Solaris (Paperback)

I hope this doesn't make it seem that Solaris is some terribly gloomy, ponderous philosophical discourse. On the contrary, it is a tale with many beauties: the evocative descriptions of the effects of the blue and red light from Solaris's twin suns; the ballet of generation and decay and regeneration enacted by the amazing mimoids, symmetriads and asymmetriads; and the development of the strange love between Kelvin and Rheya. And there is the wry humour of the history of Solarist research and theory, a compendium of creativity, crankiness and curiosity that mirrors on the cultural level the problem of our individual need to feel a real communication with others and how we project ourselves, our images and desires and obsessions, onto the world.

There is a well managed air of suspense and threat too. Lem has not forgotten the necessity of making the reader want to know what happens next.

This book contains much descriptive material, but I feel that it is on the whole essential to the philosophical underpinning of the story. Without detailed images of the planet's incredible structures and processes the narrative would lose its point altogether. Both Solaris and Rheya would be senseless, empty images. However, the philosophical discussion between Kelvin and Snow at the end seems a little adventitious. It deals with some interesting if not genuinely original notions of a lonely God who has lost control of His creation, drawing parallels with Solaris and humanity, but I would have preferred these ideas to have been hinted at subtextually rather than given a full exposition. On the other hand, there is something achingly poignant about the ending.

As always with the finest genre fiction, Solaris transcends the stylings and tropes of SF and proves to be a compelling, highly readable classic of world fiction.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews   Was this review helpful to you?

Report this | Permalink Comment Comment (1)

Lem's book is everything good science fiction is, 14 chapters succinctly written that explore notions of memory & science; this is one instance of space fiction (not my fave area in SF) that comes across brilliantly. It is hard to go into the book without giving too much away, Solaris functioning like the best works of science fiction- using the genre to look at our place in the universe. The book having a timeless quality to it- as Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (I know that uses dates from the beginning of the 21st century, but conqeuring Mars has not yet been done) or Arthur C. Clarke's short story, The Sentinel- which became 2001: A Space Odyssey (to which this book can be related- though it was before Kubrick's 1968 film).

From what I've seen & heard about Soderbergh's Solaris (2002), it was met with indifference by the US public after poor marketing (another example of this is evident when looking at the cover of this reissue, I'd plump for the 2001 Faber issue, which is a few quid cheaper & has a wonderful blue/stars cover); the film was remodelled around test audiences (whose opinion lead to the ellipsis of some sex scenes, which is a depressing thought when the film stars one of the most beautiful women in the world, Natasha McElhone!). Clooney appears to be miscast as Kris Kelvin, psychiatry at odds with his handsome features- & I'm not sure how much sense the US version will make, stuck somewhere between Hollywood & the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 adaptation (reissued on DVD last year, brilliant- though rather long & a bit pointless in parts, like 2001...).

The films exist, but I'd go back to the source novel to bask in the glory of Lem's vision: this book reminding me of those lucid dreams you have & the feeling deep down that you know it's just a dream (but you never want to leave). An excellent science fiction novel, one that easily ranks up there with such great works of the genre as We, The Drowned World, Cities in Flight, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Sirens of Titan & The Man Who Fell to Earth...

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews   Was this review helpful to you?

Report this | Permalink Comment Comment

Solaris is set, whether you are reading it now or when it was first published in 1961, at least 150 years in the future and is the story of Kris Kelvin, who travels to the space station orbiting the planet Solaris to prepare a report on the activities and future of the station. Solaris is a planet where the only living organism is the ocean which covers its surface, and which expresses itself in ways ineffable to man and from which he is constantly trying to take meaning. It has given rise to a whole sect of scientists and explorers who term themselves Solarists, and whose fundamental belief is that contact (or "Contact") between humans and the ocean-entity is possible. Lem's main points seem to be the limited ability of mankind to understand other forms of life and their inevitable tendency to anthropomorphise (as I did just then by saying the ocean "expresses itself" - because as humans, we assume that activity must somehow have a purpose), although this shouldn't be confused with misanthropy since, as the character Snow points out to Kelvin, the ocean may no better understand them than they understand it.

There is a suggestion though that the ocean of Solaris has *some* way of knowing its parasites: all the members of the space station have had visitors from their past, created presumably (there I go again) by Solaris. In Kelvin's case this is Rheya, his former lover who killed herself ten years ago at the age of 19, when he left her. She is still 19 now. Kelvin's immediate reactions of guilt and fear melt into something less hostile as he finds that the replacement Rheya has no knowledge of her past or that she is not the real Rheya - and so, effectively, *is* the real one. Eventually a sort of equilibrium is achieved, although the tests his colleagues want to carry out and which could destroy their visitors, leave him torn between forms of knowledge and belief.

What I liked about Solaris was the stately, unhurried pacing, rather like a Shyamalan film; and the matching dispassionate prose, which may have been deliberate or just the result of a combination of Lem's stoical eastern European stylings and the artifical sense of distance that is always a feature of literature in translation. What I liked less about it was the unshakeable feeling that it all could have been done in far fewer pages and with no loss of effect. One difficulty was that the descriptions of the activities of Solaris, because we know early on that there will never be any explanation or understanding for them, come to seem superfluous and slightly boring. So it simply doesn't matter in the end whether the sea's manifestations take the form of throwing up 'symmetriads' made of light stone, or, frankly, playing the hits of Boney M on the pan pipes. Similarly all the Solarist theory is so much (pink-foam-spewing) marsh gas, imitative scientifickry for the sake of it. Page after page of it.

But it wins me over in the end simply because the book itself displays unknowability that makes it worth revisiting, and because of the considered and ambiguous ending which hefts more emotional weight than you might think in such a cold, cloudless climate.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews   Was this review helpful to you?

Report this | Permalink Comment Comment