Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" is a psychological tour de force.
Lem is an expert within his field....a writer who uses the medium of science fiction to illustrate the dichotomies of human life. Lem's books are often thought experiments....his protagonists are thrust into the most bizarre and improbable of circumstances, where they proceed to dissect themselves and their society, in the course of solving the problems set before them.
Nowhere is this more true than in "Solaris", Lem's first full length novel, written in 1961, and translated from the original French in 1970.
When Kris Kelvin, academic and psychologist, arrives on the planet Solaris, it has been under constant investigation for several centuries. Lamentably this has yielded virtually no understanding of the lone entity which occupies this world, a vast organic ocean, a living sea, which entirely encircles the world. The ocean is capable of sculpting and animating mile-high facsimilies of humans, and the artifacts they have bought to its world.....it endlessly seethes with forms and deformities, parodies and sketches. Yet, for all the seemingly artistic constructs the living sea of Solaris has produced, man has never been able to establish anything which could be deemed two-way communication. The sea has never responded to mans signaling, on either a microsopic of macroscopic level, only sculpting its forms where and when it sees fit.
Solarist investigation has gone out of fashion , and Dr Kelvin joins only two other scientists when he arrives on the lonely scientific research station which floats above the ocean. Upon his arrival he finds the other scientists to be insular, paranoid, and unreasonable. He learns that his former tutor has died in an accident, but he cannot get the informing party to discuss it, and apparently the other scientist is locked away in the laboratory, and will not emerge.
His companions will only assure him that all will become clear, it is only a matter of short time before he will understand, and until such a time, nothing they can say would help anyway.
Intriguing, eh?
After an unenlightening day, Kelvin decides to sleep on it. When he awakes he is not alone. To his astonishment, sitting at the end of his bed is Rheya, his former wife. This is doubly astonishing, as Rheya has been dead for many years. Here she is, in the flesh, as confused to find herself here as he is to find her, perfect in every detail, right down to the needlestick injury where she gave herself a lethal injection in her former suicide.
Kelvin spends some time weighing up his situation. The flesh is real enough, but Rheya has no memories of her former life, only an awareness of what her name is meant to be, and who Dr Kelvin is, and a strong desire never to leave his presence. Kelvin tells her, to reduce her anxiety, she has been ill, and this is the reason for her memory loss. After calming her down, he begins to work on disposing of this eerie impostor.
Meeting eventually with success, Kelvin reflects that he now understands the behaviour of the others. Consulting with them he learns to his horror that he is not the first to have attempted such a means of escape, and that after his next sleep he may be expected to have company once more, another perfect copy, with no prior memories.
And such turns out to be the case.
The Scientists independently study their unwelcome companions, seeking a more permanent solution to their problems. During this process, Dr Kelvin falls in love with his new companion. In an ever-increasingly bizarre arrangement, Kelvin becomes more and more honest towards his new love. She sees herself as a new and concrete identity, identical to Rheya only in physical form, and understands that she may in fact have been formed from a construct in Kelvins mind. This is irrelevant to them both however, Kelvin loves her for who and what she is, and the newly created person loves him with maturity Rheya could never have possessed.
This becomes something of a dilemma for the good doctor. His companions are busy working on devices which will obliterate these beings, formed from ghostly neutrinos and therefore vunerable (if injured they regenerate spontaneously).
Can Kelvin help plan for the annihilation of the person he loves to aid the others? What are these visitors and where do they come from? Are they a doorway to communication with the long-silent ocean entity of Solaris? Read to discover!
I was completely refreshed by this book. Central to the work is a commentary on the essential arrogance of Mankind, in its continued assumption that communication elsewhere in the universe will be understandable as it is on Earth. Lem creates here a truly Alien Alien, a rare thing indeed....no star-trek-esque humanoid here, differing only from us in a few facial details and cultural references. In Solaris we are faced with the more likely eventuality, a lifeform not only undecipherable by man, but also completely indifferent to him. If the ocean knows man is there at all, it has never seemed to care.
How mankind deals with this is a central source of bone-dry humor throughout the book. Interspersing the adventurous plot, Lem narrates for us the centuries of protracted investigation of the planet....mankind moves through describing it, analysing it, and finally, beginning to ignore it when none of the previous approaches have yielded the results desired. For those of you with a good ear for dry satire, the sound of Lem laughing up his sleeve at the tunnel vision of twentieth century "scientific thinking" will be delightfully distinct!!
Kelvins relationship with the Rheya-creature is heartwrenching. What is it, to be given more time with a lost loved one? A gift, or a curse? For Kelvin, it becomes both at the same time. We observe him as he feels the pain of guilt and grief, coupled with his confused attempts to rationalise the impossible, and his growing love. As Stephen Donaldson once astutely observed,"To hurt the man who has lost everything, give him back something broken". I was touched deeply more than once in the course of my reading by the authors sensitivity to the precarious balance of an act of love. In fine taste, Lem leaves us to determine for ourselves whether the entities which appear are the gifts or the assaults of the oceanic mind below. Look out on the last two pages of the book for wonderful poetry concerning the human condition in the act of loving.
A fantastic read, and truly original. I have no problem giving this one my highest recommendation to you. I do caution and forewarn that the issue of suicide is addressed frankly, something many of us who have been exposed to that sad act often appreciate warning of.
I think you will love this book. There will be a short delay in my next epinion posting whilst I reread it from the start.
The textbook, Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem, available in Paperback. Published by: Harcourt Trade Publishers. Edition: . ISBN10: 0156027607. ISBN13: ...More at Textbooks.com
The first of Lem s novels to be published in America and now considered a classic, Solaris raises a question: Can one truly understand the universe wi...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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