Solaris

The wide-ranging, erudite Duncan Lawie goes where few Slashdot reviewers have gone before, exploring books on the fringes of Science Fiction and wacky speculation in the interest of expanding your mind and his own. This time, he reports on Stanislaw Lem's classic work Solaris, first printed in English 30 years ago, and in Russian nearly 40. Read more to find out if it sounds like your kind of page-turner.

Solaris
author	Stanislaw Lem
pages	~200
publisher	Harcourt Brace (USA)
rating	7.5
reviewer	Duncan Lawie
ISBN	0156837501b
summary	Deeply thoughtful, vastly different science fiction from beyond the English language.

The height of Stanislaw Lem's science fiction production was in the 1950s and 1960s though he has continued to produce lucid, powerful work since. Writing in Eastern Europe (in Polish), his influences were vastly different from those of Commonwealth and American authors of the same period. Access to his work in English first came years after it was written, some of them via another language. This has resulted in a delayed effect as his influence on the science fiction of the West fed in over the course of a generation. Despite - or perhaps because of - this, Lem is one of the most important science fiction authors of the twentieth century writing outside the English language and his works, including over a dozen novels and several short story collections, have been published in over 30 languages.

Solaris is one of Lem's early works of mature science fiction, differing significantly in focus from the Russian film based upon it and perhaps totally unrelated to Sun Microsystems' Unix. It tells of an episode in the continuing quest by humanity to understand an alien planet. This planet orbits two stars and yet maintains a regular path. It is a ocean-world and science believes that it is the action of this mass - which is not water -- which controls the planet's motion. The planet, which itself is called Solaris, has been studied by science for generations and a large part of the book is concerned with a form of literature review, telling the history of the highs and lows in that research and relating dozens of theories generated through the decades. The style is such that the book manages to relay all this scientific opinion without indicating any genuine support for any particular theory, though most observers seem to accept, to varying degrees, the idea that the ocean may be "alive."

The narrator, Kelvin, is a Solarist by training and has come from Earth to obtain his own first hand experience of the planet. In this period of declining research, he arrives at the research station to find it in disarray; the station leader dead and the other occupants utterly preoccupied with matters they will not explain and which Kelvin cannot understand. The development of Kelvin's character is central to the book. His history is related in tandem with that of Solarist research as he attempts to come to terms with himself and with events on the station. Kelvin is the rational man of science, attempting to understand the apparently incomprehensible. His story recapitulates the scientific journey to the heart of incomprehension as he attempts to handle the impossibly real experiences the planet seems to be imposing on him. Beyond this bulk of complexity, there is a clear perspective on Kelvin's position in the final pages which shows how far this ghostly story has come, and how far our species has yet to travel.

Given the origin of its author, and the vintage of the novel, it is hardly surprising that Solaris is so far removed from the American tradition of science fiction. The mood of the book is passive and thoughtful, building a paranoiac atmosphere through understatement and calm description. The alien environment of the planet is described in the language of science and yet manages to remain largely incomprehensible. The book appears to avoid any kind of extreme; no event so great as triumph or disaster is ever described as such. This approach can make it difficult to care about the characters but it sustains the quiet, brave despair at the heart of the novel. Perhaps in this it is a reflection of the Eastern European experience of the communist regime of the period? Science has failed to comprehend Solaris so utterly that it seems humanity must be in retreat. Even as the book closes there is no certainty regarding Solaris beyond phenomenology - or has the book displayed something of the spirit of the planet? Solaris is one of the most alien places in science fiction, at least for the Western Anglophone reader, whilst Solaris goes right to the heart of the questions that good science fiction should be exploring.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Admit it.

Ok, hands up... how many people saw the title and thought this was a book about Sun's OS?

The film is interesting too..

The Russian film [imdb.com] based on the book is definitely worth a watch if you can get hold of it, and if you have the patience - it's sometimes rather slow-moving, to say the least, and runs to over 2.5 hours in some cuts.
It's worth seeing largely because it's such a startlingly different portrayal of a future in space to those doing the rounds in the West at the time. The space station orbiting Solaris is a comfortable-looking place that's very unfuturistic, and the trip to an alien planet, with the inevitable separation from family and friends, is told from a far more human viewpoint than in most science fiction. It's a movie about people, not about technology.
There are echoes of this technique in later movies. For instance, 2010 [imdb.com] covers Floyd's preparation for the trip to Jupiter, and the impending separation from his family, in great detail, with the actual journey being skipped almost entirely.

It's a strange, starkly beautiful and intriguingly different film. Worth seeing if you get the chance.

Re:The prequel was better

OK: Somebody rate him up as funny! (you never have the points when you really want them)

It does, however make some sense of SUN's naming of their (then) new OS when they switched from a BSD based SUN-OS to a SYSV based Solaris.

For long-time SUN-OS/BSD users it was going to be a new world... somewhat like the old one, but with underlying differences that sometimes made it outright strange to comprehend -- on top of which was grafted the vestiges of the old, reliable world.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!

Lem, movies, etc.

Two comments: Much like in the case of "2001", I believe "Solaris" the book, and "Solaris" the movie (Russia, 1972; the book itself was originally published in Polish, not Russian) go hand in hand. Only after reading the book and watching the movie do you get a better grasp of both. (Read the book first, though.)

It should be noted, though, that Lem himself mentioned more than once that he did not like the movie and disagreed with the Tarkovsky's (the director's) interpretation of the book.

Solaris is one of my two most favorite Lem books, the other one being The Cyberiad [forum2.org]. In the discussion above, somebody already mentioned the issue of translation; it should be noted that Kandel's English version of The Cyberiad is a brilliant translation (I haven't read the original, but I did read a different translation).

lem rules

Lem is, by far, my favorite writer of science fiction. I must admit, though, that Solaris is not among his works that I like the most. Cyberiad and Mortal Engines are my two favorites. They are collections of short stories written in classic fable style, except they're set in a universe where the dominant form of life is robotic, and they all think that organic life is squishy, disgusting, and frightening. The language in these works is beautiful, rhythmic, and down-right amazing considering that they've been through translation from Polish. No geek should die without having read Cyberiad first.

I also liked Memoirs Found in a Bathtub a lot, and His Master's Voice. Shit, just check out this author.

The only thing you might not like about Lem is that he deliberately sets you up for a big climax (whether it be action or resolution of a mystery) and then robs you of the reward every single frigging time. One can see the smile on his face, too. He knows he's doing it. If that kind of thing would bother you, stick with Cyberiad and Mortal Engines, because he doesn't pull that shit in his shorter works. Enjoy.

Re:Admit it.

In Solaris, Kelvin's days are spent in a futile effort to understand a planet with strange characteristics and irrational features that combine logic and chaos into an alien mixture that defies human understanding.

I have largely the same feelings whenever I port software to a Sun system.

- John