Solaris

Solaris is a 1961 science fiction novel by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem, first published in Warsaw. It is his best-known work and one of the most influential novels in the genre. The story takes place on a planet of the same name, which orbits a binary star system and is almost entirely covered by a dark, gelatinous ocean forming a single, planet-wide entity. Terran scientists suspect that it is a living and even conscious being, and for decades they have tried to study it and communicate with it, mostly without success.

The narrative follows the psychologist Kris Kelvin, who arrives at Solaris Station, a research facility hovering near the ocean's surface. He finds his colleagues in a state of disorder and despondency. An earlier unauthorised experiment, in which the crew bombarded the ocean with high-energy X-rays, had provoked an unexpected response: the ocean materialised human figures drawn from the researchers' most intimate and repressed memories. Kelvin is confronted by Harey, his wife, who had died by suicide, and whose memory torments him with guilt. The copy keeps returning, and Kelvin moves between panic, bewilderment and a growing affection, while the creature gradually develops a consciousness and an increasingly human nature of its own.

Lem builds the book around the impossibility of understanding an intelligence radically unlike our own. The discipline of «Solaristics» went through a rise, a decline and a long stagnation, limited to classifying phenomena without ever grasping their meaning. The ocean seems intelligent, yet its logic escapes human frameworks entirely, and it is unclear whether it can respond to the notion of «contact» as we conceive it. The novel describes in meticulous detail the formations that appear on the ocean's surface, such as the mimoids, symmetriads and fungoids, and devotes long digressions to the history of the scientific field, which gives the story a striking sense of plausibility.

The book appeared during the Cold War and the expansion of the space race, and it was read in many different ways: from Freudian interpretations to political allegories about the Soviet bloc. Lem, however, insisted that his main interest was philosophical and epistemological. It has had several adaptations: the Soviet television play of 1968, Andrei Tarkovsky's acclaimed 1972 film, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and Steven Soderbergh's American version of 2002. Lem criticised these versions for focusing on human relationships and neglecting the radical otherness of the ocean, which forms the heart of his proposal.