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Anyone have any thoughts on Solaris? A few people have compared it to 2001, any thoughts?

I can only comment on the movie. I can say that I watched 2001 and Solaris both recently and found that they did have something in common: I did not understand either of them. haha maybe there is some kind of profound theme that I just didn't get.... probably would make more sense if I read the books.

Ally, I suspect you're right. 2001 certainly makes more sense if you read the book. I would recommend the book Lost Worlds of 2001, which is very good for insights on the creative process.

I wasn't really sure how to react to Solaris. I've seen the first half of the movie 2001 a couple of times, but never actually sat through it until the end. I think the comparison with 2001 is pretty on point. Both are more about the psychology of the characters and the sci-fi is just in the background.

What I loved about Solaris: I love that the ocean is something these scientists have been studying for generations and still know nothing about. It's a real alien in the sense that it doesn't resemble people at all. I just saw Guardians of the Galaxy (which was awesome) but their idea of aliens are humans with different colored skin.

What I hated about Solaris (aka what Solaris has in common with the movie 2001): Every time I would read a page, I would fall asleep. Literally. I don't know if I was just exhausted (also true) or if the book was that boring, but I think it took me about 150 sessions of reading one page at a time before I finished the book. I mean, I simply don't care that this guy is losing his mind, and I certainly don't want to read about it. I would have liked to know, for example, why the scientists get burned after touching the projections of the their loved ones.

I found it disappointing. I had seen the two movies and found them both interesting, although I remember certain scenes more than the entirety of both of them.

I thought the book had interesting ideas, but it got bogged down in them. The pages on different theories about the planet, the lengthy description of the shapes that are formed on the surface of the ocean - after awhile, it started to feel like filler. It reminded me a little of The Silmarillion which I tried to read several times when I was young. Great for the fan that wants the backstory, uninteresting to everybody else.

I found the idea interesting, but became bored with the whole interplay between Kelvin and his girlfriend. After he sends the first visitor away, he accepts the second one and that's about it. He acquiesces too quickly. And I found his interactions with her strange. Why wouldn't he explain the situation that she was in when she asked? Why didn't he try to contact the shuttle to see if she was still there when Snow suggested it? Why did everyone else seem to be visited by a fetish that embarrassed them while he was visited from someone from his past? These are all scientists, but they seem to lose all their objectivity and become mired in shame and isolation so quickly. There seemed to be so much there to explore, but Lem chose to pursue a less interesting path.

The idea that an alien intelligence could be beyond our comprehension is an interesting one and I've seen many people mention it, but it doesn't require a full novel to get it across. I thought the book was enjoyable enough, but in the end disappointing and frustrating.

It really helps to realise that the entire book is a criticism of sci-fi aliens (and, by extension, not sure if by intention � sci-fi AIs).

This is why you don't get a cliché satisfactory ending. There is simply too much to know and too much to understand, and no sudden and miraculous insight will resolve the mysteries (good luck defining the mysteries) of the ocean and make it ask for your phone number, or something. The scientific team in the book don't make a grand climactic discovery � they just find out something new, and issue new hypotheses, that's the whole point.

This is why you get chapters full of accounts of previous research. You have decades of thousands of cleverest and most unbiased people gathering data and constructing hypotheses: their work clearly wasn't in vain, but it still barely grazed this field.

This is why you get the Solaris team struggling to deal with the human-like clones of people from their memories. We are too mired in the framework of humanity to be readily open to things that are conceptually different, and these scientists are no exception.

(I can't compare it with the films, as it's been a long time since I saw the Soviet one, and now I'm really reluctant to check the Hollywood one out, because two people kissing each other on the poster is a symptom of a severe case of missing the point.)

That's a really interesting point--I do feel like I can appreciate the book more (but maybe still not like it more), knowing that it was meant to be criticism. By the way, in case anyone is interested, I found a short article about Solaris called "The Book is the Alien" () that supports what Emperador says.

But about the Visitors--who were they? Benjamin says they are embarrassing fetishes, but do we actually know who the other's visitors were, or do we only know about Rheya?

Well, we know about Gibarian's visitor, who is the stereotype of an African woman - a naked "giant negress" clad only in a straw skirt. It seemed like a fetishized view of a black woman - he mentions her thick arms, enormous breasts and "steatopygous" (fat) buttocks. It seems unlikely to be a figure out of Gibarian's past based on what we know about him - a Solarist in a future where space travel is commonplace. Lem even mentions that she seems like something from an anthropological museum. The figure just seems too much of a stereotype to be based on a long lost love.

Now although we never meet the other visitors, both Snow and Sartorius are obviously embarrassed by them. They try to hide them away, while Kelvin includes Rheya when he meets with Snow, and Rheya ends up conspiring with Snow in her own demise. Obviously, his regrets don't lead him to be ashamed of Rheya.

We know that Sartorius seems to have a child with him.
We don't know for sure that this indicates any kind of fetish. The child could be Sartorius's long lost child, and his relationship with the child could be parental, but we really learn so little about Sartorius that we can't determine. Is he a pedophile? Is it his lost child? Is it a child that he hurt or killed and has obsessed over? We don't know. We just know that he has locked himself and his visitor away and doesn't want the visitor to be seen.

Snow, however, describes the visitors with a reference to a fetishized piece of cloth. He also, if memory serves, seems to indicate that they are pulled out of some dark part of one's soul that had been hidden away. This whole description suggests to me that Snow's visitor is also drawn from an embarrassing fetish. I think if it was Kelvin describing the visitors to a newcomer, he would have described the visitors in a very different way based on his own experience.

As far as the book being a criticism of scifi, I can buy that, but it doesn't make me like the book any more. The description of past research into the planet is the part that puts me in mind of the The Silmarillion. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien created a whole mythos to explain the world of The Hobbit. Lem here creates a whole body of research about a world that doesn't exist. It's kind of interesting - but it's somewhat secondary to the plot and takes up a lot of the book.

On the other hand, with the idea that this is a work of scifi criticism, then the body of research becomes more primary to the plot, and the whole interaction between Kelvin and Rheya becomes secondary. Either way, I feel like a great deal of the book is taken up by matters of secondary importance.

I enjoyed the book and although I describe sections of it as being filler, I did read it all and didn't feel the desire to skip any of it, which sometimes happens with sections like that. However, I found it ultimately unsatisfying. I didn't need a nicely wrapped up ending, but generally found the characters unsympathetic. Kelvin was the most well-defined and likeable, and I still couldn't understand his reactions and actions.

I'm judging the book more on its success as a novel then on its merit as a criticism of scifi aliens, and as a novel, I thought it was a good but not great read. You can teach the seminar, but you still have to rock the boulevard. I felt it fell a little short on the latter grounds.

Has anyone read anything else by Lem? What did you think?