Core: 9/9. This novel uses an exotic live ocean to expound the abstruse philosophical problems.

Was thinking without consciousness possible? Could the process of the ocean be regarded as thought? Could the ocean be regarded as a whole living thing? Could it be possible for us humankind to communicate with aliens?

I fell in love with the ocean till the end and also want to play with it like what Kelvin did because:

• It’s marvelous. It is an old astronomical single plasmic cell that could change the gravitational field of its planet for millions of years!
• It’s interesting. It constantly imitates and creates spectacular things. And it even creates apparitions from people’s minds!
• It’s kind. When people intentionally interact with it, it politely lets them go through it and never hurts people intentionally.

Character: 7/9. Gibanrian, Snaut, and Harey impressed me in different shades. Also, solarists here are entertaining. I would give a higher score if Lem could depict Sartorius and Gibanrian’s occurrences and characteristics better and choose a less tedious protagonist than Kelvin.

Kelvin, the narrator of this first-person work, was a bit illogical and boring. For example, when he heard his only known colleague and tutor here had committed suicide just on the same day before his landing, he took a shower and read a book first instead of examining Gibanrian’s body immediately.

Instead of listening to Gibanrian’s audio to check what his last word was, he directly went to the library and thus missed the quickest way to find the truth.

He believed that calculation would verify his mentality when he also believed that everything he asked for could be satisfied by his sick mind. As a result, he was occupied in a meaningless mentality test other than gathering clues and finding out the truth.

Also, he should have recorded all the evidence of their contact with their guests at first, like using recorders to store their conversations and reporting them back to the Earth immediately, no matter whether other scientists believe it or not, if Kelvin had some sense of responsibility or honour of scientists.

When Harey disappeared by her own free will, he vented his anger on the ocean rather than on himself, who didn’t know how to treat this Harey properly in these days, which reinforced Harey’s suicidal attempts.

To sum up, Kelvin is a passive protagonist whose role here seems merely to experience the innocent cruelty and atrocious wonder of the ocean, this is why he participates in all these events inertly.

Plot: 6/9. I would give a higher score if the writer used the third perspective to describe others’ trials provided by the formidable ocean and turned prolonged introductions to books into introductory conversations among scientists.

Newcomer

Kelvin landed his Prometheus, farewelled Moddard, and then flew to Solaris Station from the Earth, but he found no one came out to welcome his landing, and the station was in a mess where Snaut (Rat) was drinking alone soberly. He seemed to be unnoticed by Kelvin’s arrival, although he had informed the Solaris station of this event months ago, and Moddard had telegraphed it again today. Snaut told him Gibanrian had died at today’s dawn in an accident, and Sartorius was occupied himself in the lab upstairs. Snaut, however, rejected giving more information but strongly suggested Kelvin should take a shower first and come back in an hour. He implied to Kelvin about the possibility of seeing real ghosts and asked him to do nothing about them except keep calm. Kelvin found dried blood on the knuckles of Snaut’s both hands.

Solaricists

Kelvin constantly felt he was being watched, but he couldn’t find the source. Kelvin picked a room without a nameplate on its door, tidied up the room, and took a bath. Then he read Hughes and Eugel’s Old History of Solaris:

About a hundred years before Kelvin was born, Solaris had been discovered.

About sixty years before Kelvin was born, Solaris had been untouched because the Gamov-Shapley hypothesis had assumed it had been impossible for life to bear the extreme conditions and arise on the planets around double stars.

About forty years before Kelvin was born, the true orbit observed hadn’t tallied with the simulated orbit; therefore, it had gained special attention.

About 36 years before Kelvin was born, the Ottenskjold expedition had constituted a makeshift reconnaissance without making a landing. It had investigated the surface of the planet, which had been almost covered by sea, and no life forms had been found anywhere on Solaris.

About 26 years before Kelvin was born, observatories had been curious about the cause of the gravitationally unstable orbit and even had blamed it on the man-made errors.

About 24 years before Kelvin was born, Luna 247, an unmanned Statelloid, had been put in place, and it had confirmed Ottenskjold’s observations, including the active nature of the ocean’s movements.

About 22 years before Kelvin was born, Shannahan had spent 18 months investigating the Solaris. The ocean had been designated an organic formation, a single astronomical fluid cell covering the surface of the planet, and a “plasmic machine.”.

About 20 years before Kelvin was born, Gamov-Shapley had been questioned for the first time, and nearly everyone had argued about whether the ocean could be recognized as a kind of life, what would be its origin, and how could it change the gravitational fields.

About 15 years before Kelvin was born, the ocean had been found capable of directly modelling space-time specifications and leading to variations in the measurement of time at one and the same meridian on Solaris, which had brought one of the most tempestuous storms of the century in the scientific world.

About 10 years after Kelvin was born, he learned at school that Solaris was widely regarded as a planet endowed with life but only a single inhabitant, the classification of which was Polytheria Type, Syncytialia Order, and Metamorpha Class. Scientists made lots of experiments aimed at making contact with the ocean, but people could never build any efficient communication with the ocean. Some assumed the ocean’s wisdom was too deep for us to comprehend because scientists could interpret its signals into abstruse theories, and others thought it was just sterile fairy tales. Some thought it the oceanic yogi, and others thought it the oceanic idiot.

In the first two years of the exploratory research, the ocean copied components of some of the devices lowered into it. However, after that it ignored repeated attempts and seemed disinterested in responding with any stimuli from humans. So scientists also lost their interest and planned to retreat honourably from the Solaris affair.

Kelvin felt someone observed him again, but he found no one but the dark sea. He drew the drapes and felt it strange to find no automats in the cabins and corridors.

He sneaked into Gibanrian’s room, where the evidence of intense fights exists. He noticed his arm was casting more than one shadow now, and it turned out to be the consequence of the sunrise. The sunlight was so strong that he had to pull the curtain and wear glasses. He was shocked by the fact that Gibanrian and Sartorius had conducted extremely hard X-radiation on the plasma, which was banned by a UN convention because of its lethal effect.

Kelvin felt someone come to the door outside, and therefore he intentionally held on to the handle at the same time to block the other invader from finding out his invasion.

Guests

Kelvin took away Gibanrian’s notes and found a letter on the floor addressed to him, which notes as follows:

Yearbook of Solaristics Volume I, Appendix, also: Minority report by Messenger re: F. Ravintzer’s Minor Apocrypha.

Kelvin also slipped the recorder and the tape into his pocket before he left Gibanrian’s room.

He then found a huge, alien, Black woman in the corridor passing by him and going straight into Gibanrian’s cabin. He was so astounded to digest the fact that he just stood there for a long time before heading to the radio station, eating with Snaut, attempting to dig something useful from Snaut, who also had the same intention towards him and recognized immediately that Kelvin had been to Gibanrian’s room and didn’t let Snaut in.

Snaut told Kelvin that Gibanrian had injected himself with a lethal dose of Pernostal while hiding in a closet, which Kelvin thought as an action out of severe psychosis out of seeing something horrible instead of a nervous breakdown and depression. Snaut told Kelvin that Sartorius locked himself in the room. Snaut confirmed to Kelvin that hallucinations could be real, touched, and hurt. Snout also claimed that he didn’t know anything about them. More precisely, he couldn’t express them properly to Kelvin. Kelvin got gas pistol from his locker before leaving the room.

Sartorius

Kelvin found in the register of the library that two books Gibanrian prompted were already borrowed out by Gibanrian, so Kelvin had to come back to Gibanrian’s room for them. Kelvin only found the yearbook, which told Kelvin two accidents had occurred on Shannahan’s expedition:

• Two scientists Carucci and Fechner conducted an exploratory flight over the ocean in a boat instead of the previous flying crafts. Fechner disappeared, and Carucci left unconscious with his apparatus, the exhaust valve of which had been jammed. But no corpse could be found by the expedition.

• Berton flighted back successfully but suffered a huge mental breakdown. Doctors suspected he was poisoned by the toxic gases of the atmosphere and therefore snubbed his report, which he claimed was a matter of the utmost importance.

Kelvin knocked on the door of the laboratory of Sartorius, who at first was reluctant to answer the call until Kelvin was annoyed enough to threaten that he would break into the door. Sartorius came out of the laboratory and showed his resistance to Kelvin’s questions. Suddenly he reinforced the door behind his back to stop the person inside the laboratory from coming out and begged Kelvin to leave as quickly as possible before he returned back to let down the ruckus. Kelvin heard the existence of a kid, and Snaut confirmed that’s Sartorius’ guest. He told Kelvin that he would understand all the secrets when Kelvin had his own guest.

Kelvin came to the depository to check Gibanrian. However, Kelvin found the body of the Black woman and felt she was still alive! At this point he was sure that he had lost his mind, so he devised a critical experiment to confirm his mentality: He requested the meridians of the galactic canopy from the Statelloid and calculated the number by Station’s huge computer at the same time. The first four digits were right, and the fifth digit was discrepant as being caused by the unpredictable influence of the sea, which enabled him to confirm his mentality. He also found from the drawer that someone had conducted a similar experiment.

(I don’t think the experiment was enough to confirm Kelvin’s mentality because he also said his sick mind could produce any illusion he required of. Why did Kelvin not take the expected answer provided by the computer and Statelloid into account? He said it was impossible for his sick brain to do huge calculations, but it’s possible for his sick brain to provide the illusion of completing the huge calculation and getting the expected result. In my opinion, it’s impossible to check his mentality by his own hand, because if he was indeed mad, then nothing in his world could be used to trust his mentality. Instead, one in that situation should first confirm one’s mental functions, including thinking properly and critically as one used to be, keep calm, and get out of the malignant environment as soon as possible. Plus, if one is able to achieve the same mental functions as before, then it doesn’t matter if one is mad or not from my perspective.)

Harry

Kelvin went to bed after calculation, then he woke up and saw Harry and thought he was still in the dream until he stubbed his toe hard accidentally on the floor.

Harey had the red pinprick caused by her suicide, and the skin of her sole was soft like the body of a Black woman in the depository. Harey told him that she didn’t have any memory except of Kelvin, including why she came here, and she had to always see Kelvin, or otherwise she became desperate to find him no matter how.

Kelvin tried to tie her up, but she could easily get out of his grip with a more powerful force. Kelvin gave her sleeping tablets, and she drank it. Kelvin carried her across to the bunk, but she took hold of Kelvin and burst out in a strident laugh. She told Kelvin someone who she should not have known. Kelvin intended to strangle her, but he let go of her for he suddenly remembered Snaut’s bloodied hands.

He led her to the Station and coaxed her into a cargo rocket that could not be opened from inside. At first he only required a few hours of freedom, and there existed plenty of air and food in the rocket. But when he found the whole rocket was juddering from a series of blows more powerful than a steel automaton, and she rendered an unimaginable vibration affecting the whole workplace while crying his name, utterly unlike any human voice, in a repeated howl, he launched the rocket to get rid of this monster helter-skelter.

The Minor Apocrypha

Snaut appeared in his room and praised him that he got rid of his guest efficiently without resorting to much violence like them. (It probably accounted for Gibanrian’s messy room.) Snaut said that Gibanrian had been the first one it had happened to, and others thought he had gone mad. However he had proved his sanity by calculation and locked himself in the room experimenting. After the other scientists had also had their guests, they had decided to force their way into his cabin, only to have found Gibanrian’s dead body.

Kelvin told Snaut his story of Harey: They had had a falling out, so Kelvin had packed his things and left her, ignoring her threat of suicide. She then had committed suicide. Snaut thought his experience was not the worst thing in all this. He hinted at his experience that he had restrained himself from killing someone all the time, but suddenly this person came back and entangled him indestructibly and persistently. (It sounds like he entangled himself in a nightmare who maybe abused him or bullied him for a long time.)

“What happened may have been terrible, but the most terrible thing is what … didn’t happen. Ever.”

Snaut was shameful about his behaviour because their first contact with Solaris only showed their own buffoonery and ugliness.

The guests came about eight or nine days after their X-ray experiment, so Snaut thought the ocean was responding to the radiation with another kind of radiation by reading their cerebrosides that constituted the substrate of the memory process and testing them. The ocean’s powerful enough to create their doppelgangers but it’s merciful not to do so. Instead, it just created a creature from their memory that could regenerate quickly.

Snaut thought even if they told the truth, people on Earth would send them to the sanatorium, and this place would not be closed. So the only way now seemed to stay here. Snaut hinted that Kelvin didn’t have a real taste of it, or Kelvin wouldn’t keep insisting on running away from Solaris. He ended this dialogue with:

“We’re unlikely to learn anything about it (Solaris), but maybe about ourselves…”

Snaut gave Kelvin the Apocrypha, and Kelvin read it. Apocrypha was collected by Otto Ravintzer and treated as pseudo-science. It contained Berton’s report. He had been sent to search for Fechner’s body, only to find bizarre models by the fogged ocean: a life-sized garden, a wall with windows, a giant baby making disgusting gestures and facial expressions, and additionally a nasty scene that he intended to keep it as a secret unless the committee trusted his mentality. But the committee had thought he had had a hallucination. So Berton had only told Archibald Messenger, the only member who had believed in him, about the whole thing. Dr. Messenger had presumed the ocean had dug Fechner’s mind and had thus created all these scenarios from his most enduring memories.

Kelvin felt sleepy, and Harey came back.

Deliberations

The same two dresses left by Harey horrified Kelvin to the extent that he forgot previous lessons, came to the corridor, and held the handle. Undoubtedly the door was broken in two by a clingy and flustered Harey. Kelvin found Harry had forgotten anything about her moments of superpower and implications.

Kelvin examined Harey’s blood smear with the neutrino microscope only to find silver emptiness at the level of atoms. When he placed a drop of concentrated acid on her blood, it decomposed as expected, but it quickly reformed. Kelvin told Snaut and Sartorius that their guests were probably made of subatomic matters like neutrinos, which was approved by Sartorius.

They surmised ocean performed a coarse experiment without reflex loops. But Sartorius thought it was an unintentional behaviour beyond the boundaries of its comprehension.

Kelvin invited Snaut to talk in his cabin. Snaut meant he would try his best.

Monsters

Harey felt something was wrong, and Kelvin tried his best to reassure her. Kelvin received a letter from Snout that told Kelvin that Sartorius was determined to destabilize the neutrino system, and he required Kelvin to collect some plasma as raw material. But instead of fulfilling it immediately, he came to the library because he fell in love with this Harry and therefore wanted to impede the development of the neutrino annihilator. So he took out Giese’s monograph on Solaris’ spectacular phenomena, including extensors, mimoids, symmetriads, and asymmetriads. Giese, one of those scientists whose outer calm concealed an unflagging passion that consumed his whole life, sacrificed with 105 other people in an expedition of observing a symmetriad that turned out to be an asymmetriad unexpectedly.

Kelvin used a plausible excuse that the energy radiation coming along with a disintegrating neutrino system is lethal to human beings so as to impede Sartorius from developing the annihilator. As a result, he agreed to send the encephalogram of his waking thoughts to Solaris, which was proposed by Sartorius but ridiculed by both Snaut and Kelvin.

Liquid Oxygen

Kelvin had a nightmare where Gibanrian warned him that Sartorius had convinced Snaut that Kelvin hoodwinked Snaut and therefore they were actually building a field annihilator. Kelvin heard Gibanrian say that all things that Solaris did were to apply a kind of selective amplifier to their thoughts, and seeking its motivation is anthropomorphism. This thus rendered them in a dilemma: if they wanted to do more research, they had to destroy these formations, which looked like murder. Kelvin thought it was just a dream, but it turned out Harey found Gibanrian’s tape recorder and realized what she actually was, how burdensome she was to Kelvin. So she killed herself with liquid oxygen, but she failed in light of her excellent ability of regeneration.

Harey made a scene to express her feelings. Kelvin confessed his love to this Harey and claimed she had already taken the place of original Harey and wanted them together without much thoughts.

A Conversation

Kelvin told Snaut that Harey knew about herself and expressed his wish to take her far away from this place. Snaut didn’t reject his whims but told him what he loved was just a memory. He questioned him why not also take the first Kelvin together. What would Kelvin do if he found Harey could not live without Solaris’ energy field? Would he come back and get another copy? It drove Kelvin not only confusing but also embarrassing especially when he found their conversations would be possibly heard by Sartorius.

Thinkers

Kelvin thought Sartorius’ experiment was just like those solarists who fool themselves. What Sartorius said to call for his sense of mission and awe in the magnificence of scientific research of humankind in turn intensified his aversion deeply. But still he thought his father and Giese, the father of solaristics and solaricists, more than Harey during the experiment.

He swung by the library with Harey to read the first volume of Giese. But he unexpectedly found Gravinsky’s compendium on Solaris studies:

• People’s attitude towards Solaris oscillated constantly between optimism and pessimism and between romanticism and materialism since they found it.

• Plasma could not be alive outside Solaris no matter how scientists tried to preserve it.

He then read a small pamphlet Almanac of Solaristics by Grattenstrom who sought to demonstrate as follows:

• Even the most seemingly abstract sciences have some connection with a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us.

• Human beings cannot now, nor in the future could there ever be talk of contact between human beings and any non-humanoid civilization for the innate limitation on the difference of physiology and psychology.

But Kelvin’s experience let him understand Solaris could live, think, act, or even contact human beings. Moreover, it owed such advanced technology and such a disparate thinking pattern that it would be likely to present a perpetual challenge to humankind.

Muntius, in his Introduction to Solaristics, compared Solaristics to the religion of Contact in the space age and ridiculed that there exists a faith wrapped in the cloak of science, a liturgy in methodological formulas of exploration, a revelation of the meaning of humankind that they were waiting for, a hope of redemption in the waning Solaristics, and a heaven among solaricists’ mouths.

When Kelvin read Muntius’ work, he found Gibanrian’s Why I Am a Solaricist. Gibanrian had sent an offer to Kelvin because Kelvin once had juxtaposed cortical processes of human emotions with discharged current in the ocean.

Dreams

The bundle of X-rays modulated by Kelvin’s encephalogram pounded the ocean repeatedly, and therefore Kelvin continued having bad dreams, but he didn’t tell anyone. Kelvin couldn’t find Sartorius and Snout for a long time after they had stopped this futile experiment.

One midnight a high-pitched, piercing, and prolonged inhuman wail woke him up halfway. Two days later, Snaut wore a real terrestrial suit and got drunk with the wine. He found Kelvin stopping shaving his beard, and Gibanrian also did this before his suicide. therefore Snaut compared Sartorius to Faust, the last Knight of the Holy Contact, who had ignored the authority to give out lethal rays but chickened out because of the past memory Solaris brought to him. Snaut also compared Harey to Aphrodite and accused scientists of being criminals because they induced people willingly to sacrifice themselves for science. These blabbers distanced Kelvin from Harey.

Success

Kelvin constantly talked about his plan with Harey when they went back to Earth. But neither of them truly believed in these dreams. Snaut gave Harey sleeping pills to drug Kelvin and helped her to commit suicide with the annihilator created by Sartorius.

Hysterical Kelvin was appeased by Snaut, and Snaut told him Solaris did all this drama without intention because it was able to read the language of nucleic acids on megamolecular asynchronous crystals and copy them without knowing their meaning. Snaut also persuaded Kelvin to write a report together due to Solaris’ demonstrated rational activity, the capacity for organic synthesis of the highest order, the comprehension of the human body and memory, etc.

The Old Mimoid

They wrote the reports for five days and waited several months for Earth’s reply. Kelvin started to believe in a defective God who always desires more than he’s able to have and doesn’t always realize this to begin with, an evolving God who develops through time and grows, mounting higher levels of power towards the awareness of that power’s impotence. Snaut guessed it might be human beings or even Solaris. Kelvin was inclined to believe in a God whose suffering wasn’t redemption, who didn’t save anyone or serve any purpose, who just was. Snaut concluded, “A mimoid.” (He might hint that Solaris might be a mimoid of the God Kelvin believed in.)

Kelvin drove a helicopter to set foot on a mimoid and play with waves for the first time. To his amazement and engrossment, he forgave Solaris for everything. He gradually recovered from then on and abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over on Solaris.

World and Others: 9/9.

I was amazed at Lem’s fabulous depiction of the environment and scenes, including as follows:

• the space travel and landing on the Solaris in Chapter Newcomer
• inner decorations of rooms and sunset and sunrise in Chapter Solaricists
• The long-winded discussion and debate on Solaris in chapter Solaricists and Minor Apocrypha was entertaining and made me feel real, because the history of science itself, in fact, is more like a mayhem of science fiction than science fiction itself. It certainly demonstrates what the essence of science is: the constant loop of exploration, presumption, experiment, and correction or confirmation. “The only thing we know is that we don’t know.”
• The sunset of the blue star, the freezing depositories in Chapter Sartorius
• Kelvin hurried to send Harey’s rocket into space in case she was really capable of breaking out of it in Chapter Harey.
• Berton’s report on the ocean in Chapter The Minor Apocrypha
• Giese’s record on Solaris’ formations in Chapter Monsters
• Spectacular formations in Chapter Dreams

All in all, Lem’s writing style is so concrete and detailed that his world seems always real enough for readers to imagine it.

Overall: 8/9. The writer is definitely a master of fiction. I’m desperate to read more of his works.