Pitiless Plasma (Solaris - Stanislaw Lem)

Name: MALU

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Product:	Solaris - Stanislaw Lem
Date:	21/05/06 (209 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: a classic read for sci-fi fans

Disadvantages: not everyone is a sci-fi fan

I’ve written repeatedly that I don’t read science fiction, the statement isn’t quite correct, I should add ‘any more’, I did so in the early 1970s when I read all of Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novels and stories. What attracted me then and why didn’t I go on reading this genre?

What attracted me was the author, I was fascinated by the versatilty of the man. Lem was born in 1921 in Lwów, Poland (now Ukraine), he was of Jewish origin, but was raised a Catholic and later considered himself an atheist. He studied medicine (1939-1941), during WW2 and Nazi occupation he survived with false papers working as a car mechanic and welder and was a member of the resistance fighting against the Germans. In 1946 Lem ‘repatriated’ from the territory annexed by the Soviet Union to Kraków and took up his medical studies again but opted not to take final exams to avoid a career as a military doctor. He worked as a research assistant in a scientific institution of psychology, privately he occupied hinself with cybernetics and mathematics, translated scientific texts and wrote stories in his spare time.

He made his literary debut in 1946 as a poet, he wrote pulp fiction, a non-fiction philosophical book and several sci-fi novels and stories. With translations in 41 languages and a circulation of over 20 million copies, Lem is the most successful Polish author, he’s the only European sci-fi author whose works have been translated into English.

When I read that he had died on 27th March, 2006 I remembered my former admiration for him and decided to re-read ‘Solaris’, his most famous and most successful novel, to find out my current attitude towards the book and to think some deeper thoughts about sci-fi literature in general. I must confess that I feel the odd reader out in dooyoo bookland what with sci-fi and horror being the most read genres and both not appealing to me.

The novel is told in the first-person perspective from the point of view of psychologist Kris Kelvin who flies from an orbital station for eighteen months to a space station hovering above the planet Solaris from where the crew is to research how to get into contact with the organic, sentient, unimaginably powerful and profoundly indifferent plasma ocean, its sole inhabitant. The leader of the crew asked for him to come but when Kelvin arrives he finds out that he committed suicide and that the other two scientists are half crazy. Robots have been shut away, the station is neglected and no serious research work is going on, Kelvin is obviously not welcome and doesn’t really know what to do in the station.

I had forgotten nearly everything and read the novel as if for the first time, I felt thrilled where this certainly wasn’t intended. I was waiting for a technical disaster but the station or rather the novel is light years beyond technical problems, I learnt to accept it as a ‘normal’ setting and background for the story, not as a subject in itself. I have no idea in which galaxy the planet Solaris is meant to be, interesting how homely the space station is that has hovered above it for centuries. The library contains old books bound in leather, the scientists drink real wine!

The novel mentions futuristic technical details but doesn’t wallow in them which is fine with me because I don’t want to know how a space ship or robots work. What it contains in greatest detail, though, is the history of the research on the planet Solaris, the different theories that have developed over the time, combined with the names of scientists, it’s an endless dropping of names. First I thought I should recognise some of these names, I was sure diligent readers of sci-fi knew them and was a bit ashamed that I was so uninformed but then I realised I had fallen into the author’s trap, of course everything is made up! He gives us all these theories only to rub in the essential problem the novel deals with, namely that we human beings from the planet earth cannot comprehend phenomena which are outside our experience and imagination. If we find something that is, we put all our energy and mental capacity into making it resemble something we know so that we can deal with it. The mere concept of wanting to get into contact with the unknown shows our limitations, we can’t accept something, a being, an idea, that exists for itself, is not interested in us, is not made to have an interest at all, but just is. In ‘Solaris’ we don’t find human beings v. an alien civilisation, what generations of earthlings have tried to understand and communicate with is an ocean of plasma, how odd, but also how fascinating.
I’m sure, however, that it’s not the concept of the ocean that has made the novel so famous but the interwoven love story. Strange things have happened in the station, the ocean has sent the scientists life-like copies of something they were closely attached to when still living on the planet Earth, what it is for the other scientists never becomes clear, we only learn that it must be something truly horrifying and maddening, in any case it was enough to make the leader of the crew commit suicide. Kevin is visited by his wife for whose death he feels responsible – or is he? Who is this being resembling his wife to the last physical detail? Can he live together with this extraterrestrial clone, is there a future for them? I’m sure no reader can guess the outcome which is a good thing.

Has the perusal of ‘Solaris’ made me into a resurrected or born-again fan of sci-fi novels? No, it hasn’t, I remember now what made me stop reading this genre. I know that the problems dealt with in extraterrestrial settings are really problems humankind faces on this planet, why not deal with them here and now then? Why this flight into space, why all this techno twaddle? I find the world I live in fascinating enough and am completely satisfied by novels set in realistic surroundings, it’s this world I want to see fictitious characters act in.

Please don’t send me lists of modern sci-fi authors who - in your opinion - write much better than Lem hoping to convince me of the qualities of sci-fi literature, it’s just not my beer and never will be - as a German would say.

So, have I regretted reading ‘Solaris’ a second time? I wouldn’t say that but I haven’t enjoyed it immensely, either. The funny thing is that I found reading the book a bit tiresome at times whereas I enjoy thinking of it occasionally, the concept of the ocean will certainly stay with me.

I always like mentioning the author’s writing style but I can’t do this here, at least not Lem’s own. I read the English translation this time which wasn’t a good idea. We have the strange phenomenon of a double-translated piece of literature here, there has never been a direct translation of ‘Solaris’ from Polish into English, the novel was first translated into French and then later from French into English. Lem who could read English fluently didn’t like the English version at all but couldn’t do anything about it. He even mocked some interpretations “I read reviews so profound I barely understood them . . . One American reviewer made a fatal mistake in that he was unaware of the fact that the idioms of the Polish original are different – hence they do not allow such conclusion.” So, if you’re interested in what Lem * really * said, learn Polish!

Solaris
faber and faber
first published in 1970
214 pages
cover price 6.99 GBP

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Don’t leave a comment informing me that a film was made of the novel, I know this. In fact two films have been made over the years. This is a book review.

Summary: a must read for sci-fi fans by the most important European sci-fi author