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This is so sad. Alexa, play from the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack

The anti-first contact book. A psychological horror of incomprehension. Much ink has been spilled on the encounters with the corporeal ghosts conjured by the planet Solaris. What really surprised me is how much time is spent on the narrator, Kelvin, reading books about the history and biology of Solaris. A huge portion of the story is spent on this, easily a quarter to a third of it, and the contrast between these two streams is extremely marked. The segments dealing with the interactions on the station are filled with extreme emotion, horror, confusion, clipped dialogue and unhinged rants, while the "solaristics" segments are sedate. Kelvin's anguish seems to disappear as he loses himself in a flood of names and concepts that are extremely familiar (to him). They temporarily move the focus of the story from the emotional reaction to the impossible, to the intellectual attempt to grapple with it, aided by the very, very detailed descriptions of the massive structures created by Solaris, moving the story out of the realm of drama, and closer to the pure Weird. Though none of the investigations yield ANYTHING, reading them does not induce despair, but an almost elegiac acceptance. Even when Kelvin seems to approach contempt for the practitioners of solaristics, it rapidly softens into acceptance of even them, too.

Kelvin repeatedly gazes out at the ocean. These gazes record only the visual effects of light, colour and motion. Never is it interpreted by Kelvin as any kind of metaphor. In fact, it doesn't even seem to arouse emotion in him, despite being the object of all his studies, and the cause of his exquisite hope and torment. It's simply an ocean. In fact, only at the end of the book (view spoiler)[does he have any direct interaction with the ocean as he lands on a dying mimoid. His interactions with the ghost of Harey are merely a reflection of his own mind. Even if Harey has any experience of "being" Solaris, it's beyond her to understand or communicate. When he attempts to touch the ocean, it avoids his hand. But even this gesture means nothing, since the ocean always forgets its reticence, then regains it later. And yet, the encounter with the ghosts can only mean there is some kind of intelligence at work. This conclusion paradoxically provides a single, immovably solid point of data, yet means nothing in itself. An intelligence that cannot be communicated with in any way is hardly different from a geological phenomenon. It is both a triumph, and nothing at all. (hide spoiler)]



An obvious choice for Barlowe's Guide. Solaris is easily one of the most alien aliens, from the most famous novel of one of the most famous scifi authors of the 20th century, and certainly the most famous eastern European author (at least in the west). Barlowe makes the choice to portray the whole creature, rather than its more picturesque extensions, which he relegates to a small sidebar drawing of a mimoid and some detached forms. Even then, most of it is cast in darkness. To be honest, it does kind of just look like an ocean planet, but it does get across the scale of the being, somewhat in contrast with the drawing for The Black Cloud.

Solaris is an obvious inspiration of the amoebic sea in his magnum opus Expedition, though it plays a rather small role in that book, being merely another habitat of Darwin IV, albeit a particularly strange one.

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Nihei Tsutomu completely completely ripped this book off for Knights of Sidonia, and the contrast between the idiom of a mecha-harem-romcom-body horror story, and the uncanny of Solaris is unlike anything else out there. Bravo Nihei. Just to list off the similarities:
* Both feature aliens that are planet-scale, shapeshifting, intelligent, yet incomprehensible to humanity (Solaris, the gauna Large Mass Union Ship)
* Both split off smaller semi-independent units that return to the original (bird/seal-like formations, individual gauna)
* Both create flower-like structures which bend the laws of physics beyond human knowledge (symmetriads, the graviton beam emitter)
* Both create distorted imitations of human objects (mimoids, the funhouse mirror Sidonian house inside the LMU)
* Both create replicas of dead humans that lack knowledge of their nature (Harey and the other "guests", Hoshijiro and the Honoka-gauna)

To cap it all off, Nihei names the solar system Sidonia seeks to colonize "Lem", to make it really obvious. Nihei is no stranger to lifting elements from western scifi novels he's read - Blame! is a fusion of Feersum Endjinn and Great Sky River with a sprinkling of half a dozen others, and he's not shy about acknowledging his influences, listing over a dozen in his Blame! artbook. It's an endearing fanboyism from one of the visual geniuses of manga - even the master has his own idols.

The biggest difference is that while Solaris is immovably indifferent to humanity, the gauna are implacably hostile. It's a necessity for Sidonia to be a mech action series, but it ends up being less meaningful than might be expected. In both cases, no amount of human investigation into the motives and capabilities of their counterpart yields deep knowledge. The Sidonians may be able to use gauna-flesh to create human-gauna chimeras, or machines they could not produce with their own science, but in the end, they produce a psuedo-gauna with the consciousness of a human, and some objects that already existed in their imaginations. Extensions and reflections of themselves. The replica humans in both works cannot communicate anything of gauna/Solaris. Sidonia does break from its inspiration at its end: (view spoiler)[the LMU, upon its death, terraforms Lem VII for humanity in a baffling final act of...repentance? Apology? Whatever it is, it seems to mean that the gauna finally come to some understanding of humanity, and made a gesture that is unmistakably that, a gesture. An attempted act of communication, which not even the ghosts of Solaris can confidently be called. (hide spoiler)]