Solaris - Stanislaw Lem, A review
I think most people go into Solaris expecting it to be an emotionally deep story about meeting people from your memories brought to life in an isolated station on a planet with a living ocean. That is what I expected when I began reading, and I soon found it difficult to match up my expectations for the story with the reality of the text before me.
The book, really is less about the planet Solaris and the strange things it is able to do, but moreso is obsessed with relaying the story of solaristics, the fictional field of study dedicated to the planet. The book is largely a recollection of the years of study into the planet, the rifts in the scientific community, theories, long drawn out explanations of phenomena and descriptions of scientific articles and experiments.
What is illuminating about all this research, at least when comparing it to any other scientific field we know of in the real world, is that none of it has really taught us anything about the planet solaris and its 'living' 'ocean'1. The years of study, the lives lost (both literally and also in terms of the years spent studying it) to the study of the planet, the massive books and monographs on the planet really mean nothing because the scientists studying it cannot make heads or tails of what the ocean actually is. For all of their scientific terminology, mathematical formulae and exhaustive2 humanity has been unable to truly comprehend what the ocean is, and that is fascinating to me.
Lev argues that we will be unable to understand aliens if we were to encounter them, and this is an idea I broadly agree with, but actually reading the novel helped me to truly understand what this meant. Even Mathematics, our most fundamental and seemingly least human of the sciences struggles to define the ocean in Solaris. The novel presents the ocean as a focus of the obsession of all those who spend their lives trying to study it and failing. When the ocean is reduced down to a protoplasmic soup, it manages to recreate a human from the minds of researchers living on the planet, when given all the complexity of a god it ends up being a faulty, imperfect one.
Relationships between people are not explored in great depth in Solaris. The people brought into existence by the ocean are not really there to form a metaphor for grief, or at least I do not think so. They are there because their very presence is so strange and so fascinating that it becomes ever the more frustrating to be unable to understand why the ocean is doing so, much less how. Before reading the book, I had imagined it would be about scientists exploring their grief with pseudo-people and finding some great beauty in the act. Maybe this would be a good book in itself, but solaris is something far stranger. It is the detailed (meticulous to the point it does get annoying at times) account of a scientific field that is unable to get even the most basic grasp of the thing it is studying.
As a scientist, and particularly a biologist, this is fascinating to me. In biology, we struggle very often with definitions. What is a species? An organism? What is life itself? When we get down to this level of questioning, we go from explaining things (which is where science as a study gets interesting) to purely describing things. Life is anything that does X, Y and Z3 , a species is defined as performing these behaviours, and an organism is sort of anything we agree to call one. Description is interesting, useful even, but ultimately we as humans find ourselves wanting to know why as opposed to what, and this is the great white space at the very bottom of biology.
In Solaris, Lem brings this instead to the front. What if there was a field, distinct from the natural sciences, where we could only ever describe, and never hope to explain. That is Solaristics, and that is why ultimately Kelvin (the main character) calls the ocean a god, if an imperfect one, because with a god there is no explanation, only description.
As a biologist (and speculative-biology enthusiast at that) Lem constructs one of the most wonderfully believable aliens I have ever seen, and the ocean is my favourite demonstration of taking basic facts about life (observational of course, explanation defies us even in the real world still) and extrapolating them to create my favourite alien of all time. The fact it evolved to make the planet's orbit4 more stable to ensure it could survive is just such a good idea and I feel that this wonderful aspect of the book is often forgotten. Masterful Speculative biology.
Solaris is not perfect - the prose is suitably dry (reminding us of the academia so thoroughly infused throughout the novel), the plot is quite frankly unnecessary to the story the book is tying to tell and so could easily be slimmed down to be slightly less of a drag, Solaris is incredibly inspirational and, though an antithesis to much of what I consider the makings of my favourite sci-fi novels, manages to worm its way deep into my mind, and resurface every so often, reminding me that things are never truly knowable, what you know is only a matter of how far you can dig before you reach a place where you must stop explaining and instead describe, with understanding being far off.
Both of these terms are discussed in the novel, and nobody really knows if they are applicable, but it is how I will address whatever it is.↩
A solid chunk of the book is just a description of the behaviour of certain protrusions of the ocean.↩
Would have added a bit about MRS C GREN but the mark scheme PTSD is too strong.↩
Not to mention the part about the symmetriads being almost able to be described mathematically - its just so wonderful!!!↩