On Solaris

Solaris is mentioned perennially in online discussions; each time I look through book recommendations spoken about in Sci-Fi circles, Lem’s short novel is one that is constantly referenced. Moreover, the movie is frequently referenced as a masterpiece, although my understanding is that Lem was not particularly fond of it.

I came to the work expecting something in line with the material so prominent during the “classic” age of Sci-Fi: intergalactic heroism, conquest of the universe, attempts to make sense of the Second World War and the larger technological age which ran on both sides of it.

However, from the first pages, I found that I was being brought into something a little bit different. The book begins on a near-earth space station, gives us a brief glimpse of travel and a sense of the universe’s scale (“I could not recognize a single constellation; in this region of the galaxy the sky was unfamiliar to me”). But instead of heroism, the first chapter leaves us unsettled.

Upon protagonist Kelvin’s arrival at the station on Solaris (the planet that consumes the bulk of the text), it is clear that there is something wrong. The man who Kelvin was excited to meet, his mentor, is dead. The man who Kelvin does meet, Snow, is uneasy and jumpy. By the close of the first chapter, Lem already had produced a fundamental tonal shift: the book thematically will not engage closely with colonization as such, it will not engage with adventure, or heroism, or anything else in that neighborhood. Lem’s novel is, instead, a testimony of a haunting.

Typically, the science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s was written with a triumphalist bent: humanity, from this vantage point, has conquered the most intractable scientific issues, and it has led to its total success. Problems persist, sure, but they’re problems of human psychology, sociology, relational dynamics. In other words, the problems are a reflection of humanity, not about the universe, as such.

Lem inverts this. Solaris is also a book about human psychological dynamics, but it is not in the least bit triumphalist. On the contrary, Lem provides us with a remarkable window into the scientific debates of the age: Kelvin recounts them, he thumbs through books that cover them, the characters discuss them. Rather than triumph, the characters are left baffled. Scientists have been studying Solaris for well over a century, and they do not understand a single thing. They understand that the planet, somehow, is alive: the first indication was that Solaris broke the laws of physics by maintaining a consistent orbit in a binary system. Regardless of how long they persist in trying to “make contact,” they make no ground.

Lem is explicit in his critique of scientific triumphalism and argues that it is instead a new coat for classic colonialism:

We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don’t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us—that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence—then we don’t like it anymore.

In spite of his correct analysis (the paragraph above is his dialogue), I came to hate Snow over the course of the book. He spends every moment scientizing the most remarkable place in the galaxy. Each time something occurs, he refuses to take what it is for what it is. Instead, we receive examinations of neutrons and arguments that what occurs to the characters is, somehow and incredulously, not real. That is, they are real, but they aren’t real in a way that is knowable to the characters. This may be so, objectively speaking, but it doesn’t matter. It misses the entire point. Some things need to be accepted as they are, and characters are unwilling to do so.

Most alarmingly to the characters, they have visitors: ostensibly, a person that encapsulates his greatest shame. We only see glimpses of the “visitor” for the other two inhabitants of the station (Snow and Sartorius), but we spend a great deal of time with Rheya, who killed herself with a hypodermic injection after a period of conflict, where Kelvin had left her.

Kelvin’s first instinct upon discovering Rheya is revulsion: he quickly concludes that she is not “his” Rheya, and attempts to kill her by launching her into space, all while he questions his own sanity. However, she returns, remembering nothing about that. One of the most touching developments of the book is Rheya and Kelvin’s relationship. The book is not about their love as such, but love as a window into alterity. On these grounds, Solaris is incredibly strong: Rheya and Kelvin, through the bulk of the book, do not fully contact, regardless of how hard they try. Yet, they come close enough, and Kelvin comes to understand Solarist Rheya as different—and separate—from Terran Rheya, and Rheya herself concludes the same: she does not want to be a mere memory of someone that Kelvin once knew and who she had nothing to do with. Instead, she wants to be accepted and loved on her own terms.

This raises questions about how we love. I love my fiancée deeply, and it would be a fundamental error, of the deepest sort, to assume that she is today as she was when we first met in 2023. In that case, I would be loving the image of her without loving her. Moreover, Lem forces us to ask what it means to love another person beyond that which is reflected back to us. He leaves the question unresolved and I think he might question whether it is possible at all, whether any contact at all is feasible. Even so, we do all that we can, to get close enough, while recognizing that it may not matter at all if we connect perfectly. It doesn’t take perfection to love, to care for others, and to do our best. But, at the same time, we’d be lying to ourselves if we believe that we could fully know another person—or ourselves: Kelvin himself does not know what exists underneath his conscious mind, and he fears it.

Lem spends a great deal of time on the geology of Solaris and, more importantly, how other people interpret it. There are attempts at trying to make sense of it all, but each time, there is some unbridgeable chasm that may not be crossed.

Interestingly, even discussions of the planet itself are a mirror. A mimoid is described as “resembl[ing] a town,” the planet is described as an “ocean,” and the characters describe “clouds” and “waves” and other phenomena that seem to parallel Earth. Yet, these concepts themselves are false metaphors: anthropocentric projections on a planet that has effectively nothing in common with Earth. The geological structures and scientific languages are themselves metaphors that do not map properly onto Solaris. This is troubling, as the only concepts that we have to work with are human ones, and human language does not travel to that which is truly and ontologically inhuman.

One anecdote, on schoolchildren on field trip to learn a bit about hydrological (if that is the correct word) forms on Solaris:

A group of schoolchildren visiting the Solarist Institute in Aden were making their way through the main hall of the library and looking at the racks of microfilm that occupied the entire left-hand side of the hall. The guide explained that among phenomena immortalized by the image, these centered fragmentary glimpses of symmetriads long since vanished—not single shots, but whole reels, more than ninety thousand of them!

One plump schoolgirl (she looked about fifteen, peering inquisitively over her spectacles) abruptly asked: “And what is it for?”

In the ensuing embarrassed silence, the school mistress was content to dart a reproving look at her wayward pupil. Among the Solarists whose job was to act as guides (I was one of them), no one would produce an answer.

Is this not true to life! What does it all mean, anyways? “Be quick, don’t ask such things—have you no manners?” Any attempt to respond is sophomoric at best, and we have to sit with our own discomfort.

While the text has something in common with cosmic horror—the smallness, and narrowness, of our existence being so small and futile that it leaves us shaking, or even mad—it leaves us more with a sense of wonder about the nature of the universe than fear. This is not Piranesi’s house, complicated and wondrous, but also knowable. Solaris presents a feast of wonder with the recognition that it is, and necessarily must be, incomprehensible to us.

Lem does not shy away from this: he presents the image of an imperfect but present god, a god that is, but is unknowable to us because he is neither the flawed anthropomorphic god of classical myth nor the omnipotent but beneficent god of Abrahamic traditions nor the multiplicity of Vedic traditions. Instead, the very fact of a god that is is itself incomprehensible to us.

The most beautiful image, at the end of the book, is Kelvin sitting on an island in the sea, reaching out to touch a wave. It enveloped his hand, without ever touching him. No contact. The message of the book in a single, beautifully written image.

I’ve been sitting with this book for two weeks without having been able to write about it, simply because I find myself thinking about it all the time. At the time I completed the book, I felt grief. As I completed the penultimate chapter: I felt like crying. There was something about the book that touched me, and I cannot identify what it was. I felt that I was in conversation with Solaris, not Lem, and one of the most stimulating conversations of my life was coming to an end. At the same time, the entire text was affectively beautiful, and I did not want it to end.

More than anything, this is the manual on alterity. Consumed as fast-paced, voyeuristic adventure, a reader will gain nothing. Digested as a philosophical treatise on the nature of our existence, it has everything.