Gravinsky’s compendium, which was most often used in school as a simple crib, was an alphabetically arranged collection of solaristic hypotheses, from Abiological to Zoo-degenerative. The compiler, who I don’t think had ever seen Solaris, had plowed through every monograph, expedition logbook, fragmentary text and interim report; he’d even found quotations in the works of planetologists who studied other globes, and provided a catalogue that was somewhat terrifying in the brevity of its formulations, since some of them veered into inconsequentiality, deprived of the subtle complexity of
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