Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.
Stanislaw Lem is one of those authors who’s name has been floating around in my “must read” list for way too long. The only one of his works I’m even a little familiar with is Solaris, and that’s only because it’s been adapted into three different movies. I thought about watching one of the films (the 2002 version with George Clooney didn’t do very well, but the Russian 1972 film sounds interesting), but I eventually decided to go with the novel first, since apparently the author wasn’t happy with any of the adaptations.
After reading the novel I can understand why he was disappointed, and I can also see why he would never be happy with a film version. By his own account, the love story between Kris and what may or may not be the ghost of his wife isn’t really the main focus of the book, but focusing on that is the only way you can have an actual story for a movie. Lem spends most of the novel describing the planet of Solaris (sometimes with second- or third-hand descriptions), while at the same making it very clear that the planet is beyond human capacity to understand.
The first thing you need to be ready for when reading this is the language. Lem didn’t believe in dumbing things down for his readers; the book goes on for several chapters about the science (or what people were trying to understand as the science) of Solaris, with digressions into all the different theories of Solaristics (the study of Solaris, natch) and how each one had or hadn’t yet been discredited. Take the following sentence fragment: “…I mean, you know the close resemblance between asymmetrical crystals of chromosomes and the nucleic compounds of cerebrosides that constitute the substrate of memory processes…” In any other book that style of writing would have been used as a joke, a way of pointing out how a scientist character was more concerned with the science than with making themselves understood to a non-scientist. Here, that sort of sentence comes up all the time.
If you can go with the flow of the writing, the planet Lem creates is fascinating. Explorers discovered fairly quickly that Solaris’s oceans were actually only one ocean, the ocean is alive, and it’s somehow controlling the planet. It stabilizes the planet’s orbit (despite the pull from two suns which should make that impossible) and it randomly shapes itself into fantastic structures, and tunnels, and winged objects, and places where the laws of physics stop working. By the start of the novel scientists have come up with a catalog of thousands of different forms and hundreds of different theories, none of which mean anything. Kris, the main character, has made a career of studying Solaris, and even he isn’t confident that he’ll be able to add anything new. Soon after arriving at the science station he finds that the three scientists on board are each being “haunted” by something from their past, and Kris himself wakes one morning to be greeted by his dead wife, Harey, who doesn’t seem to realize she’s on a different world. Or that she’s supposed to be dead.
The other scientists make sure that no one, even the reader, knows what their “ghosts” are (in fact Kris’s former mentor kills himself before the novel starts). Whatever it is for each person, it’s something painful, involving guilt and loss. Harey committed suicide years earlier, and now the planet has brought her back for Kris to deal with all over again. He’s obviously horrified, both at the creature pretending to be his wife, and the fact that the creature really believes she’s his wife. Worse, after one murder attempt on his part and a suicide attempt on hers it becomes obvious that she can’t die, and whatever happens she’ll appear next to him every morning for as long as he stays on the planet. And Kris slowly and inexplicably starts to fall in love with her, and not just with the memory of who she’s supposed to be, right around the same time that she starts to realize that she isn’t, and never has been, human.
This is the element that the films focus on. It must have been incredibly frustrating for the author, because the doomed love story between Kris and Harey was never the point. As Lem has been quoted, “the book was not dedicated to erotic problems of people in outer space.” Here’s a rough idea of what he was trying to explore: humans will always relate to anything they find on other planets in a human way, based on human desires and motives. And what’s most likely to happen is that whatever we find will be so far removed from humanity that we’ll never be able to understand it. Whether it’s the reason for the shapes that appear in the ocean (different life stages? a way of working through mathematical problems? epileptic seizures?) or why the planet read the minds of its visitors and bring various people back to life (a way to study humanity? a reward for traveling all the way from Earth? punishment for trespassing?), it’s all left unexplained. Towards the end of the book Kris isn’t even sure he has the ability to relate to other humans anymore.
Grim stuff, and there’s no real resolution to the story, which colors my feeling about the whole thing. For a while I enjoyed how visual a book this is; many of the descriptions of the ocean’s metamorphic shapes reminded me of scenes from René Laloux’s animated movie “Light Years” (okay, “Gandahar,” although I enjoyed the English-language version more.) But even that ended up falling flat because Lem drives home the point over and over that these descriptions (many of which aren’t made by the main character, they’re something he reads in a science journal written by other explorers) don’t come close to the reality, since the human mind can’t even comprehend what it sees on Solaris, much less what any of it is for.
Pick this one up if you enjoy a philosophical experiment with your story, but be prepared to work for it.