Solaris (1961)

Polish author Stanislaw Lem’s most famous science fiction novel is a reminder that books behind movies are often better than the movies based on those books. I still haven’t seen Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 version of Solaris, but Andrei Tarkovsky’s version has thwarted me a few times. For one thing, I suspect Soviet director Tarkovsky may have expected viewers to already be familiar with Lem’s novel. His shots of this strange ocean planet, Solaris, are quite beautiful, but the novel has more detail about the planet’s formations and activity, if Tarkovsky even were attempting “mimoids,” “symmetriads,” “asymmetriads,” and such. It’s easy to be distracted by the bizarre scene on the research space station where the humans dwell, as Tarkovsky’s movie may be. It feels like there’s more plot there. But Lem intended the novel chiefly as a “first contact” story and specifically contact with an entity or intelligence utterly alien to humans. The entire planet is a life form itself. The attempts to communicate with it are still accounted as failures after many decades of study. What it seems able to do is manifest strange beings. Somehow it reaches into the minds of these scientists for the most traumatic events in their lives, and then somehow it replicates their most significant others. Most are implied on this small team. They feel shame and hide these strange creations from the rest of the team. The only one we learn about is a former lover of one scientist who killed herself. She—or it—is not a hallucination and it is not human. It is frighteningly needy and thus manipulative and it has unusual, unexpected strength and abilities. What, if anything, is Solaris attempting to communicate? I have always read it (in the movie and in the early going here) as a style of defense or warning of its powers. But I think Lem intended it as beyond understanding. On the other hand, if you were Solaris, it’s not hard to believe you would feel attacked by much of these research efforts. In the end there’s no understanding. The human research goes on—they have found a way to neutralize the strange manifestations. And the ocean planet beneath them roils on as ever, ceaselessly. A great novel.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.