Solaris

by Stanisław Lem

Book Overview

"A fantastic book." --Steven Soderbergh

When psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he finds himself confronting a painful memory embodied in the physical likeness of a past lover. Kelvin learns that he is not alone in this and that other crews examining the planet are plagued with their own repressed and newly real memories. Could it be, as Solaris scientists...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156027607
• ISBN13: 9780156027601
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Harper Voyager
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Solaris

You also need to watch the Russian movie with English Subs. its beautiful.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND...

Having seen the film that starred George Clooney and was based upon this book, and having found it wanting, I decided to go to the source. I am glad that I did, as it is certainly better as a book than it is as a film. It is also far more profound than the film, which concentrated on the love story. This book is much more than that, covering many themes. It is, first and foremost, about contact with an alien entity and communication of a type beyond our comprehension. Is it friend or foe? Who can say, as the source of the communication makes its pitch based upon an individual's memories, some good, and some bad? What it is communicating remains unfathomable. Still, the book provides much food for thought.

What WAS it?

Solaris was a planet, but it also was a mystery. For hundreds of years mankind has been trying to understand if the ocean was a intelligence or just organic soup. Kris Kelvin, a researcher from Earth, must try to understand WHAT is happening, because the planet has done something. Something wonderful, amazing and very, very scary. The book forces us to think about what we define as intelligence, what we define as human and, even, what we define as God. Wonderful, truly a classic. A must read!

Incommunicability or Being In the World

This novel explores the theme of communication. Scientists explore a curious planet, Solaris, whose ocean appears to be an intelligent life-form. Scientists are sent to live on the planetfor purposes of establishing contact.Contact is elusive however. What is to be the medium of communication? Even without the tool of verbal language,humans can empathize and communicate to some extent with other mammals. We know that they share common instincts and emotions with us, such as fear, sex drive, hunger, etc. But what about something so "other" as this solarian ocean?Finally indisputable evidence of contact arrives. Solaris is able to tap into the scientists brains and create exact replicas of significant persons from their past. These replicas look and act in the same way as the people they simulate. The main character Kelvin has before him Rheya, an ex-lover who had committed a suicide which he could have prevented.This leads to another problem of communication: how to understand the intentions of this action? Has Solaris created the simulacra as a cruel joke, Or did Solaris do this to please the visitor? Is Solaris just doing it as a kind of experiment?The scientists are tempted to judge the planet according to human behavior, but realize that would be folly.Humans view others, not just Solaris, but any other species, or even any other human being through the prism of their subjectivity. To reach the other requires an incredible effort of will...it may be impossible. Kelvin is at once in love with the succubus and tormented that "she" is not really Rheya, in spite of the resemblance. The succubus is evertyhing that Rheya was to Kelvin because she is nothing but a collection of his memories. Fine, but who was the real Rheya? Just a scattered collection of a few bits of the real Rheya mixed in with Kelvin's own desires, fantasies, and fears. So this raises the question of how possible it is to go beyond ourself to another human being.Another problem raised is that of self-communication. Another scientist in the book, snow, makes the point that humans only know about two percent of their thoughts and that Solaris probably knows more about them than they do themselves.We humans do seem "walled off" and communicability at this stage of our evolution is pretty minimal. Science does seem a valiant attempt to get beyond our fears and fantaises, but as philosophers of science have proven, even our science is fraught with subjectivity. As for understanding ourselves, as Terence Mckenna say, the various schools of psychology sound like medieval hawkers.Or is this seperateness all an illusion as Heidegger and some mystics claim? The difference between subject and object was reinforced by cartesianism. In that case, how to overcome the symptom of a seperated, isolated ego?This is not the place to attempt an answer. However, this book will give you a lot to think about. I recommend that it be read at least two times succesively. You wi

The human condition explained by an entirely un-human entity

Where to begin. As the first book I've ever read by Stanislaw Lem, it took me a bit to get into his style. Once I did, I was captivated. I couldn't get enough. Solaris, in brief, is the story of an astronaut (Kris Kelvin) who arrives on a space station orbiting Solaris, a world orbiting a binary star which has been of much interest to the scientific community over the last hundred years. Immediately upon landing, he discovers a friend (Gibarian) who had been the commander of the expedition, has died under mysterious circumstances. The man to deliver this information is the shady Dr. Snow, who babbles incoherently about "visions" before calming down and speaking lucidly. It's not too long before Kris finds himself seeing "visions," and to tell you anything else would be to spoil the story. Aside from a rip-snorting plot, the laborious attention to detail only enhances the story. The words create a perfect picture in your mind, and every person I've talked to who's read this novel has had more or less the same impression of the station. It has a too-large quality, as if there ought to be more than simply three people on it. This only adds to the suspense. The explorations of the planet's surface itself are fascinating scientific descriptions of formations the ocean creates. The grand "floral calyx stage" is incomprehensible to the human mind, yet Lem can describe it in sparkling clarity. The story also contains much human emotion. Kris is dealing with the suicide of his wife, which he blames on himself. Snow is half mad with "visions," and Sartorius, a third scientist, has locked himself in his lab, with only the odd sound escaping. As Kris strives to understand this colossal mind orbiting beneath him on the planet, he is unconsciously attacking his own brain, racking it for clues as to what he is really feeling. Thought provoking and ultimately tragic, Solaris is a classic from beginning to end. The only problem is the double-translation (Polish-French-English) which is at times clunky. This, however, is a minor complaint against a grand piece of literature.

Solaris and The Invincible - 2 great books by a great author

Humans tend to classify everything they deal with - including the books they read. Clearly, every classification is imperfect. In certain cases this imperfection is especially damaging. Some books, labeled "Espionage", or "Children", or "Science Fiction" - are never read by many people just because they are labeled as such. Stanislav Lem, clearly, is one of the most striking examples of this problem. Unfortunately, he became a victim of another damaging trend, which is endemic to the North American book market. Once you enter a Science Fiction domain here - the ratio of books to trash becomes much closer to zero, than in any other section. How can one determine for himself the significance of a book in his life? I read Solaris for the first time when I was 15. There are many other books I read at the same age which I still consider to be very good - and read many-many times since then. Some of them, though I would - probably - never read again, because they ceased to bring anything new to me when I re-read them. I still do love them - but there is no mystery any more - no unanswered questions, no new landscapes around the corner. There are other books, which you would read again and again - and every time you would find something new in them. "Solaris" is a book like this. Lem never was a SciFi writer - even in his earliest works - and "Solaris" is the most powerful proof of this fact. Space travel and scientific theories are here - but is this book about space travel? Or a scientific theory? What is this book about? I think it is about quite different things. It is conceived and written about the things which are most important for humans: love, shame, human dignity, and compassion. Solaris is also a philosophical book: it offers only questions, no answers, but the questions asked in "Solaris" are formulated such, that a serious reader has no way to avoid trying to answer them. And the questions are - again - about the things which are of the greatest importance for the humanity: what is consciousness? are we able to overcome our xenophobia? how do we behave if we encounter something which is not hostile, but still - causes great pain to us? The last two questions are offered in another great book of Lem: "The Invincible", which is - architecturally - much simpler, than Solaris, but - as it is frequently the case with shorter works of really great writers - "The Invincible" strikes the reader with this highly concentrated power, similar to a laser beam, equally disturbing thoughts and emotions - which is exactly what is expected from any work of art. I only hope that over the years the world will reevaluate Lem's work and he will become as prominent a writer and philosopher as he deserves to be.