Anyway

Sol­aris by Stan­islaw Lem is sci­ence fic­tion more in keep­ing with “2001: A Space Odys­sey” than with most other types of sci­ence fic­tion. It’s more con­cerned with explor­ing bound­ar­ies of thought and ima­gin­a­tion than with pla­cing humans in con­tact with ali­ens who speak an under­stand­able lan­guage and act with under­stand­able motives. The alien body here is an entire planet which through­out the book acts with motives the humans can only guess at.

The cover of the book (which comes from the 2002 movie of the same name) would lead one to assume the book is a romance, which would be false. There is a little of the romantic in it, espe­cially towards the end, but it’s not a “love in the uni­verse” book.

The book­club had mixed feel­ings about “Sol­aris”, at least in part because the book is unevenly writ­ten. The pages upon pages of descrip­tion of plan­et­ary form­a­tions could prob­ably have been edited down sub­stan­tially (and in fact, even those who enjoyed the book skipped over most of the geo­graph­ical descrip­tions), while much of the rest of the book leaves you won­der­ing due to lack of detail (which I assume was delib­er­ate). To make the most of “Sol­aris” you have to be pre­pared to con­cen­trate, so it’s not really suit­able for air­plane fod­der (unless you have good head­phones to block out the noise).

“Sol­aris” is about the unknown, and just how lim­ited human ima­gin­a­tion is in under­stand­ing truly alien spe­cies. One mem­ber of the book­club related that to how hard it is to truly know another per­son, and there’s quite a lot of that in the book as well; the “hero” doesn’t know what is hap­pen­ing to the other humans on the space sta­tion and they have no inten­tion of telling him. The secrecy is intense and adds to the atmo­sphere of lack of under­stand­ing and lack of the cap­ab­il­ity to under­stand what is hap­pen­ing. The­or­ies abound as to the nature of the alien life­form, but none quite seem to fit. If you’re feel­ing in a philo­soph­ical mood, or look­ing for a spring­board to think about what it means to be human or even alive, you could do worse than read “Solaris”.

Sci­ence fic­tion writ­ten some time ago always runs into some prob­lems where the described future and the real present col­lide. The sec­tions where the hero is read­ing ref­er­ence books (yes, real bound books) on the space sta­tion, and com­plains about how they didn’t have room for all the import­ant books, is notice­able to today’s reader with exper­i­ence of effect­ively infin­ite elec­tronic stor­age space. And to me the com­plete lack of women as explorers in the given his­tory of the planet Sol­aris, and the equally com­plete lack of women sci­ent­ists or research­ers, dates the book even more. One of the book­club mem­bers com­men­ted that these two factors together prove the author’s point, that many things are unima­gin­able. Even if they become com­mon­place 30 years later.