Solaris

Rating:
Summary: A titan of reason in the often brainless genre
Review: Solaris is probably the most important work of science fiction ever written. Once you consider that it was written in 1961, you come away even more impressed. It deals with the question of whether we can know anything at all, and thoughtfully considers this by asking what would happen if man encountered something truly alien in his explorations of space.

The author treats his subject with a great dose of reason, staying away from fromulaic, brainless, knee jerk approach which is the standard in sci fi today. A lesser writer would, most likely, find a way to communicate with the entity through the all time cliche of "mathematics-as-universal-language" you see every time in run of the mill sci fi. Yet, Lem is more sophisticated that that and does not provide an easy, idiotic means of communication.This ability to stay away from the obvious is what impressed me, and ultimately made for a strangely fresh, unique and significant reading experience.

The reader looking for a plot above all else, however, should not buy this book.

Rating:
Summary: yawn......
Review: A solid and interesting premise, but Lem sadly fails to make it work. I found myself wondering what was the point of the book and waht was happening. There isn't really any mystery (although at times it get creepy) the reader already knows the nature of Solaris. Nothing is really accomplished in the end and i felt almost as if I was reading an incomplete story. Oh yeah, Event Horizon was a ripoff of this book.

Rating:
Summary: Spooky, & strangely moving.
Review: At first this reminded me more of Poe then anything. I've read little science fiction from the non- English world & for some odd reason all the sf novels I've read from the non-English world have been French. Until this book that is. Lem creates a creature so alien that at times I found it quite frustrating. In fact Solaris is about as alien & inscrutable as you can get. I should warn you that I read history books for fun so the long history sections interested me, but might bore you to tears. Also this was a much quicker read then I expected. There's something about this book that turns me off, but I had to reward the writing & imagination of it.

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Summary: The human condition explained by an entirely un-human entity
Review: Where to begin. As the first book I've ever read by Stanislaw Lem, it took me a bit to get into his style. Once I did, I was captivated. I couldn't get enough. Solaris, in brief, is the story of an astronaut (Kris Kelvin) who arrives on a space station orbiting Solaris, a world orbiting a binary star which has been of much interest to the scientific community over the last hundred years. Immediately upon landing, he discovers a friend (Gibarian) who had been the commander of the expedition, has died under mysterious circumstances. The man to deliver this information is the shady Dr. Snow, who babbles incoherently about "visions" before calming down and speaking lucidly. It's not too long before Kris finds himself seeing "visions," and to tell you anything else would be to spoil the story. Aside from a rip-snorting plot, the laborious attention to detail only enhances the story. The words create a perfect picture in your mind, and every person I've talked to who's read this novel has had more or less the same impression of the station. It has a too-large quality, as if there ought to be more than simply three people on it. This only adds to the suspense. The explorations of the planet's surface itself are fascinating scientific descriptions of formations the ocean creates. The grand "floral calyx stage" is incomprehensible to the human mind, yet Lem can describe it in sparkling clarity. The story also contains much human emotion. Kris is dealing with the suicide of his wife, which he blames on himself. Snow is half mad with "visions," and Sartorius, a third scientist, has locked himself in his lab, with only the odd sound escaping. As Kris strives to understand this colossal mind orbiting beneath him on the planet, he is unconsciously attacking his own brain, racking it for clues as to what he is really feeling. Thought provoking and ultimately tragic, Solaris is a classic from beginning to end. The only problem is the double-translation (Polish-French-English) which is at times clunky. This, however, is a minor complaint against a grand piece of literature.

Rating:
Summary: Overrated - a laborious story
Review: Solaris is the very example of a book of which the themes, interesting in themselves (consciousness, human attitude towards the unknown), and even the story, that describes an attempt to understand a kind of conscious ocean, are spoiled. The style is laborious -- we can find full-page enumerations of the items to be seen in a room, and more generally lots of superfluous details, none of interest for the story, that both induce an extremely slow (thus boring) rythm and a very fast reading, because of the weak density of information. The (rare) dialogues are poor and stereotyped, as well as the characters themselves: minimalist psychology, flat and impersonal narration. The scientific descriptions in the storyline, fortunately rare, are pathetically naive. Yet some elements of the narration, such as recurrent materialized fantasies, well described, and even the whole atmosphere of anguish of the unknown, some thought-provoking philosophical reflections (man is shown as alone facing himself in front of the wall of unreachable knowledge), allowed me to finish the book. With a feeling of frustration, because the enigmas remain unsolved -- but that end was logical -- and because the themes deserved a better treatment.

Rating:
Summary: Solaris and The Invincible - 2 great books by a great author
Review: Humans tend to classify everything they deal with - including the books they read. Clearly, every classification is imperfect. In certain cases this imperfection is especially damaging. Some books, labeled "Espionage", or "Children", or "Science Fiction" - are never read by many people just because they are labeled as such.

Stanislav Lem, clearly, is one of the most striking examples of this problem. Unfortunately, he became a victim of another damaging trend, which is endemic to the North American book market. Once you enter a Science Fiction domain here - the ratio of books to trash becomes much closer to zero, than in any other section.

How can one determine for himself the significance of a book in his life? I read Solaris for the first time when I was 15. There are many other books I read at the same age which I still consider to be very good - and read many-many times since then. Some of them, though I would - probably - never read again, because they ceased to bring anything new to me when I re-read them. I still do love them - but there is no mystery any more - no unanswered questions, no new landscapes around the corner.

There are other books, which you would read again and again - and every time you would find something new in them. "Solaris" is a book like this. Lem never was a SciFi writer - even in his earliest works - and "Solaris" is the most powerful proof of this fact. Space travel and scientific theories are here - but is this book about space travel? Or a scientific theory? What is this book about? I think it is about quite different things. It is conceived and written about the things which are most important for humans: love, shame, human dignity, and compassion.

Solaris is also a philosophical book: it offers only questions, no answers, but the questions asked in "Solaris" are formulated such, that a serious reader has no way to avoid trying to answer them. And the questions are - again - about the things which are of the greatest importance for the humanity: what is consciousness? are we able to overcome our xenophobia? how do we behave if we encounter something which is not hostile, but still - causes great pain to us?

The last two questions are offered in another great book of Lem: "The Invincible", which is - architecturally - much simpler, than Solaris, but - as it is frequently the case with shorter works of really great writers - "The Invincible" strikes the reader with this highly concentrated power, similar to a laser beam, equally disturbing thoughts and emotions - which is exactly what is expected from any work of art.

I only hope that over the years the world will reevaluate Lem's work and he will become as prominent a writer and philosopher as he deserves to be.

Rating:
Summary: The best book i have ever read
Review: Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" is a complex metaphor concerning the human knowledge, the existence of God, (but mainly,) it is a satyr on those "well-elaborated" theories that, in the end, no one understands exactly what it is about. Lem shows the reaction of human beings in the situation of confronting their own selves, their most deep desires and problem

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: This was the first book I read by Stanislaw Lem and, for me, it was one of those proverbial page-turners. _Solaris_ wraps its ideas and characters very closely. Consequently, despite the fact that the book is idea-driven, the pace doesn't slow. On this level, it is typical of many of Lem's books (confronting the fallacies of "scientific" theory), but the similarites end there. Understandably, many readers would like Lem to write more books like _Solaris_; its tone is often dark and introspective, which is certainly NOT typical of the author. In its own right, however, an outstanding book. Those so inclined may want to seek out Andrei Tarkovsky's effective film version from 1972

Rating:
Summary: Great!
Review: A great book of ideas. Lem's proposition here is that truth, although it may be knowable, is certainly not known by us. Much of the book is a satire of wrong-thinking scientific theories. The main story of the book deals with contact with an alien intelligence of unknown nature. The main thrust is that, while we can try to interpret its nature, the best we can hope for is for our interpretations to throw some light on ourselves. We are looking into an abyss, and the only thing we can possibly see is a mirror.

Rating:
Summary: Solaris is not a love story
Review: A characteristic view of Solaris is, as one reviewer wrote:

"It's an intriguing premise, but unfortunately Stanislaw Lem intellectualizes his story to the point that the majority of SOLARIS doesn't even read like fiction. For a good chunk of the novel, you feel like you're reading a philosophical tract, or at times a psychology text."

Good fiction should not necessarily require the divorce of the reader's intellect from his emotion; that is the task of pulp fiction. Unfortunately, many readers (Steven Soderbergh included) seem to view Solaris as a romantic story of thwarted love set against a sci-fi backdrop, polluted by inexplicably dense sections of text dealing with invented fields of science. This is clearly a fallacy; no romantic novel comes to the conclusion that "the age-old fath of lovers and poets in the power of love . . . is a lie, useless, and not even funny."

Solaris is, rather, a satiric novel attacking science and human reason. Those aforementioned dense passages that seem extraneous are, in fact, central to the novel's intent; they examine the failings of the scientific method when confronted with the utterly alien. The novel attempts to topple one of Western civilization's central conceits, the idea that rational thought can solve all of the universe's mysteries. Lem claims that the true goal of science is to find a "mirror" for humanity, to find in the unknown the ideal image that we have of ourselves.

The relationship between Kris and Rheya, and between Snow/Sartorius and their respective "visitors," serves as an allegory for this premise, in which a scientist's frustration with his inability to comprehend the Other, combined with the painful memories dredged up by the visitor's form, results in spite and a desire to destroy. Lem's psychological insight in this matter rivals that of Dostoevsky, but the novel seems "cold" because Lem lacks Dostoevsky's fervent Orthodox faith. Where Dostoevsky found resolution in the pure emotion of faith in God and love, Lem can only leave the reader with "the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past."