Solaris

Careful: this gives away the plot and the ending of the book.

Solaris is a planet, and its surface is covered by a single enormous ocean.

The ocean moves, produces giant structures, corrects the planet's orbit. It is thought to carry a kind of intelligence.

Humans have been studying it for a hundred years. They have understood nothing.

Kelvin arrives

The psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at the station. One of the crew of three has killed himself, and the other two behave strangely.

Snaut is frightened and speaks evasively. Sartorius opens his door to no one. Neither wants to tell Kelvin anything.

The next morning when Kelvin wakes up, Harey is sitting in his room: his wife, who killed herself ten years ago after a fight with Kelvin.

What the ocean does

It pulls out the deepest and most shameful memories from the minds of the people at the station and sends them back in material form.

Each of them has a "guest." Nobody wants to see anyone else's, so they hide from one another.

Harey seems real: she talks, remembers, feels cold, is afraid.

But the woman who has arrived is the Harey Kelvin remembers. Not the woman herself, but her version in the man's memory. She knows nothing that Kelvin does not know: her dress has no buttons, because Kelvin does not remember that detail.

Kelvin sends her into space in a rocket. The next day she comes back.

What really made me think

It was Harey.

She slowly understands what she is. That she is not a human being. That she is made from a memory. That she cannot get away from Kelvin; she panics when she goes a few meters from him.

And the most painful part: that Kelvin's love for her is really the guilt he feels toward her.

To be made from someone's idea of you. To have no existence of your own, to be nothing but how someone else remembers you.

This idea stayed with me for days.

Harey tries to kill herself and cannot die: her body puts itself back together. In the end, by a method Sartorius found, she chooses to disappear of her own will.

That part hurts more than I would expect from a science fiction novel.

What Lem is really after

He is not writing an alien contact story.

What he writes is this: when humans meet something foreign, they do not try to understand it, they try to make it resemble themselves.

The ocean does not communicate. It does not try to. Maybe it notices that humans exist, maybe it does not; maybe these "guests" are a message, maybe a reflex.

The book does not say, and its not saying is the whole point.

Humans cannot accept this. For a hundred years they produce theory after theory.

The library section

In the middle of the book there are long chapters: the history of the theories written about Solaris. Which scientist claimed what, how which theory was refuted, which school argued with which school.

While reading I found them heavy and went through some of them quickly.

After finishing I understood what they were for: a demonstration of how much humanity talks in the face of something it does not understand. Libraries full of books, zero knowledge.

A branch of science called "Solaristics" has been founded and has produced nothing. Lem wrote it boring on purpose.

Still, reading it knowing this is better than not knowing while you read.

The question itself

What the book asks is this: can you tolerate the existence of something you do not understand?

The answer is no, and Lem shows this as a flaw.

In the end Kelvin goes down to the surface of the planet, touches the ocean and waits. Nothing happens. The book ends with a sentence that says "there is no hope at all, but I am staying."

The films

There are two adaptations: Tarkovsky's 1972 film and Soderbergh's 2002 film.

Both put the emotional side forward: the story of Kelvin and Harey moves to the center.

In the book that story is an example. The real matter is philosophical, and in the films that side shrinks. Lem said he was not satisfied with either film.

If you have watched the film, you have not read the book; it is not true in the other direction.

It is around three hundred pages.