“You may have been sent to torment me, or to make my life happier, or as an instrument ignorant of its function, used like a microscope with me on the slide. Possibly you are here as a token of friendship, or a subtle punishment, or even as a joke. It could be all of those at once, or—which is more probable—something else completely.”
Stanisław Lem’s Solaris sits securely at the center of a Venn diagram where literature, philosophy, science-fiction, and psychology overlap. Generations of scientists have spent careers hovering over an alien planet, attempting to establish communication with the intelligence they believe lurks within its oily waves. The planet has two suns: one red, one blue. It’s orbit follows an impossible trajectory, adjusted by fluctuations in the ocean. Though libraries of research have been published, very little is known for certain about the potentially sentient gelatinous ocean that covers the planet of Solaris, and in the process of exploring it through the eyes of a psychologist, we learn more about humanity than about the alien being humanity encounters.
Our protagonist, Kris Kelvin, tells the story in first person, which lends an eerie tone to the narrative as we are welcome to question the integrity of the narrator. The novel includes large passages on the history of humanity’s interactions with Solaris, and while these are necessary to give the novel depth, they are often tedious pull us away from the main story of Kelvin’s personal journey.
In one account, a pilot searches for his lost partner in a storm of strong winds and fog. His descriptions of the episode seem to be hallucinatory. Once positioned in the eye of the storm, he hovers over the oily surface of the ocean, which begins to turn transparent until eventually it is completely clear. The ocean begins to froth with foam, and thin filaments begin sprouting into a yellow plaster likeness of a garden—trees, paths, hedges, tools, an apiary. The model cracks and emits a pale liquid as it crumbles back into the foam. He continues his search, and at one point thinks he has spotted his partners flying suit amongst the waves. As he descends, he realizes that the figure, while humanoid, is not his partner. It is an enormous child—its body rising twelve feet above the waves as it lays horizontal. The pilot is disturbed by the child’s movements. As it maneuvers, it does not exhibit the random, curious movements of a child—it’s movements are methodical and calculated. A hypothesis is put forward that the ocean had absorbed his partner’s mind, which was manifested as the experimental reconstruction the pilot had seen. Kelvin reads this account to himself. ‘The Little Apocrypha’—as the fictional work is titled—gives the reader a better understanding of the history between humanity and Solaris, but it pulls us out of Kelvin’s story for too long, just as placing a summary of it in the middle of this review obscures the real meat of the novel.
Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
Kelvin is sent to Solaris to assess the situation on the station there, but when he arrives, he finds things in disarray—one crew member has died, another is living in voluntary seclusion, and the third, Snow, seems to have gone mad, communicating with Kelvin in a cryptic manner.
Drawing on the crew’s subconscious minds, Solaris has populated their ship with corporeal visitors raised from their memories. Is the purpose of these simulacra to communicate with the crew? To study them? To experiment on them? The alien intellect remains shrouded in mystery, but the emotional stress the replicas place on the crew members causes their grasp on sanity to weaken. Kelvin researches in the library, discusses with Snow, and interacts with his personal visitor, Rheya. Evidently, the visitors are inseparable from the source of their form. At first, Kelvin tries to launch Rheya into orbit in a shuttle, but a replacement replica is with him upon his awakening the next day. When a closed door separates them, she claws through it, ripping the flesh from her hands. As he spends more time with the simulacrum, he learns that it is ignorant of its origins; it may have been created by Solaris, but it does not know its purpose.
Rheya is exactly as Kelvin remembers her, down to the mark on her arm where she injected herself in the act of suicide a decade prior. Repressed memories surface, and Kelvin experiences anew his guilt in his lover’s demise. He begins to question the motives of humanity in their endless quest to confront the unknown. Mankind does not understand itself deeply, and yet we persist in our investigations into the mysterious and risk being overwhelmed by things we can’t comprehend. From an introductory text on Solaris, Kelvin recalls the author’s theory that the study of Solaris was the era’s replacement for religion.
Contact, the stated aim of Solaristics, is no less vague and obscure than the communion of the saints, or the second coming of the Messiah. Exploration is a liturgy using the language of methodology; the drudgery of the Solarists is carried out only in the expectation of fulfillment, of an Annunciation, for there are not and cannot be any bridges between Solaris and Earth.
As Kelvin gradually becomes used to and emotionally dependent on the replica of Rheya, his desire to understand the mechanisms which created the enigma is quelled.
As the book ends, Kelvin sets foot on Solaris for the first time, his future uncertain. He reaches out to the gentle waves on the beach, which envelope his hand, leaving a pocket of air around his flesh. He raises his arm, and the fluid encasing his hand rises with it, connected to the ocean by a thin stem. As he communes with the alien ocean, contemplating his purpose, Kelvin decides to remain true to human nature, and resume exploration of Solaris.
Lem uses the natural sciences and a philosophical perspective to create a compelling narrative that prompts the reader to ponder—about the novel, of course, but also about themselves; their origins, their purpose, their species. It is devoid of many genre tropes, preferring to provoke contemplation and, perhaps, wonder, rather than provide entertainment. It is not without its faults. As I mentioned, there are quite a few patches of drier reading, where a large amount of information is packed into a chapter to provide context. There are excessive references to fictional scientists and their discoveries, which make the reality of Solaris feel more slightly more legitimate, but end up weighing down the narrative a bit. These are minor quibbles, though. Taken as a whole, the book is quite engaging and well worth reading.