Disposable Lit Reviews

Berkley, 1961/1971
223 pp.
ISBN 0-425-03907-2

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Given that sooner or later I need to see both the 1972 Tartovsky adaptation and the recent Soderbergh version, I thought it only proper to check out the original novel. It’s an interesting, if not entirely satisfying, blend of the old-style clunking science fiction tale, and the more experimental and introspective “speculative fiction” that came into vogue in the 1960’s. And frankly, it seems like one of the least likely novels to ever adapt for the screen.

What other novelists would save as their climactic revelation, Lem gives us as background: That the ocean of the planet Solaris, in a tenuous orbit between two suns, is actually a single organism. Yes, that is a big deal — except that no one’s ever been able to figure out much more about it, in the decades since it discovery. It’s active, maintaining its balance between its two suns by apportioning its weight to shift the center of gravity; it creates huge and complex structures out of its plasmic body, it merrily lives its incomprehensible life, and it responds not a whit to generations of researchers’ attempts to communicate with it, or even to discover if it’s intelligent. (Which is, honestly, a nonsensical question — in what way would an organism which came into being in complete solitude with complete control and domination of its environment exhibit anything which we would recognize as intelligent? And how could we possibly communicate with a lifeform which has never had the possibility or need for communication previously?)

And so the possibility of study of Solaris, the planet and the organism, has gradually diminished to cataloguing planetary phenomena and cataloguing the scores of variations on theories of the nature of the “living ocean” — until…

…Solarist Kris Kelvin arrives at the undermanned-by-attrition floating station above the ocean’s surface to find one researcher dead by his own hand, and the other two living secretively, barricading themselves off from each other and him. He hears sounds like other people are on the station, though they couldn’t be; and sees in passing a half-naked Negress (the translators’ word, not mine) who has no right or reason to be there.

And then, when he wakes up in the morning, Rheya is there. His wife. Dead twelve years of suicide after a particularly vicious fight.

Much of the novel is Kelvin and the other researchers’ desperate attempts to figure out what their personal “visitors” are, and what they’re meant to accomplish — if anything close to intent can be assigned to them. Rheya herself is of human intelligence, and slowly comes to understand that she’s not the “real” Rheya of Kelvin’s memory. (We never meet the other two researchers’ “visitors,” but according to them, Kelvin got off easy — theirs are more shameful even than his guilt over pushing his wife to suicide.)

Much of the time spent between them becomes a pseudo-meditation on guilt, memory, and the “reality” of personality, but — and I know it’s patronizing of me to attribute this to “European reserve” — their interactions are, to my tastes, far too muted. Rheya is recreated here because of the extreme nexus of emotions surrounding her in Kelvin’s memory; one might expect more of those emotions to make themselves known, but instead their relationship is governed by an arm’s-distance emotionlessness and a dedication to masking those deeper feelings.

It gets crunchier, though, as Lem also spends pages and chapters rehearsing the history of Solarist study and theory, from competing hypotheses on the lifeform’s level of sophistication to the history and personnel of various expeditions to the catalogue of the temporary structures that the ocean manifests (mimoids, symmetroids, etc.). The dry academia of these long sections mutes even further the emotional impact of what is ostensibly the heart of the human story. (Frankly, I’m interested to see how Tartovsky — whose Stalker went out of its way to use common imagery and settings to tell a tale of the fantastic — dealt with the grandiose visuals which are such a part of the setting of the novel.)

The ending is inconclusive — a pseudo-catharsis for Kelvin’s personal issue, and very little on the larger issue of Solaris itself. I can see how it COULD be adapted for film, but I can’t really see anything that is compelling in such an adaptation — anything that would make a filmmaker say, “Wow, this is a book that’s simply got to be a movie,” not once, but twice.

And the comic geek in me kept hoping that Solaris would get a bee in its bonnet toward a Norse god of thunder, but that’s just me…

Nathan Shumate