Thoughts on a first reading of "Solaris"

A reader's (and writer's) reflection

This is a one-off reflection on reading Stanisław Lem’s classic sci-fi novel Solaris for the first time. As it’s aimed more at fellow sci-fi writers than at my regular subscribers, I’m not sending this one direct to people’s inboxes. I’m also not making a great effort to craft this into a beautifully written essay. It’s just a collection of my thoughts after reading the book.

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Going In

Solaris (originally published in Polish in 1961) had been on my to-read list for some time. The edition I found in my local public library was the translation by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, published by Faber & Faber (1970) and reissued in 1991.

The front cover of the 1991 edition I read, with eye-catching artwork by Polish artist Janusz Olzewski.

I learned afterwards that Lem apparently didn’t care much for this translation. He was rather a polyglot (and polymath) and could read English well. Kilmartin and Cox based their translation on the French edition rather than the original Polish; it seems a later translation was done by Bill Johnston, working directly from Polish, but is currently only available on Kindle / Audible.

I had seen the film adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky a little while before reading the book, so I had some idea of the concepts and story although I was aware Tarkovsky had taken some liberties with the text.

The Ideas

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that THE big sci-fi idea in Solaris is the utter otherness of what alien life might be like, should it exist, and the extreme difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of communicating with such a different form of life. It’s hard to think of another story in which the sheer weirdness and alien-ness of alien life is drawn so sharply.

The difficulty of communication in general, not just with aliens, is a theme. We see the effects of poor communication between protagonist Kris Kelvin and his former lover Hari (or Rheya in the Kilmartin-Cox translation), as well as between Kelvin and the others on the Solaris research station. If humans find it so difficult to talk to each other, Lem seems to ask, what chance have we got with other forms of life?

Then there’s the old question of what is life, anyway, and what does it mean to be human? Plus the immense psychological stresses of life on a very isolated station very far from home, dealing with guilt, and a bit of a redemptive arc for Kelvin.

Writing Style

As I read Solaris, I often found myself looking at it from a writer’s point of view. This didn’t detract from my enjoyment; rather, I could admire what Lem was doing and how he did it.

One of the first things that struck me was his use of colour. There were frequent references to the colours of things, sometimes connected to the planet’s two suns (red and blue) and sometimes things on the station itself:

the long corridor with its polychromed walls; the designers had intended the variations in color to make life more tolerable inside the armoured shell of the Station. (p.149)

Now the ocean disappeared altogether beneath thick, corrugated membranes with pink swellings and pearly depressions, and these strange waves suspended above the ocean swirled suddenly and coalesced into great balls of blue-green foam… immense membranous wings were soaring in the red sky. Some… were pitch-black, and others shone with highlights of purple… (p. 181).

I don’t know whether or not it’s a response to the classical kind of sterile, white space environment that’s often depicted in sci-fi books and movies. Perhaps Lem just enjoyed vivid colours. It certainly made the world more vivid for me, and I rather enjoyed that. (I also felt rather pleased that in my own current serial, Destination Europa, different rings of the ship have different colour codings, though I wrote that long before reading Solaris).

The other thing that struck me was the number of pages, sometimes whole chapters, he spends on describing the in-world science of the planet Solaris and the academic discipline of “Solaristics” that’s built up and in which Kelvin has been doing his research. There was A LOT of detail and depth not just on the hypothetical science involved, but in what the different schools of thought were and the history of the research. Some chapters were just Kelvin reading a bunch of stuff about Solaristics. These “whale facts” chapters were a bit dry to read, but contributed a lot to building the realism of the story. I did wonder sometimes whether the detailed description of “Solaristics” and its intellectual history were somewhat of a satire on academic and scientific research culture, but it’s hard to tell without knowing more of the cultural background in 1960s Poland, and with it being in translation and maybe missing nuance at time.

Thinking about my own writing, I reckon it would be hard to pull off “whale facts” chapters in something like an online serial, but they work as part of a whole.

Takeaways

My own personal takeaways from reading this classic:

• don’t be afraid of “whale facts” chapters in a novel (but be careful how it’s done)

• not every novel is going to be suitable for serialising

• I’d like to read more of Lem’s work, because it sounds like he was a polymathic genius who wrote loads more interesting stuff.

Further Reading

Paul Grimstad, “The Beautiful Mind-Bending of Stanisław Lem,” The New Yorker, January 6th 2019