Scott's Reviews > Solaris

Have you ever watched a reputed champion for the first time - a Muhammed Ali, a Michael Schumacher, an Andre Agassi by reputation - and been disappointed? Have you heard so much, been expecting something so great, and then watched the title fighter hit the mat in round three, the pole position driver stall on the second bend or the top seed play a dull match with only tantalizing flashes of the brilliance you’ve heard so much about?

That experience is how Solaris felt for me.

Solaris has a big reputation. The iconic film, the recent Clooney remake, decades of cultural references... this is a book I’ve been waiting to read for a long time. Sadly, despite its great central concept, I found it to be a less than scintillating read.

Solaris begins with scientist Kris Kelvin journeying to a distant research station orbiting the strange and mysterious planet Solaris, a world covered with a vast living ocean, a being of indecipherable intent whose power is such that it controls to some degree the orbit of its world around the binary system it inhabits. On his arrival he finds the station in disarray. One of the three resident scientists, Kris’ old friend and mentor Gilbarian, has suicided while the other two seem paranoid and deranged.

It soon becomes clear that unsanctioned x-ray experiments performed on the station have led the ocean-being to respond, and it has done so by delving into the memories of the men on the station, recreating perfect, walking, talking copies of the people most important to them. If they try to escape from these copies they are relentlessly pursued. If they destroy a copy, it reappears the next morning, with no memory of its destruction. Tortured by physical manifestations of their pasts the men on-board the station struggle to understand what the Ocean creature is doing and why, opening up interesting questions as to whether it will ever really be possible to understand a truly alien consciousness.

If you think this is a cool setup, you aren’t alone. Two films have been made of Lem’s book, and it the central concept is what drew me to it (along with the aforementioned big reputation).

However, this promise didn’t deliver for me and I found Solaris to be quite patchy. While the sections where Kris deals with his deranged colleagues or the clone of his wife are great, there are some seriously dull patches in this book. As Sreyas advised me in a Goodreads comment (thanks Sreyas!), whenever Kris enters the library, start skimming pages. Unfortunately, Kris is a frequent library user and the long, tedious outlines of all the research that had been performed on Solaris really started to grate on me (and it takes a lot of library-dullness to bore me- I’m a Librarian by trade). These fairly regular boring bits really kicked my reading enjoyment in the sensitive bits.

Considering this book's great reputation, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the fault lay with me- did I miss the point? Is my typical 2017, smartphone-addled attention span too short for Lem’s slower paced story? Or are the dull sections too many and too long? After finishing Solaris I feel it is the latter, and I am genuinely disappointed that this isn’t the great book I had hoped it would be.

In saying this, Lem’s world is beautifully realized, and the story is one of genuine sadness and poignancy. I haven’t seen either of the films but I’m guessing they cut Kris’ library visits and focused on the meat of the story, something that I feel this book would have benefited from. It’s by no means a boring read, or a bad story, it just contains numerous dull sections that I recommend you skim over.

P.S: I love spotting dated tech/attitudes in old SF works and I collected a few in Solaris- The radio set Kris uses needs time for its ‘valves’ to warm up, the station is packed with heavy old paper books, and the 'auto-librarian' spits out bits of cardboard when asked questions. It’s all very 1960s In Space and I kept expecting someone to bust out some vinyl or for Robbie the Robot to show up.