Slashdot Mirror
Solaris
The height of Stanislaw Lem's science fiction production was in the 1950s and 1960s though he has continued to produce lucid, powerful work since. Writing in Eastern Europe (in Polish), his influences were vastly different from those of Commonwealth and American authors of the same period. Access to his work in English first came years after it was written, some of them via another language. This has resulted in a delayed effect as his influence on the science fiction of the West fed in over the course of a generation. Despite - or perhaps because of - this, Lem is one of the most important science fiction authors of the twentieth century writing outside the English language and his works, including over a dozen novels and several short story collections, have been published in over 30 languages.
Solaris is one of Lem's early works of mature science fiction, differing significantly in focus from the Russian film based upon it and perhaps totally unrelated to Sun Microsystems' Unix. It tells of an episode in the continuing quest by humanity to understand an alien planet. This planet orbits two stars and yet maintains a regular path. It is a ocean-world and science believes that it is the action of this mass - which is not water -- which controls the planet's motion. The planet, which itself is called Solaris, has been studied by science for generations and a large part of the book is concerned with a form of literature review, telling the history of the highs and lows in that research and relating dozens of theories generated through the decades. The style is such that the book manages to relay all this scientific opinion without indicating any genuine support for any particular theory, though most observers seem to accept, to varying degrees, the idea that the ocean may be "alive."
The narrator, Kelvin, is a Solarist by training and has come from Earth to obtain his own first hand experience of the planet. In this period of declining research, he arrives at the research station to find it in disarray; the station leader dead and the other occupants utterly preoccupied with matters they will not explain and which Kelvin cannot understand. The development of Kelvin's character is central to the book. His history is related in tandem with that of Solarist research as he attempts to come to terms with himself and with events on the station. Kelvin is the rational man of science, attempting to understand the apparently incomprehensible. His story recapitulates the scientific journey to the heart of incomprehension as he attempts to handle the impossibly real experiences the planet seems to be imposing on him. Beyond this bulk of complexity, there is a clear perspective on Kelvin's position in the final pages which shows how far this ghostly story has come, and how far our species has yet to travel.
Given the origin of its author, and the vintage of the novel, it is hardly surprising that Solaris is so far removed from the American tradition of science fiction. The mood of the book is passive and thoughtful, building a paranoiac atmosphere through understatement and calm description. The alien environment of the planet is described in the language of science and yet manages to remain largely incomprehensible. The book appears to avoid any kind of extreme; no event so great as triumph or disaster is ever described as such. This approach can make it difficult to care about the characters but it sustains the quiet, brave despair at the heart of the novel. Perhaps in this it is a reflection of the Eastern European experience of the communist regime of the period? Science has failed to comprehend Solaris so utterly that it seems humanity must be in retreat. Even as the book closes there is no certainty regarding Solaris beyond phenomenology - or has the book displayed something of the spirit of the planet? Solaris is one of the most alien places in science fiction, at least for the Western Anglophone reader, whilst Solaris goes right to the heart of the questions that good science fiction should be exploring.
Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.
Ok, hands up... how many people saw the title and thought this was a book about Sun's OS?
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
> and in Russian nearly 40
What?! Solaris was written 40 years ago (1959-60), but Lem was by no means russian, but polish!
The Russian film based on the book is definitely worth a watch if you can get hold of it, and if you have the patience - it's sometimes rather slow-moving, to say the least, and runs to over 2.5 hours in some cuts.
It's worth seeing largely because it's such a startlingly different portrayal of a future in space to those doing the rounds in the West at the time. The space station orbiting Solaris is a comfortable-looking place that's very unfuturistic, and the trip to an alien planet, with the inevitable separation from family and friends, is told from a far more human viewpoint than in most science fiction. It's a movie about people, not about technology.
There are echoes of this technique in later movies. For instance, 2010 covers Floyd's preparation for the trip to Jupiter, and the impending separation from his family, in great detail, with the actual journey being skipped almost entirely.
It's a strange, starkly beautiful and intriguingly different film. Worth seeing if you get the chance.
It does, however make some sense of SUN's naming of their (then) new OS when they switched from a BSD based SUN-OS to a SYSV based Solaris.
For long-time SUN-OS/BSD users it was going to be a new world... somewhat like the old one, but with underlying differences that sometimes made it outright strange to comprehend -- on top of which was grafted the vestiges of the old, reliable world.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Two comments: Much like in the case of "2001", I believe "Solaris" the book, and "Solaris" the movie (Russia, 1972; the book itself was originally published in Polish, not Russian) go hand in hand. Only after reading the book and watching the movie do you get a better grasp of both. (Read the book first, though.)
It should be noted, though, that Lem himself mentioned more than once that he did not like the movie and disagreed with the Tarkovsky's (the director's) interpretation of the book.
Solaris is one of my two most favorite Lem books, the other one being The Cyberiad. In the discussion above, somebody already mentioned the issue of translation; it should be noted that Kandel's English version of The Cyberiad is a brilliant translation (I haven't read the original, but I did read a different translation).
- Tal Cohen
Solaris rocked!
It was the coolest place, because they had no clue that a bunch of lambs like us had infiltrated it. Of course, it all goes straight to hell at the end of disc 1, but still, it was pretty cool while it lasted.
-Denor
I also liked Memoirs Found in a Bathtub a lot, and His Master's Voice. Shit, just check out this author.
The only thing you might not like about Lem is that he deliberately sets you up for a big climax (whether it be action or resolution of a mystery) and then robs you of the reward every single frigging time. One can see the smile on his face, too. He knows he's doing it. If that kind of thing would bother you, stick with Cyberiad and Mortal Engines, because he doesn't pull that shit in his shorter works. Enjoy.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Stanislaw Lem is one of the greatest Sci Fi writers of all times. His works do not concentrate solely on technology, but on the way people react to new environment and what they do to cope with it. He is al about our human failings. Eventhough he writes in Polish, he is easy to translate in English because his puns are in English. If you can find his books - by all means - read them. They are great. He has funny and absurd writings like the stories of the pilot Pyrx and Iion Tichi. If you believe in Murrphy's laws - just read some of this - you will be laughing out loud. The theme of the impossibility of contact with alien intellignce (not extraterrestrial - alien to our thinking) goes on in such books as "The Voice of God" and "Fiasco" where Pyrx dies. Other great eastern european Sci Fi authors are the Russian brothers - Arkadii and Boris Strugatski. If you consider yourself a geek - go and read your credo in "Monday begins on Saturday". This is the one book that exemplifies what being geek is all about and how do you hack life and the universe in general. And by the way 2+2 is SEVEN - even if drink the sky and turn the sea upside down. Don't listen to Trurl
While the ending exercised a very queer grip on me and made me remember the film as one worth staying up for, I am unable to forgive it for the interminable footage of Our Hero travelling in a Japanese Taxi through tunnels, tunnel, My God! the tunnels! Tunnels upon tunnels upon Japanese tunnels, aiiieee, the tunnels have no end! No more! I'll tesll you all I know!
Seriously, the sequence lasted 20 minutes or something, I could imagine the theaters emptying. After that it picked up again. It was as if a crazed nipponese tunnel fetishist had swapped out one of the reels.
I read Fiasco, the main thing I remember aside from the gruesome emergency spacecraft lifesaver (which propels a tube down your stomach so quickly you lose all your teeth) is that it is just unrelentingly grim. Like Philip K Dick, Lem is also popular in the UK, where we apparently like to hear stories of things going, in the vernacular, ''pear shaped''.
Also highly recommended is The Cyberiad, subtitled Fables for the Cybernetic Age. Hilarious and also often profound, Lem's fables are the perfect bedtime stories for the thinking geek.
miles
There is an interesting article by Bruce Sterling about Stanislaw Lem at http://www.well.com:70/0/Publications/authors/Ster ling/Catscan_Stuff/catscan_two.txt& lt;/a> . It is trenchant in just the manner that Sterling's catscan columns and "Cheap Truth" newsletters were.
I love Lem's work. It derives from such a completely different tradition from Anglo SF and remains so beautifully written. Only Phillip K Dick wrote anything like it in Enlgish. My only criticism is the English translation, which wasn't from the Polish, but translated from the French translation.
I read it in French, and for those capable of doing so, I recommend it over the English version.
One of the things I see in this book is the question of whether we could ever identify a non-human intelligence if we found one. Just how alien is alien? Is Solaris intelligent? It certainly isn't human. This question is never answered, and it remains an open question today. Can we build an artificial intelligence without basically building an artificial human? Is any definition of intelligence possible without making reference to purely human abilities?
You won't find the answers in Lem's work, but you will find the question repeated over and over.
Is this the first time a book written not originally in English is reviewed here?
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Of course, I mean "2001: A Space Odissey".
200.1 is the reduced-to-one-tenth shorter version. No so boring.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Wow. About a month ago, I pruned my bookshelves, and got rid of almost all of my SF.
I kept books by these guys:
Stanislaw Lem
Phillip K Dick
JG Ballard
Karel Capek
And there are a other well-represented authors on the shelf who dabble in sci-fi once in a while: e.g.,
Italo Calvino
Jorge Louis Borges
Haruki Murikami
Looks like my tastes are getting a little pretentious as I get older. Anyone want to point me at other "literary" SF authors?
I had to kind of force myself to finish 'Solaris', wheras his other books are more easily devoured. Worth the effort though. In the short story collections, he blurs the boundary between fiction, fable and poetry to great effect.
Then there's the one full of reviews of non-existent publications by non-existent authors. Brilliant stuff!
**>>BELCH
Lem will stand the test of time, like a box of twinkies or the first Van Halen album, lying in wait to have the dust blown off and be rediscovered by future geeks for eons to come.
**>>BELCH
I adored his first few books, but all that time in the warm California sun is turning him into a marshmallow. I couldn't even get half-way through his last one. He needs to move to New York, or Kansas City or something.
Don't even get me started on William Gibson!
**>>BELCH
Copyright for authors (as opposed to corporations) is life plus 70 years. Other posters in this thread have indicated that Mr. Lem is alive and well.