Solaris in The Alternative Worlds

Mar 24, 2013 Daniel Roy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: sf

This was my first novel by Polish SF master Stanislaw Lem, and I didn't know quite to expect going in. I sure didn't expect such a haunting novel, filled with pain and existentialist dread. This novel deserves its status as a SF classic, both for its mind-boggling depiction of a true alien mind, and its complex, resonant prose that manages to express a sense of horror and disquiet I have only seen in a much more recent SF novel, Peter Watts's Blindsight.

The eponymous Solaris is a living ocean on This was my first novel by Polish SF master Stanislaw Lem, and I didn't know quite to expect going in. I sure didn't expect such a haunting novel, filled with pain and existentialist dread. This novel deserves its status as a SF classic, both for its mind-boggling depiction of a true alien mind, and its complex, resonant prose that manages to express a sense of horror and disquiet I have only seen in a much more recent SF novel, Peter Watts's Blindsight.

The eponymous Solaris is a living ocean on a planet orbiting a twin star, and arguably the central character of the story. If you're tired of reading about aliens that can scarcely be distinguished from humans, then boy will you enjoy this one: Solaris is a mind so vast, so alien, that generations of scientists have yet to make sense of it. All they know is there is intent in these dark waters, as demonstrated when the living ocean conjures things from deep within the psyches of the humans assigned to watch it.

The novel works on two fronts. The first one, and arguably its most engaging on an emotional level, is the story of Kelvin, a psychologist assigned to Solaris, who confronts something that Solaris has conjured from the depths of his guilt. It would have been easy to go the same route as The Thing here and spin this into a confrontation; instead Lem chose an intimate, impossibly human relationship that evokes such a sense of pain, loss, and dread that it becomes much more effective and haunting. It moves slowly, without violence, and it is more horrific than many horror tales as a result.

Given these qualities, it's understandable that filmmakers chose to focus on this aspect of the story when adapting Solaris to the big screen. Yet the second aspect of the novel is possibly its most profound and disconcerting. In aparte, Kelvin recounts the long history of human exploration of Solaris, which only serves to reveal the depths of our own ignorance when trying to apprehend an alien mind. In this, the greater nature of Solaris is explored in depth, but never explained nor revealed. The alien being Lem describes is staggering and frightening, and assuredly a better approximation of true alien life in the Universe than, say, Star Trek's bumpy foreheads.

When the two pieces of the novel are taken together, Solaris stands as a terrific and poignant thought experiment in astrobiology. It's a statement on the limits of knowledge and science when approaching something that is utterly different from ourselves, and a rare glimpse into a mind so alien, so vastly different, that we can only wonder at the purpose that moves its depths. ...more

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