 |
Humans ponder the living
planet of Solaris.
cover art by Paul Lehr |
This is the first of three related blog posts about Stanisław Lem's science fiction novel
Solaris.
Here is something I wrote back
in 2012:
"Stanislaw Lem died in 2006. His story
Solaris was one of the first science fiction novels I read and it remains one of the most disturbing
first contact stories I've ever read. It would be interesting to know how much influence
Solaris has had on other authors such as Asimov (
Nemesis)"
Lost in Translation
Written in Polish and first published in 1961,
Solaris was translated into French and then that French version was eventually translated into the English version (download
here)
that I read back in the mid-1970s. To this day, I have emotion-tinged
memories of how I reacted when I read a copy of the 1971 Berkley Medallion
edition of
Solaris with cover art by
Paul Lehr.
 |
| Berkley International Science Fiction |
The feelings that were evoked in me fifty years ago by my reading of
Solaris still rest in my memory like some alien artifact that was telepathically planted in my brain. I received a $0.25 weekly allowance and so I did not have big bucks to spend feeding my addiction to Sci Fi. That there was a cheap paperback edition of
Solaris, a story written by a non-American, was something of a miracle. I don't know how many Berkley International Science Fiction titles got published or how they selected the authors to be showcased. In the mid-70s I read other Berkley Sci Fi novels such as
The Santaroga Barrier.
I should probably read the more recent (2011) directly translated (by
Bill Johnston) version of
Solaris, but there are simply some books (such as the nightmarish
Level 7) that I will never read twice. In the case of
Solaris, I agree with Randy Byers: "
It's a very dark, disturbing novel", so I will probably never read it three times.
As a 14-year-old boy, I was reading science fiction for entertainment, and I was only modestly entertained by
Solaris. Mostly I was disappointed and, as I recall, "revulsion" was the predominant feeling that
Solaris provoked in me. A 14-year-old should probably not be reading about a suicidal woman who tries to kill herself by drinking
liquid oxygen.
 |
Inter Ice Age 4
by Kōbō Abe,
another medical
school-trained
science fiction
story teller. |
Apparently,
Lem was not happy with Western science fiction as an escapist
literature, so it should surprise nobody that he had goals in mind for
his readers other than simply entertaining them with a rousing space
travel adventure story about meeting aliens on a distant exoplanet.
Autistic Aliens
Given
Lem's educational background, we can't expect that he would have
written an American-style Sci Fi adventure story about interstellar
space travel. On the other hand, what other writer of science fiction
would have created a novel about an "
autistic ocean"? The meaning of the term "autistic" has changed in the 60 years since Lem wrote
Solaris. Originally, autistic children were often viewed as having an "
unhinged mind",
in the same way that psychotic adults were thought of as having
"escaped from reality" into a delusional inner world. These days, autism
research leans towards identifying defects in brain function that
disrupt a child's ability to function as a human being with normal
inter-personal
social behaviors.
Aliens or just one Alien?
I'm
agnostic with respect to this question: is there only one life form on
the planet Solaris or is there a population of Solarians? I assume that
the alien(s) of Solaris has/have telepathic powers: not only can they
"read" the memories of humans, but if there are multiple Solarian
"individuals" residing in the ocean of planet Solaris then I imagine
that they can easily share their thoughts with each other and their
"individuality" is very different from what most people experience as
human individuals.
In a human society, being autistic disrupts the
pattern of normal social interactions with other people, but it can also
insulate the autistic individual and allow them to "do their own
thing". These days we think of an autistic spectrum that may merge at
one end with "normal" people who have only minor problems with social
skills and sometimes these are unique "high functioning" individuals who
can do great things... maybe create a great work of art or become
a famous scientist.
Maybe the "autistic ocean" of Solaris needed to attract autistic human
scientists; maybe only a scientist on the autism spectrum had a chance of
1) understanding the alien life form(s) of Solaris, or 2) of being understood by the alien ocean.
Disappointment
Why was I disappointed when I read
Solaris? After
my startling discovering of the existence of science fiction novels, I had been reading books such as "Doc" Smith's
Skylark
novels which feature the adventures a dashing hero who jumps in his
spaceship, zooms off to distant planets and meets a multitude of
humanoid aliens. 👽
Most of the imaginary space aliens
from the Golden Age of American Sci Fi had human-like interests and
motivations, so it was easy for a 14-year-old (me) to follow along with
the story. Still, the first Sci Fi novel that I ever read (
The Gods Themselves) explored human interactions with extremly odd aliens, so it is not as if
Solaris was my first exposure to non-humanoid aliens.
 |
| Assignment Nor'Dyren |
I read
Assignment Nor'Dyren at about the same time when I read
Solaris. In the decades since, I have read
Assignment Nor'Dyren many times; it is a flawed novel, but it is
FUN. 😋
Remembering
Solaris as dreary and annoying, many decades passed before I could bring myself to read it for a second time (I'm glad I did, Solaris is not nearly as horrifying for an adult as it was for me in my innocent childhood).
Assignment Nor'Dyren
suffers from a common problem found in many science fiction stories: humans travel out into the interstellar
depths of the galaxy and find that there are many other humanoid
species, all miraculously having reached the same technological stage of
development. This was one of the dominant ways of writing about space
aliens ever since the early days of "
planetary science fiction"
with its stories about finding human-like civilizations on Mars and
Venus. Many story tellers have no interest in "weird aliens" who might
be a billion years into their age of high technology, so they write
about space aliens who are very similar to we humans.
 |
| Solaris: A World Thinking |
Solaris
was completely different! As a young Sci Fi fan, it was frustrating to
read
Solaris because I wanted a rational and coherent account of an
interesting alien creature or culture. Instead, Lem provided me with a
confusing stream-of consciousness vision of a trip to Solaris as experienced by Dr.
Kelvin who struck me as a poor excuse for a scientist of the future. In
Assignment Nor'Dyren,
the story is told from the perspective of a practical, hands-on
repairman who, like Kelvin, goes through a mind-wrenching ordeal upon
reaching a distant exoplanet. However, young readers (like my
14-year-old self) will find it easier to deal with the accidental death
of an alien in
Assignment Nor'Dyren than the multiple deaths of Kelvin's young wife that Lem wrote into
Solaris. For me,
Assignment Nor'Dyren was a satisfying adventure story while
Solaris was a source of disappointment.
 |
An old 1960s Mimoid
Mercury space capsule. |
Disappointment #1: The first page of
Solaris reads like a description of a
1961 Mercury astronaut's descent to Earth. Where were the sparkling spaceships of the future?
Disappointment #2: In
Solaris,
the first words spoken by Kelvin make him sound like a blubbering
crybaby. Where is the dashing Sci Fi hero with nerves of steel?
Disappointment
#3: rather than arrive at a sparkling Hi Tek research station, Lem
drops Kelvin (and readers) into a hell hole, what seems like a run-down
haunted house. I had not intended to buy a ghost story! 😞
Lem had no interest in providing 14-year-old American
Sci Fi fans with their dashing heroes. And it wasn't only that Kelvin
does not play the role of a stereotypical Sci Fi action figure. The
first person he meets (Dr. Snow) at the Solaris research station acts
like a total dick (and he's drinking 🍾🍺). Rather than tell Kelvin why
he's acting so strangely and what has been happening at the station, he
reflexively lies: "...it's nothing, I assure you." Then with his next
breath, "A lot has been happening here." Then Snow "explains" why the
station commander is not there to welcome Kelvin by letting Kelvin
assume that there was "an accident". At this point, Kelvin just shrugs
and wanders off into the station.
WTF?
A 14-year-old science
fiction fan does not like to read a story about adults who are pathetic
liars and who are acting irrationally. Soon enough, Kelvin learns that
the commander of the station recently killed himself. Kelvin has just
traveled for 16 months across a vast interstellar distance to reach the
Solaris research station and yet he barely reacts to the news of the
commander's death. 😕
 |
The Metamorphic ocean.
The alien ocean can manufacture
objects such as an artificial child.
image source |
We might graciously say that Lem wrote
Solaris
as a mystery story. Alternatively, I can hypothesize that Lem was
playing with the idea of autism and the telepathic effects of his
"autistic alien ocean" on the research station's staff. In the first
chapter, without any explanation, Dr. Snow warns Kelvin that he might see
"visitors" on the station. Kelvin asks if the visitors might be what he
calls "polytherians". Not until the next chapter's exposition dump do we
learn that Solarian life has been classified as being in it own unique
category:
Polythera Syncytialia Metamorph.
Readers of
Solaris gradually come to know
Kelvin fairly well by watching his thought processes and following his
actions and conversations. After deciding that the station commander is
dead and Dr. Snow is a drunken lunatic, Kelvin goes off and contemplates the
commander's dead body. Ew. And then we get a meandering info dump:
Kelvin's thoughts about the history of "Solaristics" (the study of the
planet Solaris), including a flat statement that the first scientific
investigation of Solaris detected no life on the planet. But the second
expedition to Solaris decided that the ocean was "organic", maybe a
giant living cell. Kelvin knows vast amounts about the 100 year long
history of Solaristics, but he thinks that the voluminous published
studies of Solaris are just a "useless jumble of words". If these are truly Kelvin's inner thoughts about the state of Solaristics, then why
has he come to Solaris?
As the Chapter 2 information dump continues, we learn
that some of the researchers' devices that had been lowered into the
ocean had been cleverly modified by the ocean, and some had even been
"duplicated" by the ocean. In fact, the mimoids (odd structural
artifacts that occasionally that rise from the ocean surface of planet Solaris) routinely
make "copies" of any human artifact that is placed nearby. However, we
are told, mimoids ignore humans and other Earthly life forms.
A huge gap in Kelvin's stream of consciousness
"narration" is that there is no mention of life on other exoplanets
besides Solaris. We have no context for the science of Solaristics or
the general state of human science in this future time. 😕
While
learning about Kelvin, I ended up asking: what is wrong with this
pathetic excuse for a planetary scientist? Are we supposed to conclude that
Kelvin does not care about Solaristics? Why did he come to Solaris and
what
does he care about?
 |
Electroencephalographic analysis of Rheya.
original cover art by Wojciech Siudmak |
It is not until one third of the way through
Solaris
that we learn Kelvin is a psychologist. Almost at the end of Solaris,
the reader finally learns that Kelvin has studied patterns in the
"discharges" of the ocean that seem to resemble electrical activity
inside the human brain. Typically, our unreliable narrator (Kelvin)
can't be bothered to provide we readers with any details about his
research. Similarly, we never hear any details about the organic chemistry of the alien ocean, as if calling it "organic" is all we need to know. With such omissions, Lem is telling me that he was not actually trying to write a science fiction story; he simply used a Sci Fi setting to write a type of anti-science lamentation.
The Ghost Gift
One quarter of the way through
Solaris,
Kelvin receives a "gift" from the aliens: a woman named 'Rheya'. But it
takes 80 pages more before we learn that this is a copy of his wife and
that Rheya killed herself ten years previously (when she was only 19
years old).
The "narration" method used by Lem is vastly annoying
for any reader who enjoys linear narrative. Readers might begin to
wonder: is this a Sci Fi story about an interesting type of space alien
or is it a psychological study of Kelvin? Has Lem selected this method
for telling the story as a way of making readers share the frustrations
that have been experienced by generations of Solarists? Quickly we learn
that Rheya is fearful of her husband because he has a "very bad
temper". Ya, this just keeps getting better and better. 😠
 |
Dr. Kelvin and Rheya's brain scan.
When they first meet on Earth,
is he investigating what is wrong
with the brain of a suicidal girl OR
does Rheya become suicidal because of
the anti-social behaviors of her husband? |
"
Kelvin's personal ignorance, personal loss, and personal guilt are the narrative's main thrust." (
source)
Kelvin
believes that he was largely responsible for Rheya's death. He married
this young woman, then left her, ignoring her warning that she would
kill herself. Kelvin thought Rheya was too much a coward to actually
kill herself, and told her exactly that as he left her. Given that Kelvin is
such a creep, I was intrigued by the idea that the
2002 film version of Solaris
went to the trouble to provide viewers with a significant amount of
background information about this "happy couple". Did Kelvin become a
psychologist after Rheya's death or before?
What would Kelvin do?
 |
Solaris chapters
There are major info dumps
in Chapters 2 and 6. |
Quickly after the alien-constructed copy of Rheya
arrives inside the Solaris research station, it becomes clear that she is not a
magically reincarnated complete Rheya, rather, she has been constructed
from Kelvin's memories of his wife; she is cognitively incomplete. However, the
reconstruction was done in a strange way. This "new Rheya" knows nothing
of how she died, even-though that is a painful subject in Kelvin's
memories of Rheya. The gaps in Rheya's memories are what makes me think of Rheya as a "gift"
provided to Kelvin by the aliens, a finely crafted artifact provided to Kelvin that
might (if he used it correctly) allow him to escape from his guilt over
how he treated his wife. At the same time, the artificial life version
of Rheya might function as a kind of device by which the Solarians can
study humans, particularly human social behavior. This "copy of Rheya" has her own mind.
How
does Kelvin make use of this precious gift? He gets out of bed and
starts his morning ritual of shaving. Then he tells her that he must
depart (go to work) and this reveals a fundamental part of her alien
programming: she has an uncontrollable compulsion to stay with Kelvin
every moment.
This is where the rational science fiction fan in me
says: "Okay, people have been studying Solaris for 100 years, trying to
attain meaningful contact with the aliens of Solaris. Now, Kelvin has
made contact with this 'artificial copy' of his wife, a strange gift
from the Solarians." I must ask, "
What will Kelvin do?"
I
answer myself, "He will send a report to Earth, letting everyone know
about this amazing ability of the Solarians to make 'copies' of people."
But
no. That is not what happens. Kelvin tries to tie Rheya's hands behind
her back, but "she" has super-human strength. So he tricks Rheya into
getting into a space capsule and launches her into orbit. Why? He can't
stand to be with a "living" reminder of his dead wife? Because a scientist, having made a long-sought break-through, will always quickly destroy the physical evidence of the new discovery?
 |
Can the autistic ocean get it right?
A new gift for the humans, version 3.0 .....
a Solarian; 3D "printed" by a neutrino beam. |
As a 14-year-old reader of
Solaris, I felt
that Lem was not writing about scientists. I wondered: did Lem ever know
a single scientist? Miraculously, at the end of the novel, Dr. Snow
regains his sanity and suggests to Kelvin that their "visitors" might
have been gifts from the aliens. There is a short science fiction story
hidden inside
Solaris, hidden under a meandering abnormal/alien
psychological medical mystery. Eventually, after almost 200 pages, the
scientific report (concerning the artificial humans created by the alien
ocean) finally gets written and transmitted back to Earth. The
overly-long and contorted central part of Solaris has passed, like a bad
dream.
 |
| human pollen invades Solaris |
I love the idea of an exoplanet where a type of
ancient artificial life resides, having possibly lived in isolation,
enjoying the fruits of its advanced technology for a few billion years.
When humans arrive, it might take the Solarians a century or two before
they can begin to communicate with humans. At first, the aliens might
not even notice the humans, much in the way that I might not notice a
grain of pollen that has drifted into a room where I am watching a movie
such as the
1972 Solaris.
Imagine a human child who grew
up in the absence of social interactions with other people and even
other animals; maybe raised by robotic nurse maids who don't talk and
show no emotions. How long would it take for such an asocial human to
learn how to interact socially with other humans? The asocial oceanic
life form of Solaris might need to experiment and create a new
technology for studying humans, just as we would need a microscope in
order to study pollen. Alternatively, the Solarians might find humans to
be annoying and they might choose to deploy their automated defense
system that provides a way of shielding themselves from any unwelcome
"humanoid pollen" that lands on their planet.
Please Go Away
Lem produced intricate verbal descriptions of artifacts that were made by the alien oceanic life form that he imagined for
Solaris. Sadly, Berkley Books did not see fit to publish an edition of
Solaris
with cover art that depicts one of those oceanic artifacts produced by
that vast planetary-scale life form: alien growths such as mimoids and
symmetriads.
Science fiction fans have, at times, crafted their own images that try
to capture the wonder evoked by Lem's verbal account of odd structures
arising in the ocean of planet Solaris (see the image to the left on
this page for an example). The cover art by Paul Lehr that was used for
my 1971 edition of
Solaris seems to have no obvious connection to the story. 😞
One interpretation of the alien artifacts (such as
symmetriads)
is that they were intentionally crafted by the Solarians with the goal
of confusing the Solarists (the human scientists who went to planet
Solaris in order to study the alien Solarians). In creating artifacts
like the symmetriads, the goal of the Solarians may simply have been to
frustrate the scientific investigational spirit of the Solarists and
make we humans abandon further study of Solaris, ignore the the planet
Solaris and turn our meddlesome attention to other parts of the galaxy.
 |
| The human condition. |
Pest Control
The alien(s) of Solaris may
have been treating humans in much the same way that we deal with pesky
mosquitoes that can find their way into our bedroom at night, whine
annoyingly in our ear, then cut into our body and suck out a drop of our
blood, possibly leaving behind a disease-causing microbe inside us.
 |
The planet Solaris is located in a binary star system.
Artwork from the 2002 film version of Solaris. |
And what else should we expect? The atmosphere of
Solaris contains "poisonous gasses" and "no oxygen"; the planet's
surface has only a few seemingly barren and lifeless islands. In an era
when hundreds of new planets are being visited every year, why should
humans even pay the least attention to the world Solaris? What first
attracted the attention of Earthly scientists was that the orbit of
Solaris defies the laws of physics.
 |
The living ocean of Solaris, 1972. Just fog for
the "special" FX? Not even one old mimoid? 😖 |
After orbital observatories were positioned close to
Solaris, it was noticed that there was an "active character" to the
ocean's movements. Eventually it was decided that the ocean of Solaris
was a either a single gigantic living organism or the life-sustaining
medium for a population of Solarians who had the ability to alter
space-time and stabilize the the orbit of Solaris.
Giving the Gift of Rheya
An alternative interpretation of the events in
Solaris is that the alien Solarians were actually trying to communicate with the
Solarists,
but due to fundamental differences between the aliens and we humans,
meaningful communication did not come easily. Rather than have a wizbang
discussion with the alien ocean about artificial gravity technology,
the Solarists depicted in the story ended up having a devil of a time
dealing with the "gifts" that were provided to them by the aliens and
they struggled to maintain their own sanity.
The only alien "gift" who becomes a major character in
Solaris is the artificial copy of Kelvin wife, '
Rheya'.
We never really get to know much about the "gifts" that were provided
to Dr. Snow and the other staff members at the research station, but readers
know that every human on Solaris was "unhinged" by a combination of 1)
the "gifts" that they received from the telepathic alien ocean and 2) the
effects of what Kelvin describes (poorly) as bizarre thoughts that pop
into his head and 3) the troubling "dreams" that disturb their sleep.
In the last chapter of
Solaris, Lem finally
allows readers to step outside the research station and get more
physically intimate with the alien ocean. Seen through Kelvin's eyes,
readers see how the ocean playfully reacts to Kelvin's touch. However,
Lem also allows Kelvin to wax philosophical and ask Dr. Snow about the
concept of an
imperfect god. During their discussion, out comes the idea
that the alien ocean of Solaris might be the embryonic form of a
material god. Maybe the ocean is in the process of "growing up".
Is a Science Fiction Story the Place for Celebrations of Ignorance?
Lem
gives biological evolution little attention in
Solaris. This creates a literary safe haven for commentators such as
Darko Suvin to over-emphasize the problems that we humans face when we reflexively apply the
intentional stance to all aspects of the universe. However, when we explore and study the "
foreign universe", we can move past our first failed attempts at understanding; we need not give up and proclaim that we will never understand. The history of science is full of defeatist proclamations such as, "Because they are so remote, we will never know what the stars are made of." Spectroscopy became a tool for astronomers and now we easily study the atomic constituents of distant stars. The Solarists may have spent 100 years failing to attain meaningful communication with the Solarians, but that does not mean that humans will
NEVER understand the planet Solaris and its unusual life form.
"
The way evolution works, I can't see it happening." -
Peter Ward
 |
| Asimov's conscious planet. |
Could the evolution of life on a planet avoid populations of organisms and go directly to one giant world-spanning ocean that exists as a "single living cell"? It is not likely. Not everything that Lem could imagine is possible. Lem went way out on a speculative limb by suggesting such a possibility in
Solaris. Anyone trained in organismal biology would react to this as if it were a silly idea and would not write a Sci Fi story suggesting direct development of a planet-sized cell. For his novel
Nemesis, Asimov imagined his own kind of "
conscious planet" with a planet-wide network of telepathically-linked cells. Sadly, Asimov never explained the physics of telepathy or his imaginary "neuronic" detectors. 😞 Like faster-than-light travel and time travel, telepathy and spontaneously-arising planetary consciousness are fun Sci Fi story ideas, but not scientifically plausible.
I can imagine that when Lem was in medical school, he
may have seen psychologists working with autistic children. That
experience may have contributed to Lem's creation of a story in which a
planetary life form is viewed like a growing child rather than as an
evolving form of life. The Solarists seemed comfortable imagining that the alien
ocean
arose spontaneously without having to go through an evolutionary
process similar to how we humans evolved. In contrast, it is far easier to
imagine that a biological species such as we humans might, in our far
future, reach a state of artificial life that is similar to Lem's living
ocean.
There is an alternative to the belief that we humans find ourselves trapped in an inexplicable "foreign universe". As creatures that evolved by natural selection as biological components of the universe, we should be "at home in the universe", our brains having been slowly and carefully crafted so as to allow us to understand the world around us. There is nothing wrong with Lem reminding us that humans need some humility, but I prefer my science fiction as a literature of hope and progress. Lem's
Solaris does not scratch that itch. 😞
 |
Searching for Interesting Aliens in film...
Solaris blog series parts II and III |
Solaris in Film
Imagined First Contact involving mysterious telepathic messages passing to and from the human unconscious mind is a challenging topic to depict in a movie. In parts
II and
III of this series on
Solaris, I will look at the
1972 and
2002 Solaris films and comment on them from my perspective as a fan of science fiction.
Next: the
1972 Solaris movie (directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)
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