.

For all its faults, Amazon has done extremely well supporting independent publishing. I know they’re not the only ones, but their model has been comprehensive and (importantly) hasn’t changed in over a decade, giving authors like me a lot of confidence in the process in the long term.

Along with the likes of Kobo and Nook, Amazon pioneered the concept of ereaders with their Kindle devices back in the 2000s. And to their credit, they’ve stuck with them when devices like the Sony Reader was discontinued after eight years. With a battery life spanning a month or more and screens that can be read in bright sunshine and ebooks prices being a fraction of paperbacks, ereaders provide readers with a low-cost alternative to regular books. That has caused the book market to flourish. A staggering 99% of my sales are ebooks.

Traditional publishing is enticing but offers no answers.

I have two traditionally published novels with Harper Voyager, meaning I’m an established authors in their stable, and yet I’m often snubbed by them. Questions about publishing other novels go unanswered. And it’s not that my emails aren’t being read. I’ll ask four questions in bullet point form and get three answers, with my question about exploring more publishing opportunities being ignored.

And then there’s the issue of pricing. Like daffodils flowering in spring, I’m perennially asking for the price of my books to be lowered. The ebook has been priced ABOVE the hardback in the US. Here in Australia, the ebook price is an eyewatering $32 dollars—FOR A F%$KING EBOOK!

With draconian pricing like this, nobody makes any money off my traditionally published novels. Not them. Not me. It’s really dumb.

Needless to say, I’m frustrated with traditional publishing and don’t see a future with them.

Let’s be honest here. I’m an obscure author. Reaching new readers is insanely difficult. I have diversified across other platforms, with two of my best novels (Galactic Exploration and Welcome to the Occupied States of America) being available on Google Play, Apple iBooks, Kobo, Nook, etc, but I still sell more of these books on Amazon than all the others combined. To be brutally honest, I earn next to nothing from those other outlets.

It’s depressing, but I keep those two books on those other platforms so at least some of my books are outside of the Amazon ecosphere.

So why are the rest of my novels exclusive to Amazon? Ah, this is the crux of the issue.

Amazon has a program called Kindle Unlimited. It’s Spotify-for-books. Basically, readers pay a single amount each year, and then they can read anything in the Kindle Unlimited library at no additional cost. They can read as much as they like. That has been a game-changer for me. That’s where I am discovered, as readers can pick up one of my novels on a whim and without worrying about buying a dud. Then they can go on and read all 30 novels in the First Contact series without paying a cent more.

How do I get paid? Per page read. In practice, this works out at about 1/3 of what I would make from an ebook sale, but I get so many page reads that Kindle Unlimited makes up 70% of my income. The only catch is for a book to be in Kindle Unlimited, it must be exclusive to Amazon.

So there you have it… if I go wide across all distributors, I earn peanuts. Traditional publishers ignore me. Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited gives me a lifeline.

It is fair to say that without Kindle Unlimited, I wouldn’t have written a fraction of the books I have as it has provided a revenue stream that keeps me afloat. Book piracy is rampant and my book sales have fallen over the past 18 months even though I’m writing my best work, but Kindle Unlimited allows me to continue as a fulltime author (for now).

I hope that explains why my novels are exclusive to Amazon. TL;DR — without Amazon they wouldn’t exist.

I know there are a whole host of reasons why people might want to boycott Amazon and American companies, and if that’s your decision, I respect that, but please realize there are a lot of small bit-players like me that get caught in the crossfire.

The Minotaur

My latest novel, coming out this Friday, is The Minotaur. It’s a tribute to the Polish novel Solaris. 

I love writing tribute pieces to classic science fiction from the Golden Age, as often these stories are lost in time. They can be dated in styling, technology and pacing, but they still pack a punch and have had an impact on subsequent writers, even if they don’t realize it.

In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, Stanisław Lem wrote a science fiction classic from behind the Iron Curtain. At that time, Poland was part of the Eastern Bloc, controlled by the Soviet Union. In the West, there was distrust over the oppressive nature of communism. The Soviets were condemned as the enemy of freedom and progress, but they held the ascendancy in space. After launching Sputnik in 1957, the Soviet Union went on to take photographs of the far side of the Moon and launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit in April 1961. Fear was rampant. America was scrambling to catch up. 

And then came Solaris. 

Although it’s not a political novel, Solaris is a reflection of its time and explores humanity in the context of First Contact. Rather than quelling uncertainty, it toys with the limits of human understanding and suggests there may not be a rational explanation for everything in the universe.

In the novel, Lem strips bare the arrogance of colonization while deftly telling a story of sorrow, guilt and grief. He writes with prescience and compassion, defying the Western stereotypes projected onto Soviet literature. He satirizes the extremes of politics without ever mentioning any one political system. His piercing insights are still applicable today. 

…we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.  

— Solaris: Chapter 6: The Little Apocrypha

Lem’s depiction of an alien world as a single, living entity, constantly adapting and changing, one that’s incomprehensible to humanity, shifted science fiction from its simplistic origins. He challenged the blind rush to endlessly explore the unknown without actually solving social and political problems and used his novel to confront the egotism of human arrogance.

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

— Solaris: Chapter 10: Conversation

Like all novels of its time, Solaris is dated. The technology is simplistic. The characters are flat. And then, suddenly, they’re not. Suddenly, they’re rich and full of realism and emotion—and you find yourself lost in an alien ocean. 

Although I read the novel over Christmas, it’s been over a decade since I watched the George Clooney adaptation. I think I might have to go back and watch it again!

Oh, by the way, in my novel The Minotaur, there’s a passing reference made to a character called Zak Lem from the crew of the Herschel. Zak is a contracted form of the Polish Staszak, which is a diminutive form of Stanisław. In this way, Stanisław Lem makes a quiet cameo in my tribute to Solaris. Also, the rescue ship in this novel is named after Kris Kelvin, the protagonist in Solaris.

I hope you’ll grab a copy of The Minotaur, but more than that, I hope you will be inspired to read Solaris. It deserves its place among the great science fiction novels of the Golden Age and should not be forgotten.