Solaris Kindle Edition

Author lays out a good story with well described characters and environment. It's a bit of a gear-change after having seen the Russian movie several times and the one with George Clooney several times as well. The written story is somewhat different and more detailed regarding the planet and the space station there in orbit where the story takes place. The written story is less of a soap opera like in the movies and the characters better developed in the text here. Note the ending of the book is different than the movies and seemed to me to not actually come to a definitive conclusion, but don't let that deter you from this read.

For many years I postponed reading Solaris. Andrey Tarkovsky is my favourite film director, and having seen his film on Solaris I was afraid to be disappointed by the book. The easy availability of Kindle edition encouraged me to try. And I'm glad I did.The book and the film ... are similar in some ways, and different in others. Tarkovsky is more poetic, introspective, spiritual. Lem - rational, philosophical. It shows. Both are the best in their genre, in their approach.But that means that even though the themes are similar, the main message coming from Solaris experience is diffferent. It shifts from hope bordering on despair in ever being able to comprehend a totally different, alien rationality that exhibits some purpose but is never comprehensible in itself (Lem), to awareness that the only thing of value, the only precious substance worth preserving for eternity is humanity, human relations, human vulnerability - and hope/bordering on despair in ever being understood/preserved in time/saved by a totally different rationality (Tarkovsky). Even though it might seem like nuances, that's a grandiose shift of message. I now understand why Lem was unhappy with Tarkovsky's film.Solaris is primarily a book of ideas, but there is also a very deep psychological undercurrent. I picked some quotes from the book where you can see some ideas that you would notice both in the book and the film - but developed in different ways:1) The idea of humanity wanting to get mirrored, understood by The Universe, and being in horror when The Universe mirrors back the worst of humanity's traits.""A normal person," he said. "What is a normal person? Someone who's never done anything heinous? Right, but has he never even thought about it? Or maybe he never thought about it, but something inside him thought it, the idea popped into his head, ten or thirty years ago, maybe he fought it off and forgot about it, and he wasn't afraid, because he knew he'd never carry it out. Right, but now, imagine that suddenly, in broad daylight, among other people, he meets IT embodied, chained to him, indestructible. What then? What do you have then?" I said nothing. "The Station," he said quietly. "Then you have Solaris""We're not searching for anything except people. We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. We desire to find our own idealized image; they're supposed to be globes, civilizations more perfect than ours; in other worlds we expect to find the image of our own primitive past. Yet on the other side there's something we refuse to accept, that we fend off; though after all, from Earth we didn't bring merely a distillation of virtues, the heroic figure of Humankind! We came here as we truly are, and when the other side shows us that truth--the part of it we pass over in silence--we're unable to come to terms with it! [...] It's what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope!"2) The idea of defective/crippled God/Meaning. Lem ir very clear on this, Tarkovsky treats the subject less directly - through poetic expression, general ambiance of the film." I'm no specialist in religion, and I may not have come up with anything new, but do you happen to know if there ever existed a faith in... a defective God? [...] I mean a God whose deficiencies don't arise from the simplemindedness of his human creators, but constitute his most essential, immanent character. This would be a God limited in his omniscience and omnipotence, one who can make mistakes in foreseeing the future of his works, who can find himself horrified by the course of events he has set in motion. This is. . . a cripple God, who always desires more than he's able to have, and doesn't always realize this to begin with. Who has built clocks, but not the time that they measure. Has built systems or mechanisms that serve particular purposes, but they too have outgrown these purposes and betrayed them. And has created an infinity that, from being the measure of the power he was supposed to have, turned into the measure of his boundless failure. [...] It seemed to me very, very authentic, you know? It would be the only God I'd be inclined to believe in, one whose suffering wasn't redemption, didn't save anyone, didn't serve any purpose, it just WAS."3) failure to communicate with a Complete Other."I didn't believe for a minute that this liquid colossus, which had brought about the death of hundreds of humans within itself, with which my entire race had for decades been trying in vain to establish at least a thread of communication--that this ocean, lifting me up unwittingly like a speck of dust, could be moved by the tragedy of two human beings. But its actions were geared towards some purpose. True, even this I was not completely certain of. Yet to leave meant to strike out that perhaps slim, perhaps only imagined chance concealed in the future."To my mind, here Lem and Tarkovsky disagree with each other. At the very end of the film we see The Solaris mirroring back the Human World, though in a heavily distorted form, thus giving hope that some of it might be preserved for eternity. For Lem preciousness, sacredness, preservance of humanity is not the main point - it's more an awe in front of Unknowable who can exploit human weaknesses, vulnerability for purposes unknown, and desperate wish to come even one step closer to the Truth, to comprehending the Unknowable.Both Lem and Tarkovsky are geniuses. Their messages are almost always very subtle, and can be interpreted in various ways. But it is clear to me that they saw Solaris differently. If you've seen the film, do read the book! There are some important, interesting concepts/ideas that Andrey Tarkovsky didn't/didn't want to show in the film. The very idea of symmetriad, for example:" A human being is capable of taking in very few things at one time; we see only what is happening in front of us, here and now. Visualizing a simultaneous multiplicity of processes, however they may be interconnected, however they may complement one another, is beyond us. We experience this even with relatively simple phenomena. The fate of a single person can mean many things, the fate of several hundred is hard to encompass; but the history of thousands, millions, means essentially nothing at all. A symmetriad is millions, no, billions, to the nth power; it is unimaginability itself. What of it if, in the recesses of one of its aisles that is a ten-fold version of a Kronecker space, we stand like ants holding onto the folds of a breathing vault, that we watch the rise of vast planes grayly opalescent in the light of our flares, their interpenetration, the softness and infallible perfection of their resolution, which only lasts a moment, for everything here is fluid--the content of this architecture is motion, intent and purposive. We observe a fragment of the process, the trembling of a single string in a symphonic orchestra of supergiants, and on top of that we know--we only know, without comprehending--that at the same time, above us and beneath us, in the plunging deep, beyond the limits of sight and imagination there are multiple, million fold simultaneous transformations connected to one another like the notes of musical counterpoint. For this reason someone gave them the name of geometric symphony, but if this is the case, we are its unhearing audience."

The ideas presented within this book were engaging. Where it lost me was in some of the larger chapters that tried to capture the history and “science” behind the ‘ocean’ on the planet. I was also thrown off by some of the stilted language and odd emotional reactions the team had with each other. The more interesting philosophical notes are tagged on at the end. Not a bad book, but also not great.

The space race has given us, not only technological advances, but it also had an impact on other fields such as literature and movies. It has helped man to know himself better in the permanent quest of trying to understand the universe. The stimulus of getting to the moon before the other, pushed advancements in technology. At the same time it inspired writers and the film industry. This is the case of Solaris, which was first a book and then was the inspiration for at least two movies.The book is excellent in many respects and it deals mainly with philosophy, my own interpretation. The movies based on this book are a good intention of grabing some of the essential themes of the book. I liked more the Russian version since it tries to stay closer to the book. Solaris, the movie, is always compared to Kubrick's movie 2001, a Space Odysee. It seems that most people favour the Kubrick work mainly for the special effects. 2001 tries to trascend science fiction with something deeper, however the message is abstract. A 2nd movie called 2010, tries to explain the mistery, but I don't think it was succesful, sometimes is better to leave the mistery and let people imagine the end.Solaris surpasses 2001 in this respect since philosophical ideas are expressed more clearly and heavily in the book, and even gets to the movies. The polish author, Stalisnaw Lem, has included problems of morality, and religious exploration as well, which from my point of view makes it more interesting, since it makes us ponder about man and its destiny. There are lots of conversations in the book and in the movies. The philosophical questions are frequent and there is even an insinuation of an imperfect god, something like the Greek gods.Neither of the movies dwells on the description of Solaris, which is fantastic. The mile long plasma structures that grow and collapse and the colors of the two suns are something only described in the book. The author's imagination helps us discover that we have a universe in our own minds with limitless potential of uderstanding, I don't think I'm exagerating, but we may need minds like S. Lem to realize this.And there is also a love story, which may be the part that is most well known about this book, and it could be the bait to many people since this aspect touches most of them. Here we have a psychological-moral aspect that is troublesome as the rest of the book. The suicide of a person and a guilty feeling makes wonder if a second opportunity could make a person to be better this time, and transform him in the defender, to the end, of this second chance. And even though, there are many subjects in this book, the love story remains there, in the front and in the background. There is mention of the lost woman in the last paragraph of the book.Another interesting fact is the description of the ship and the items within it. The book was written at the very beginning of the space race and for this reason it uses what the author knows and is familiar with. The description of the library is interesting since he describes it in the same way a library on earth can be described. We may see a problem here, since a library, as we know it, may not be practical in space due to the fact that, nowadays, computers have taken the place of entire encyclopedias and archives. However, in this book, we could just consider a library as a symbol for a place of meetings, where the knowdledge could be so close as to pass its science through osmosis.The 1972 movie has an interesting library where there are more than books, but decoration with chandeliers, old paintings (by Bruegel) and even a Bolivian folk mask of a devil, whose meaning may not be important, but it shows that the whole movie had special details as well as music that was chosen not to be more than the movie. What is important is the depiction of the ocean which, to my eyes, could be compared to the paintings of Monet. Also, this movie has moments in the snow which are painting-like.Other special details are the clothes that Rheya wears, which are a work of art and are ageless as well as a texture that looks soft to the touch. And Tarkovsky, the Russian director, used time as a tool which I like to compare it to the time you could spend looking at pictures of Monet. For this reason, this is not a movie for everybody since action and hyperactive pictures are preferred by the common folks, who will be dissapointed with the slow pace of this movie.One of the most important of the philosophical questions, from my point of view, is when one of the scientists makes a comment about what is accomplished with the space flights, and then he says that we are looking for mirrors. The main idea behind this statement is that the scientists are forced to change the focus and scope of its work and ask themselves if they can understand the universe before they can understand themselves. This, for me, is a contribution to the eternal quest of who am I? What lays beyond our solar system? What is in the distant stars? What about God? Do I know myself? What are we looking for? given by Stalisnaw Lem, all around the space race, reflected in his book and movie.

I guess I would call this the best Sci-Fi novel I have ever read. Great imagery. It sometimes gets into somewhat trite passages, but the overall effect is wonderful.Some have reported some typos and errors in this translation, but I did not notice any.

First let’s get the translation straight; Wikipedia states there is only one English translation, by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, and that this is actually a translation of the French translation and, further, that Lem himself, who read English fluently, repeatedly voiced his disappointed in this translation. It further states that an improved translation seems unlikely due to rights issues. However my edition states ‘This is the first English translation directly from the original’ by one Bill Johnston and I have absolutely idea whether this is considered a better or worse translation but I found the prose clumsy and extremely heavy going. So please bear that in mind regarding my comments below!So what is the book about? I’m not sure I can answer that question. I’m not even sure Lem could have answered it. On a purely prosaic level it is about the planet Solaris. Largely ignored when first discovered as it was calculated that its unstable orbit around a binary pair of stars meant it would shortly be meeting its end, but it later turns out that orbit was somehow being actively managed to maintain stability by what was now interpreted to be a sentient planet; at least the ocean of plasma covering the surface is thought to be sentient. This new understanding has generated much renewed interest in the planet and the possibility of making Contact with it. By the start of the book this research has been ongoing for over a hundred years with the only real progress being the creation of whole libraries of books cataloguing the unfathomable behaviour of the ocean of plasma, of Solaris. Many theories abound but there has been absolutely no success in creating any plausible interpretation of these phenomena. Into this scenario steps Kris Kelvin the newest recruit to the permanent research station on Solaris numbering just four members including Kelvin.The narrative divides quite distinctly into two separate threads; the human interactions of the research team and the description of the behaviour of the Solaris over the many years it has been studied. The first is handled as a fairly straight forward story narrative as the crew try to understand the ‘ghosts’ so disturbingly created by Solaris from their own memories. The second is handled through an immense amount of incredibly dense pure exposition. Hard to read and simply documenting the history of observations of Solaris’ behaviour over the years and the abortive attempts to understand them. This latter makes up a good half of the text and its sole purpose seems to be to present Solaris as being utterly impenetrable and that ultimately all attempts to understand it are doomed. So effectively half of the book is just descriptions of the incomprehensible actions of the planet which remain to the end of the book unexplained and unexplainable. Very unsatisfying; the only philosophical conclusion seems to be that any attempt to understand any alien intelligence will be inevitably doomed to the same failure.Due to this lack of understanding and explanation these two threads never really coalesce; the human interactions are almost entirely driven by the actions of Solaris but there is no understanding as to how or why and, most disappointingly, the book never makes any attempt to give any conclusive explanation. It is interesting to consider the three cinematic adaptations of the book; the first was a 1966 Russian two part film for TV, the second another Russian Film made in 1972 and the third, and the one probably most familiar to people in the West, a Hollywood film starring George Clooney made in 2002. What is interesting about these films is that they highlight the dual nature of the book; the first adaption concentrating on the planet Solaris whilst the second two concentrate on the human interactions. Lem himself states that these last two have got it wrong, that ‘This is why the book was entitled "Solaris" and not "Love in Outer Space."’So we can take it from Lem himself that the main drive of the book is the unfathomable nature of alien intelligence. He provides us with excessively longwinded and dense descriptions of the behaviour of Solaris and never provides any sort of conclusion or explanation for them. Ultimately it all seems rather pointless; to go to such lengths to describe all the bizarre and fantastic activities of Solaris and then to tell the reader that this behaviour can never be understood. I was left feeling why bother? It’s a short book but it took a long time to read, ploughing through all that dense exposition, and at the end left me feeling cheated with no reward for all that effort. Solaris is described as Philosophical SF and maybe I’m just not philosopher enough to appreciate it. A somewhat grudging three stars; it did have some very interesting ideas.

Solaris was first published in 1961. It is older than most of its readers, but the story has not aged in the least. It is perhaps because it doesn't rely on trickery, gadgets and mimicry. Its concept is utterly original and reaches beyond the confines of its sci-fi genre.A psychologist, Kris Kelvin arrives at the space station on the planet of Solaris shortly after one of the scientists based there takes his own life. Immediately upon his arrival, strange things begin to happen. He sees a naked, athletic black woman who cannot possibly be there. Soon, Rheya, his long gone lover, makes an appearance, and will not leave his side. She too cannot be real but all his senses, and his memories, tell him that she is. Two other resident-scientists experience similar ... hallucinations? encounters? relationships? It's difficult to define.This "resurrection" of the long-dead lovers can only be attributed to the planet of Solaris, and more specifically to the ocean that inhabits it. The ocean covers the entire surface of the planet. It appears to be a living, organic form which has evolved to such an extent that it is capable of thinking, creating, understanding and probably penetrating into man's mind to retrieve his memories and to use them to recreate people from his past. This doesn't seem entirely innocent - it may be that those "visitors" are spies or even assassins, although they claim to be benign and act innocently enough. They cannot be killed and sent away - they keep coming back. And more importantly their personalities evolve and they are able to form genuine relationships with "their" humans."Solaris" explores not only the depths of the universe and the diversity of matter/creation, but even more intriguingly the depths of human mind, its secrets, memories and its self-awareness. The book is about the new and unexplored frontiers, our soul being the most remote and the hardest to comprehend.Brilliant, intelligent book!

First read this in the late 70s. Since seen the classic Russian sci-fi film and the mediocre American sci-fi film. Treated myself to a new copy and just finished reading it. Still as fascinating as it was when I first read it. The sentient ocean on Solaris digs into the deepest recesses of your mind and brings to life your darkest memory. How can we understand a seemingly intelligent planet when we have only scratched the surface into trying to understand our motives? What is real and what is imagined? Deeply philosophical read.Ray Smillie

Psychologist Kelvin is sent to the Research Station orbiting one of the greatest mysteries encountered by mankind: an oceanic planet that appears to exhibit signs of intelligence. His mission is to evaluate whether the research is a failure. What he finds is utter chaos, scientists driven past the edge of sanity by a force that may be the ocean – and that Kelvin may not be able to escape.Some books stand the test of time. Others don’t. Early on in this book the word “Neg***s” is used, and I almost gave up there and then. On top of this is the constant low-grade sexism: Kelvin becomes obsessed with saving a woman because of MAN PAIN, and she is in love with him because, well, you know, that is what women do.Okay. This is a classic of science fiction. I’ve read Kipling and swallowed his racism because it is great writing. But accepting the dated social ideas leads you into a second problem.Much of this book is essays on epistemology – how we know things and how you can justify a belief. These are essential to the story. Except, well, I had to study Epistemology as part of my PhD and this book is, unsurprisingly, 60 years out of date. It is like reading like an essay on how to use leeches to cure period pains.When he ditches the serious science for the adventure and the impossibility of his quest for redemption, this is a good read. If I had read this when it was first published, I would have thought it marvellous. Kelvin makes a lot of weird decisions, some of which of unquestionably cruel, but there is a good, imaginative adventure in here. Just be ready for it to feel very old-fashioned.

This is a good book, but my heart started to sink whenever the protagonist of the really interesting story about an alien intelligence playing with researchers' minds went "too the Library", as it meant said story was going to be interrupted for several pages with pretentious and pointless (as the book itself is at pains to point out!) exposition about the planet.The story itself is great, but don't be afraid to skip several pages whenever it descends into dry exposition about previous research attempts and theories.