Solaris (novel)

Solaris is a science fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem, published in Warsaw in 1961. It was adapted into to a film in 1972 and again in 2002. See Solaris (movie).

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

The novel is about a scientific expedition to a distant planet with an "ocean" that is really a single planet-sized organism, showing signs of vast but strange intelligence. 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.

At first, the researchers can do little more than observe the various highly complex phenomena on the surface of the ocean, classifying them into an elaboate nomenclature, without the slightest conjecture about their meaning. When they 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.

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.

See also

science fiction, Andrei Tarkovsky