Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

Fascinating and challenging 1960s-era sci-fi about the incredible, even unimaginable, difficulties involved in first contact between civilizations.

The planet Solaris features a strange, tissue-like surface that usually acts like a liquid, but can also spontaneously form all sorts of shapes and geological formations. It has been studied and debated over by generations of Earth scientists, many of whom believe the planet itself exhibits a form of intelligence, perhaps even consciousness and self-awareness.

 

Unlike TV sci-fi, where aliens always seem to be other actors wearing bumpy rubber foreheads who all somehow speak great English, this is "hard-science" sci-fi, and it traffics in the much more plausible notion that an alien species would have an intelligence so radically different from ours that we might never understand it.

Author Stanislaw Lem tells the story in a nested and indirect fashion, reminding the reader a bit of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The reader learns background information via letters, books, third-hand reports, even transcripts from meetings. Lem "shows" rather than "tells" here, and the book reads like a good mystery novel, creating psychological suspense along with uncertainty as the readers--and the main character--figure out what's happening together.

This is the kind of novel that probably had to be reverse engineered before it could be written, and I can't imagine the technical challenge Lem faced in figuring out precisely what to reveal, how to reveal it, and when. And the reader can't see this underlying "machinery" at all while reading, but rather only experiences the well-polished story. Well done.

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One final thought, on the wonderful thematic density in Stanislaw Lem's various works: In Solaris we see themes ranging from a Fourth-Turning-type decline in scientific genius; discussions of the foundational arrogance of humankind as we stumble through reality thinking we grasp it much better than we do; discussions of consciousness and what makes us "us"; and how we rationalize, accept and come to terms with things that we never thought we could.

The book gets the reader to think deeply, and this is a great gift. I thank this author.

A brief coda on the translation: Stanislaw Lem wrote in Polish but was fluent in English, and reportedly he was unhappy with this book's English translation. The ending--which I won't give away here--turns out to be unsatisfyingly ambiguous in the English language version. In the Polish version, apparently, what the reader wants to happen, happens.

[Readers, what follows are chapter-by-chapter notes on the plot. This is merely to help me order my thinking and better remember what I read. There are spoilers below, so feel free to stop reading right here.]

Notes:

The Arrival

Kris Kelvin, psychologist, arrives from Earth to join a research team on a station orbiting the planet Solaris. After exiting his capsule, the first person he sees is cybernetics expert Snow, terrified, drunk. Kelvin asks about Gibarian, another of their colleagues, and Snow is strangely evasive about him. Snow warns him that if you see someone else, be prepared to meet anything; Kelvin then notices dried bloodstains on the backs of Snow's hands.

The Solarists

Kelvin enters his quarters and finds his tools melted and misshapen, the room is in disarray; he puzzles over the fate of Gibarian, assumes that he died recently; and then Kelvin spends time flipping through books in his quarters, thinking through what he's learned about the Solaris planet over the years. [A useful device here, by which the author can explain to the readers all the backstory.] We learn that Solaris has two suns, thus there's a sort of a three-body problem situation where life on the planet would typically be subject to all sorts of fluctuations, extreme heat, extreme gravity, etc. The reader also learns that the planet was thorougly studied and no life was discovered on it, but yet the planet's orbit was far more stable than it should be; somehow the planet changes shape or position relative to the two suns; eventually this led to a belief that the planet's ocean was some sort of gigantic entity, possibly a form of primitive life or some kind of prebiological life, and that it was able somehow to exert active influence on the planet's orbital path. 

Eventually a consensus emerged that there was life on this planet: either the planet itself or the ocean was somehow alive, and thus efforts were underway to attempt to establish contact with the ocean. Except that with these efforts, the ocean actually would "interfere": it would modify or disrupt instruments submerged into the ocean, defeating all attempts at analysis. 

"The decision to categorize the ocean as a metamorph was not an arbitrary one. Its undulating surface was capable of generating extremely diverse formations which resembled nothing ever seen on Earth, and the function of these sudden eruptions of plasmic 'creativity,' whether adaptive, explorative or what, remained an enigma." On the various theories: that the ocean was a gigantic brain, that it was some sort of oceanic yogi, that it was autistic, or that it was perhaps endowed with genius.

The main character Kelvin has a feeling of being watched while in his room. He goes into Gibarian's workroom and learns about an experiment the team was going to run exposing the planetary surface to an intensive bombardment of X-rays. Then, unexpectedly, someone comes to the outside of the door of Gilbarian's room: the author just holds the door handle and doesn't let the person open it; the person lets go of the handle and walks away.

The Visitors

Kelvin finds a letter addressed to him from Gibarian, but it just contains two lines that don't make sense. he also sees a tape recorder and he pulls the cassette[*] out of it and puts it in his pocket. Then, walking down the corridor to go and meet with Snow, he sees a giant "negress" [this is the translator's word, not mine!] wearing nothing but a skirt: she walks by him but doesn't give him so much as a glance. She then walks into Gibarian's room, leaving Kelvin alone and terrified.

[*] I can't help but notice that even very good sci-fi often seems to be cursed with mental models for tech devices that are products of the era in which the book is written. So far in this novel we've seen a discussion of physical books (in the previous chapter, "Solarists"). Here we have another era-dependent tech product: a tape recorder with a physical tape!

Kelvin meets with Snow and learns that Gibarian committed suicide by injecting himself with pernosal, a sedative. He then asks Snow if he's seen anyone else, and Snow becomes terrified and about to attack Kelvin [the reader gets early inklings here that Kelvin is a psychiatrist or psychologist]; Kelvin asks Snow to put his cards on the table, to tell him what is really going on, and he asks who the person was that he saw. They talk about Gibarian and whether he was insane. Snow tells him "...you haven't understood a thing, not a single thing."

Sartorius

Kelvin once again refers to the note Gibarian wrote to him: the notations on it refer to a fatal accident that happened in an earlier expedition to explore the Solaris planet, where one person unexpectedly died and there was no explanation, except that one of the veteran pilots involved in the mission--typically a very stable and calm man--went insane. Kelvin then tries to go see Dr. Sartorius in his lab but Sartorius won't let him in; he only came outside the door to say, "Go away now, I'll join you later, please go away." 

Later, Kelvin goes to the cold storage part of the facility and finds Gibarian's body, frozen solid, but sleeping right next to him he sees, again, the negress... but she's not frozen at all in fact he touches her feet and she is warm to the touch. Kelvin then theorizes that he has gone mad, and then carefully works out various ideas to verify or disprove his insanity: he comes up with an experiment to ask the computer to work out a difficult calculation, something that he also calculates himself, and he discovers, no, he's actually not insane. 

"I was not mad. The last ray of hope was extinguished." [This is a good example of the author building subtle suspense. The reader doesn't know yet why there is suddenly no hope, and you'd think that if he weren't mad, there still might be a ray of hope! But the fact that not being mad means there's no hope indicates that much worse stuff is going on that the reader can even conceive. Well done.]

Rheya

Kelvin goes back to his quarters, overcome with exhaustion, and falls asleep. When he wakes up he sees someone named Rheya: the reader learns that he saw her for the last time ten years ago, when she was 19. Thus she should be 29 now, but she still looks 19; Kelvin thus thinks he is dreaming, because, the reader learns, she is dead. She kisses him, and the kiss felt so real he couldn't believe it was a dream. The reader learns she committed suicide by deliberately overdosing--and he even finds the red dot on her arm where the injection happened [!]. She killed herself in reaction to him breaking up with her. Kelvin sticks himself with a needlepoint and, bleeding, realizes that he is not dreaming, this entire situation is completely impossible. His next thought is "I must be ready to defend myself." He knows it cannot be her, but she herself thinks she is her... which means he has to pretend that he's taking her for her. And then she mentions someone who Kelvin didn't know about until after she had died, so there was absolutely no way she could know who this person was. Kelvin then locks her into a shuttle and sends her out into orbit; the "being," whatever it is, cries out, but not in a human voice. [Again, the reader is in the dark here about what's going on, this is part of the suspense, the book is structured in a way like a mystery. It appears that something or someone is making a psychological projection out of each of the scientists' minds to create these beings].

"The Little Apocrypha"

Kelvin returns to his quarters and finds Snow sitting there, who asks, "Well, are you ready to have a chat?" He tells Kelvin that "it" happened to Gibarian first, who locked himself in his quarters. Then the other two crewmembers, Snow and Sartorius, began experiencing "visitors" too. Snow tells Kelvin that the being that appeared to be Rheya "will come back as if nothing had happened... If you abide by the rules, she won't be aggressive."

Snow talks about how this "contact" (such as it is) with another civilization simply causes the human crew here to observe their own monstrous ugliness, folly and shame. "The phenomena here began to manifest themselves eight or nine days after that X-ray experiment." The reader learns that the Solaris planet's ocean can somehow read the minds of the human crew. [The reader also learns here, for the first time, that Kelvin is a psychologist via this conversation with Snow... again, the author reveals information by showing rather than telling, and he lets the story let the reader in rather than droning about it in expository.] Kelvin then tells Snow about the note that Gibarian left him; he asks him what the "Apocrypha" is, and Snow gives him a worn book containing a collection of articles and treatises written about various intellectual speculations and theories about what the consciousness/being on Solaris actually was; the book also contains Andre Berton's report, the pilot from the earlier mission who inexplicably went insane. 

Kelvin decides that he will do his best to help both himself and the other crew accustom themselves to these visitors. He lays down to go to sleep and then he realizes that he still has the tape from Gibarian. As he takes cassetee out of his pocket, the door opens, and it is Rheya, who has returned, even though she should still be locked in the shuttle that Kelvin sent into orbit.

The Conference

Kelvin now tries to lay down and go to sleep with Rheya; he thinks that she believes herself to be Rheya; he decides to treat her as if she were. He then sees two identical dresses: one that he had helped her out of the day before, and the other one that she must have worn today. This horrifies him. He then tries to slip out of his quarters, closing the door quietly behind him, but something inside the room literally tears the door open, practically off its hinges. He then sees Rheya in the room, her hands cut to the bone, bleeding, and unable to understand what's happened to her. "Kris... what happened to me?" Kelvin attempts to treat her wounds, but then hands began rapidly healing right before his eyes.

He takes her to the medical bay, does an exam on her and even draws her blood, which doesn't look right under the microscope: it doesn't seem to have underlying molecules. Kelvin even tests it by adding acid to the blood sample, and the blood recreated itself.

Snow, Kelvin and Sartorius then a conference call from their respective quarters to pool their knowledge. Kelvin says that the vistors are "supercopies": a reproduction which is superior to the original, built from subatomic particles that somehow replicate the macrostructures of the human body. Snow becomes increasingly panicked whenever Kelvin refers directly to the "visitors" in any way. And then Sartorius's "visitor" pulls the cover off of the camera conference call lens, which Sartorius had carefully kept covered, and Kelvin sees a straw hat.

The Monsters

Kelvin wakes up to Rheya crying, saying, "You don't want me." She tells him she loves him and he almost screams. There's a strange "uncanny valley"-type experience here where he's deeply revolted by her being so like the real her. He calls it a "terrible charade."

[*] Here we have a third instance where we see the author--and once again, this is no criticism of a self-evidently gifted author--trapped in the tech of his own era, as we see the main character use tape, microfilm, even a computer that spits out punchcards.

Now Kelvin looks into the scientific work done on this planet over the years of Earth missions here.  On various hypotheses of what the ocean actually might be, as it is described as a type of yeasty colloid able to produce growths and structures that can be far larger than the Grand Canyon. On the "mimoid formations" the ocean can somehow make: imitations of objects external to the ocean itself. Kelvin reads up on the theories of one of the early scientists who wrote extensively about Solaris, describing the various growths, extensions, canyons, polyps and other strange shapes that it is able to form. Also, incomprehensibly, the ocean is capable of copying or reproducing a puppet, a doll, a carving, even any kind of machine, but its behavior is inconsistent, and does not appear to be any form of cooperation.

Also a discussion of an eruption during a past exploration mission that killed 106 scientists and explorers, including the author of the very research book Kelvin is reading. It was an eruption of glutinous mud that  swallowed up the men, all their equipment, even nearby aircraft and helicopters. There was a move to execute a nuclear strike on the ocean in response, but this was thwarted by one of the researchers who threatened to blow up the station if such an attack occurred.

Kelvin decides that he is determined to save Rheya.

Snow comes by Kelvin's office, and they have a sort of a conference--with Rheya right there this time, which is not consistent with Snow's prior paranoia about the visitors. Snow again theorizes that it all started with the X-ray experiment that Gibarian had set up, as he thinks this may have altered the ocean somehow. Also Snow tells Kelvin that the visitors from the planet "only come as we wake up" which may indicate the ocean is interested in the humans during their sleeping hours. Snow then talks about Sartorius' plan to create an anti-neutrino field to destroy the visitors; Kelvin is against this plan, he thinks it will be dangerous and harmful to the planet. They debate about what to do, as Kelvin also suggests a plan to broadcast an X-ray encephalogram of Kelvin's brain to the ocean in an attempt to communicate. Snow gets up and leaves.

The Liquid Oxygen

Kelvin wakes in his room, Rheya is not there, but Gibarian [!] appears, warning Kelvin that Sartorius and Snow are conspiring against him. Gibarian warns Kelvin that he can't trust anyone. It turns out Kelvin was dreaming. When he wakes up Rheya is in the bathroom, but Kelvin also notices the tape recorder with Gibarian's voice recording was missing. He asks Rheya about it and she denies taking it. Later that morning her behavior becomes strange, she's pale and crying. Kelvin asks her what's wrong and she says sadly. "They aren't real tears."

Then Kelvin hears a strange hissing and then thudding noise, he rushes out to find that Rheya drank liquid oxygen in an attempt to kill herself. Kelvin takes her to the sick bay, where she begins having a violent death, but then her body begins regenerating. "It... it didn't work," she stammered. 

It turns out she had taken Gibarian's tape recording and had listened to it, and she now understands her purpose here on the station. "But I heard enough to realize that I am not a human being, only an instrument... That's what I am. To study your reactions--something of that sort. Each one of you has a... an instrument like me. We emerge from your memory or your imagination, I can't say exactly--anyway you know better than I." [Basically here the Rheya character is of course a simulation, some sort of subatomic creation of the planet, yet also she is literally the consciousness of Rheya, such that she is only with difficulty realizing now that she is not Rheya, now that she's heard the recording from Gibarian. And worse, she is probably fully aware of the "uncanny valley" experience Kelvin is having with her. "I disgust you, and myself." This is a fascinating section here on individuality and what exactly it might be that makes us "us."]

This chapter ends with an interesting, indirect dialogue between Kelvin and Rheya where Kelvin realizes that the ocean is doing an experiment--a first contact of a sort--but the two "sides" of the contact can't really exchange knowledge or ideas at all. And so Kelvin thinks the experiment will just continue: he says to Rheya, "You may have been sent to torment me, or to make my life happier, or as an instrument ignorant of its function... Possibly you are here as a token of friendship, or a subtle punishment [because of Rheya's suicide all those years ago], or even as a joke." He comes to a sort of acceptance: "Now all I see is you."

Conversation

The reader learns here that the pseudo-people, the "visitors," suffer intensely when they're separated from the people they're supposed to be attached to; some how they also have their own volition as well.

Kelvin talks to Snow, explaining everything that happened with Rheya, that "she knows," that she attempted to drink liquid oxygen but survived and regenerated, etc. Snow tells him we should take a look at the shuttlecraft you sent off into orbit and see if Rheya is still in there. Kelvin actually wants to leave the station with the "Rheya" who's on the station with him right now; but now the reader doesn't know whether there will be two of her. Snow also tells Kelvin if you leave with her she'll die, "And then what will you do? Come back... for a fresh sample?" The whole conversation seems pointless, meaningless, as they try and sort out what is happening, what it means when they interact with each of their "visitors," and how strange, warped and inhuman the whole experience is.

Kelvin decides not to participate in the "encephalogram experiment" because of the possible ramifications for Rheya: "If she disappears after the experiment, that will mean that I wanted her to disappear--that I killed her." And yet he also somehow despises himself for falling in love with this projection.

The Thinkers

Snow, Sartorius and Kelvin end up doing the encephalogram experiment after all, it proceeds without incident. Kelvin then goes to the library to review a well-known historiography [a "history of the history"] of scientific thinking and theories about the planet Solaris. [This takes the reader to  an interesting conceit about the solipsism of humanity: we are so into ourselves that we will go so far as to write histories about ourselves and how we "think" about other life forms and other civilizations--while still failing to understand those life forms! Amazing.] 

Kelvin thinks through the various phases scientific thought on Solaris and recognizes that after a great "classical period" there followed period where the scientists and researchers of Solaris were leaderless, lacked the genius of the classical era. That the "science" devolved into a sort of hypocognized cataloging done by lesser minds. [Here the author touches on another fascinating phenomenon that probably science in the Soviet system in his day was experiencing--and that science in the West for sure is experiencing today, as scientific thought itself becomes more hypocognized along with the various centralization and bureaucratization forces affecting that scientific thought. The more you control funding, as well as a promotion system, and the more you can direct these things centrally, the more you can enforce various forms of narrative control and thought control about what direction research can and cannot take, such that it results in a Fourth Turning in the institution of science itself. We saw this happen in blatant fashion at the NIH under Anthony Fauci's J. Edgar Hoover-like control: over decades medico-scientific research on AIDS, alzheimers and of course COVID, were directed down specific cul-de-sacs, thanks to the massive quantities of research dollars that the institution could shut off at will for any iconoclasts pursuing "unapproved" work. Quite staggering to see Lem articulate this problem more than sixty years ago.]

Kelvin then reflects on what their small team has discovered: that the ocean was without a doubt a living creature with psychic functions, that the ocean had noticed them, that it could perfectly reproduce a human body, and that it lived, thought and acted.

Also a sobering discussion here that touches on the basic arrogance of humankind: that we think we could somehow expect to "pool information" with this living ocean, that we could even attempt to comprehend a being so totally unlike ourselves.

The Dreams

The team broadcasts the X-ray encephalogram to various locations on the planet. Kelvin thinks Snow and Sartorius are keeping something from him, or worse, that Sartorius was still working on the anti-neutrino disruptor project. He also thinks there is some kind of presence on the station. Kelvin then starts having dreams that are indescribable: he's part of a sort of collective, like a swarm, or a mass of coiling worms; he finds these dreams horrifying. And then the ocean begins making strange swellings and formations, some of which reach all they way up to the orbiting station; the ocean also becomes phosphorescent in abnormal, atypical ways. Then one night Kelvin hears screaming from the laboratory, while realizing that because of the station's soundproofing there should be no possible way he could ever hear something like this. He was just about to go investigate, but then the screaming stopped, replaced by muffled sounds and objects being dragged across the floor. A few days later, while Kelvin and Rheya are in the kitchen,  Snow comes in, drunk, stuffing food in his mouth as if he hadn't eaten in days. He berates Kelvin.

Victory

Rheya gets up in the middle of the night and walks out of the room. But when Kelvin asks her about it, she strangely denies it. She then tries to get Kelvin to drink some kind of sleeping agent, and when Kelvin wakes from it he somehow knows that she has killed herself. The next day Snow gives him a note that Rheya had written to him: she had killed herself, with Snow's help, with a new destabilizer tool that Sartorius had recently built; we don't know Rheya's motives, but possibly her suicide would thus "free him" to return to Earth. 

Kelvin is consumed with rage and grief, while Snow tries to explain to him how the planetary consciousness pulls mental memories from us without knowing their function, without necessarily knowing what they "mean" to us, that it doesn't mean us harm.

The Old Mimoid

Kelvin and Snow have a sort of a theological discussion, imagining a god that is imperfect and childlike, like the planet: unable to communicate, treating the humans and their machines as toys, etc. Kelvin goes out in a helicopter to set foot on the planet for the first time. He lands on a tiny island and walks around, he climbs up one of the planet's solid formations, a "mimoid," made of a lightweight stone-like tissue. Then the ocean interacts with him: it wraps around his hands and feet, leaving a thin covering of air around his gloves and boots; it was as if "these branches reaching out of the ocean seemed to display a kind of cautious but not feral alertness." He forgives this being for everything.

"During that last week, I had been behaving so normally that Snow had stopped keeping a watchful eye on me."

The ending is ambiguous: Kelvin returns to the surface; it's not clear precisely what his motivations but it appears he wants to somehow be with Rheya again, even though he knows that it's almost certainly impossible. But yet "leaving would mean giving up a chance, perhaps an infinitesimal one..." Somehow he still wants to be in the same place as she is, even though he knows the planet can't really know about him, much less care about him and his motivations.

Vocab:

Calyx: [zoology] a cuplike cavity or structure. [botany] the sepals of a flower, typically forming a whorl that encloses the petals and forms a protective layer around a flower in bud.

Auscultation: the medical practice of listening to internal body sounds, primarily using a stethoscope.

Tegument: an outer protective layer, like skin or a shell.

Volute: [architecture] a spiral, scroll-like architectural ornament characteristic of Ionic and Corinthian and composite capitals. [biology] a deep-water marine mollusk, like the conch, with a thick spiral shell.