Humanity’s inability to connect with, understand, and conceive of the manifestations of Solaris in anything other than human form is evidence of that absolute failure.

The novel focuses intensely on the history of humankind’s exploration of Solaris, emphasizing the notion that space exploration is not a search for new worlds but a search for the reaffirmation of humanity, looking for likeness rather than anything new. The slow-moving chaos that ensues is less about the plot and characters and more about Lem’s points concerning humanity and knowledge. The guests are somehow sent or manifested by Solaris itself-potentially an attempt at communication. Kris learns that the other scientists also have “guests” (as they are called) like Rheya, each one a person from their past. After his first night on the station, Kris’s old lover Rheya, who killed herself ten years ago after a quarrel with him, appears, biologically indistinguishable from the woman he loved. He flies to the space station above Solaris and, once aboard, meets Snow and Sartorius, the only other scientists on the ship. The novel follows psychologist Kris Kelvin, an academic charged with determining whether humankind’s exploration of Solaris-a brainlike oceanic planet-is worth continuing. In response to Soderbergh’s version, Lem said that his book “was not dedicated to erotic problems of people in outer space.” Lem’s Solaris is far more epistemological, concerning humanity’s search for knowledge in the face of a planet/being that evades ontology itself. Lem considered the two versions to have missed his original purpose and accused Tarkovsky of remaking Crime and Punishment. The two adaptations that have been made, the first by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and the second by Stephen Soderbergh in 2002, both emphasized different aspects of Lem’s grander novelistic aims but failed to satisfy the author. A modern encapsulation of the sublime situated in the frontier of outer space, Lem’s highly introspective and philosophical work is difficult to capture in film. Polish author Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris is an incredibly literary piece of science fiction, filled with mystic landscapes and unanswerable questions.

Stanisław lem's solaris