Solaris by Stanisław Lem

First published: 1961 (English translation, 1970)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Science fiction

Time of plot: The future

Locale: A space station suspended above the oceanic surface of the planet Solaris

Principal characters

• Kris Kelvin, a psychologist
• Dr. Snow, an expert in cybernetics
• Dr. Sartorius, a physicist
• Rheya, a material apparition of Kelvin’s dead wife

The Story:

Kris Kelvin arrives at the Solaris research station to find it in a state of utter confusion. Gibarian, one of the three scientists on staff at the station, has committed suicide. One of the others, Dr. Sartorius, has locked himself away. The third, Dr. Snow, is terrified to the point of madness. While trying to figure out what happened, Kelvin contemplates the mystery of Solaris: a planet following an impossible orbit around a double sun, seemingly able to do so because the colloidal ocean that covers its entire surface is capable of making continual adjustments to the world’s gravity to maintain its path. This living ocean undergoes ceaseless metamorphic transformations, producing many kinds of different structures with no discernible pattern; the Solarists studying the world produce many hypotheses to account for these transformations, but they are unable to confirm any of them.

After catching a brief glimpse of another person, Kelvin confronts Snow and demands to know who it is, but Snow refuses to tell him anything. Kelvin ascertains, however, that Sartorius, who is equally unhelpful, is not alone in his rooms. Later, Kelvin is visited in his own quarters by his dead wife Rheya, looking exactly as she did when he last saw her ten years before. Kelvin is horrified by the impossibility of Rheya’s manifestation, while she is gradually possessed of an oddly passive anxiety as she realizes that she cannot understand or explain where she is or how she came to be at the station. Intent on getting rid of the unnatural visitor, Kelvin tricks her into entering a space capsule; he then blasts her into space.

Knowing that Kelvin might now be ready to believe him, Snow explains that all the station staff have been subject to such visitations. The manifestations invariably solidify guilty secrets of some kind—fetishes, obsessions, or unresolved psychological problems. Snow tells Kelvin that as a psychologist, Kelvin should be well aware that every man has such secrets, and Snow proposes that when men come to Solaris to confront the alien ocean, the ocean responds by confronting men with the discomfiting produce of their own inner selves. Snow suggests that if Kelvin wants explanations he might look at a book called The Little Apocrypha, a copy of which Kelvin already found. Kelvin begins to read it, finding it to be a speculative and pseudoscientific counterpart to the disciplined reports issued by the scientists sent to study Solaris.

Kelvin’s studies are interrupted by Rheya’s remanifestation. Accepting that he is unable to get rid of her for the time being, Kelvin begins to study her; slowly they begin to reconstitute their loving relationship. Sartorius helps him in the quest, explaining that the simulacra—which Sartorius labels “phi-beings”—are made of a different kind of matter.

With Snow’s help, Sartorius tries to figure out a way to destroy the apparitions; he eventually succeeds in building a device that breaks down the matter of which the apparitions are composed. By the time the device is ready for experimental use, however, Kelvin’s feelings are deeply ambivalent. Rheya, aware of her own unhumanness, has to trick Kelvin to be allowed to submit to Sartorius’s experiment. It succeeds in destroying her—although the machine promptly breaks down—but no sooner is the simulacrum of Rheya banished than Kelvin begins wishing for her return.

There is nothing left for Kelvin to do but to try to derive some understanding of Solaris from the strange experience. He suggests to Snow that they might imagine a sick and despairing god with the creative ocean of Solaris as a kind of “hermit of the cosmos” dimly reflecting that god’s problematic creative power. Kelvin is able to simulate normality in his outward behavior, but inwardly he remains in turmoil, not knowing whether he could or ought to hope for Rheya’s return. Were she to come back again, he feels, it will represent yet another imperfection of creation and of life, which ought not to repeat itself “like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox.” At the same time, he stubbornly persists in the belief that “the time of cruel miracles was not past.”

Bibliography

Csisery-Ronay, Istvan. “The Book Is the Alien: On Certain and Uncertain Readings of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris.” Science-Fiction Studies 12, no. 1 (March, 1985): 6-21. A consideration of the “hermetic ambiguity” of a situation in which contact with the alien has been achieved and yet remains impossible.

Freedman, Carl. “Solaris: Stanisław Lem and the Structure of Cognition.” In Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Freedman applies various critical theories to Lem’s novel Solaris and works by four other science-fiction writers to demonstrate the affinity between contemporary literary criticism and the science-fiction genre.

Science-Fiction Studies 13, no. 3 (November, 1986). Entire issue devoted to consideration of Lem’s work, including editorial materials and several papers that examine Solaris.

Suvin, Darko. “The Open-Ended Parables of Stanisław Lem and Solaris.” In Solaris by Stanisław Lem, translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox. New York: Walker, 1970. Suvin’s afterword to this edition of the novel provides a general introduction to Lem’s work, including an annotated bibliography. Relates Solaris to the main traditions of speculative fiction.

Swirski, Peter. Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. A comparative study of Lem and Edgar Allan Poe that analyzes how the two authors use scientific concepts for fictional purposes. Includes bibliographical references and index.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Stanislaw Lem Reader. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997. A collection of various writings by and about Lem. Includes an introductory essay by Swirski, two lengthy interviews with Lem, and an essay by Lem. Also contains a complete bibliography of Lem’s books in English and Polish, a list of Lem’s essays and articles in English, and an extensive bibliography of critical sources on Lem in English.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. A collection of essays analyzing Solaris and other works and examining some of the themes in Lem’s fiction, such as social engineering, human violence, evolution, Freudianism, and virtual reality.

Yossef, Abraham. “Understanding Lem: Solaris Revisited.” Foundation, no. 46 (Autumn, 1989): 51-57. Considers the significance of the names given to the characters and the relationship of certain ideas in the text to Judaic theology.

Ziegfeld, Richard E. Stanisław Lem. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985. A general account of the philosophical themes in Lem’s work.