Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

It has now been 50 years since the publication of Stanislaw Lem's classic, Solaris. And though the passage of time has antiquated certain technological aspects of the tale, it has, in no respect, reduced its philosophical might.

In the distant future, humanity has taken to the stars, exploring interstellar space and setting foot on far-flung worlds. But though these achievements are noteworthy, they stand humanity in poor stead when it stumbles across the enigma that is Solaris, an ocean world riding an awkward orbit between powerful, binary stars. The planet's oddities are sufficiently compelling to earn it a manned research station which is assembled and then lowered into Solaris' atmosphere, where upon it studies the seemingly landless planet. Though there is disagreement over the how and the extent, the experts agree that Solaris is alive, its all-encompassing ocean? A single, conscious entity. This is no simple intelligence, no plant or tree. This is an entity capable of observing even while it is being observed by the human scientists studying it for clues to its composition and its origins.

Kris Kelvin, a trained psychologist, arrives at Solaris, intent upon observing it as well as the station's crew. But though our protagonist seems to possess an admirably ordered mind, his formidable intelligence is immediately threatened when he begins to see things on the hovering station, apparitions that cannot exist. What's more, these manifestations (Guests), which, for Kelvin, take the form of his long-dead wife, are flesh, organized reality sourced from his deepest memories. Slowly, as days give way to weeks, Kelvin, like the crewmen before him, is driven to madness by what cannot be. Haunted by the guilt over his wife's untimely death, he fights for understanding, for a way out of the alienness in which he has been ensnared, but it's clear that, even if he does succeed in physically escaping Solaris, it will always be inside him, enmeshed in his spirit.

Mr. Lem bites off a great deal in a piece which, though it is intellectually engaging, offers little in the way of the satisfying escapism common to most science fiction. He challenges readers to consider what first contact with aliens might be like if the extraterrestrials are not some variation on a familiar form but a thing entirely foreign to us, an organism whose thinking, existing, is so inaccessible to us that it is necessarily inscrutable. In this, Mr. Lem asks us to contemplate the nature of consciousness. How do we know that we are not dreaming? How do we know that we are not part of some hallucination? How do we maintain our sanity in the face of something that can pull from us our deepest fears and use them to examine us even as we are examining it? Though these existential questions are callbacks to Western philosophy, they are also meaningful to the 21st century reader aware of and interested in the ethics of exploitation. The presumptuousness of the human scientists prodding insensitively at Solaris and getting back a response they cannot handle is analogous to the way we have savaged our environment, running roughshod over it and its creatures in an effort to understand ourselves and our world. And though this may have been largely unavoidable, we cannot expect to freely exploit without consequences for ourselves and our civilization.

Solaris is delightfully creepy, entrapping our minds on a distant, alien shore where reality is malleable and enigmas abound. But though the philosophy here is enjoyable, I needed there to be more of an actual story. Mr. Lem is a skilled illuminator of the nature of deteriorating, human relationships, but he does not truly explore Solaris. This may have been an intentional choice on the author's part; after all, how can one explore something one does not understand. But the novel was poorer for it. Nonetheless, Mr. Lem has captured the dark underbelly of human emotion, particularly our tendency to destroy what we do not understand and he's done so with rare skill. (3/5 Stars)