Review: Solaris by Stanisław Lem

This is a fairly unusual sci-fi book. Right from the get-go, it manages to grab you, dropping you and the protagonist onto a research station on an alien world, far from earth, and completely covered with oceans. Immediately, strange things start happening on the research station, and you’re drawn into the story, which is mostly psychological in nature. The book mostly serves as a way to ask a number of interesting questions you don’t often see in sci-fi (warning: some spoilers ahead):

• What happens when we come across an alien that is unlike any living being on earth? In Star Trek, Star Wars, and most popul sci-fi, just about all aliens are humanoid. In part, that’s because most movies lack the budget/technology to create a convincing alien that is not at all humanoid; in part, that’s because most writers also lack the imagination. Solaris contains a wonderful idea: the alien is the entire planet, or perhaps all the oceans of that planet. Or at least we think it is. It’s so wildly different that we can’t even be sure!

• What happens if we can’t communicate with that alien? Again, in most popular sci-fi, the aliens might speak another language, but they steal speak–that is, with mouths, voices, and sound. In this book, we have no idea how, or even if, the aliens communicate.

• What if we can never understand the alien? Even if we could find a common way to exchange information (e.g. speech, math, etc), there is no reason to assume that the way the alien thinks would at all be comprehensible to us, or vice versa. In this book, countless scientists spend their entire lives trying to establish communication with the alien, all in vain. It seems that the alien begins to understand humans, able to extract thoughts from our heads, but it’s not clear if this is means something or if it’s even done intentionally.

• What if we come across an alien that is a “child”? That is, it could communicate if it were older, but when we come across it, it’s still too young, and much like an infant randomly grasping at things in its crib, the actions may be largely random. That would be a temporary inconvenience if the alien had a similar lifespan to our own–we’d just wait until it gets a bit older–but if the alien lives for thousands or millions of years, then what is actually a long childhood may be misunderstood by humans as something incomprehensible or lacking intelligence.

• What if the alien was like a god, but an unwilling one? I love the concept of a super-powerful being, with all the powers of a deity, but with no desire to wield them. Think of the kind of world that would result from such a situation.

These are amazing questions and wonderful to contemplate. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t dive very deep to answer them. Not that I’m expecting an answer, but I expect the book to at least try, whereas in Solaris, not a whole lot happens. It’s a short story, with relatively little change in the characters, and relatively insight into these deep ideas.

Still, the book is well worth reading, if for no other reason than to have a lovely illustration of the fact that if we do come across life forms elsewhere in the universe, there is no reason to assume that they would be anything like us, at all. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson pointed out, we share 99.9% of our DNA with chimps, and we can barely communicate with them, at all. All it takes is 0.1%, and it’s safe to say that aliens will be much more than 0.1% different than us.

Rating: 4 stars