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.