Solaris (novel)
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Solaris is a science fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem, published in Warsaw in 1961. English translations of the book are available as ISBN 0156837501 (1987), ISBN 0156027607 (2002), and ISBN 0571219721 (2003). It was adapted into to a film in 1972 and again in 2002. See Solaris (movie). There is also an opera of the same title by German composer Michael Obst.
The novel is about the ultimately futile attempt to communicate with an alien life-form on a distant planet. The planet, called Solaris, is covered with a so-called "ocean" that is really a single organism covering the entire surface of the planet like an ocean. The ocean shows signs of vast but strange intelligence, and it can directly create physical phenomena in a way that human science has difficulty explaining. This alien mind is so inconceivably different from human consciousness that all attempts at communication are doomed. The "alienness" of aliens is one of Lem's favourite themes; he is scornful about portrayals of aliens as implausibly humanoid.
The novel begins with the arrival of the protagonist at a scientific station hovering over the surface of Solaris. At that point, research on Solaris has been going on for years, but researchers have been able to do little more than observe the various highly complex phenomena on the surface of the ocean, classifying them into an elaborate nomenclature, without the slightest conjecture about their meaning. When the protagonist and his colleagues become more aggressive in trying to force contact with the inscrutable ocean, the experiment turns out to be psychologically traumatic for the researchers themselves. The ocean's response, such as it is, lays bare their own personalities, while revealing nothing of the ocean's. To the extent that the oceans's actions can be understood, it appears that the ocean is experimenting with the researchers' minds by confronting them with their most painful and repressed thoughts and memories. In the protagonist's case, these are his memories of Rheya and his feelings of guilt over her suicide. What torments the other researchers is only hinted at, and they are careful to conceal it, but it appears to be much worse.
Solaris is considered by some to be Lem's greatest novel. Particularly noteworthy are extended passages describing in cool academic language phenomena that are totally beyond human comprehension.
Andrei Tarkovsky's film follows the novel quite closely, though it emphasizes human relationships over Lem's theories on exobiology. The ending of the film, however, displays a sentimentality completely contrary to the book. Steven Soderbergh also made a film of Solaris, which appears to be influenced by both the book, and Tarkovsky's film.
Names in Solaris
Like many other novelists, it appears that Lem has 'encoded' messages within the names of the characters, for example:
- Kris Kelvin, whose name perhaps reflects both Christ and the Kelvin temperature scale, possibly heat. It is notable that he arrives in the Prometheus, named after the Greek culture hero who brought fire to mankind and was punished for it in Hades.
- Rheya, who in Greek myth is Rhea, and connected with the ocean. (The character's name in the original Polish language version was Harey, apparently an anagram.)
- Snaut or Snow (depending on the translation) whose name reflects coldness or an intrusive 'snout'.
See also
External Links
- Notes on Solaris by Paul Brians, Department of English, Washington State University [1] (http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/science_fiction/solaris.html).de:Solaris (Roman) es:Solaris (novela) fr:Solaris hu:Solaris (regény) pl:Solaris (powieść)