Solaris - spoiler review

Solaris is a sci-fi novel about what happens when humans meet an alien. Cliche, right? It’s been done a million times, right? Wrong. It hasn’t been done quite how Stanislaw Lem does it in Solaris. This isn’t a story about humans meeting aliens that are more primitive than they are. Neither is it a story about humans meeting an advanced and warring species bent on destroying Earth. This is a story about what happens when humans meet something they can’t at all explain or understand—but this thing understands humans, or at least seems to. The alien on the planet Solaris is a giant, goopy, dark-colored ocean the covers the planet. Yes, an ocean. The ocean replicates the objects that researches lower into it. It create strange structures that grow and collapse and seem to look like man-made cities but can’t possibly because how could the planet know what Earth’s cities look like? And for the scientists aboard the research station hovering above Solaris’s ocean, it creates replicas of things that it finds in the deepest, darkest, most-hidden parts of their minds.

In the book it’s explained that these repressed memories are the most complete and clear because of where they’re stored and how rarely their corrupted by recollection. Solaris isn’t trying to horrify the scientists by reincarnating the people they hurt the most or the people who hurt them the most or the things that represent their greatest fears or regrets. Solaris is simply trying to communicate, and in doing so it acts like a mirror. It reflects back the worst of a person, for good or ill. Books are mirrors too. We get to see different sides of things, stories or other people. We get to see other times or other parts of ourselves, the parts we’re scared to look at. That’s what I found most interesting about Solaris, how it showed what happens to people when they face the worst of themselves. The main character drove his wife to suicide, and when Solaris replicated her for him, he inadvertently drove her to destroy herself again. That’s dark. And fascinating. But Solaris didn’t know what it was doing. It simply took out of Kelvin his most secret thoughts and memories, the things that most scarred him, and used those brain waves to communicate with him.


This isn’t a happy book, nor is it a perfect one. The psychological aspect of the book was the most interesting, but by the end I was getting tired of the frequent info-dumps about the scientific literature on Solaris. It just didn’t feel relevant to the story. That said, the book was short enough that I could forgive the info-dumps and enjoy the rest of it, especially the first half.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Left Hand of Darkness - spoiler review

I didn’t like The Left Hand of Darkness. I wish I did. I badly wanted to. But when I compare the fascinating sci-fi concepts and the cool setting (pun intended) to the plot, the plot doesn’t live up to the potential. I expected Le Guin to blow me away with a riveting story, but instead I got political intrigue and a dull and lengthy escape across a glacier. Here’s the premise: In the far future there is a collection of planets that form an alliance called The Hundred Worlds. A man names Genly travels from one of these worlds to a cold, ice-covered planet named Winter that isn’t part of the alliance. His job is to convince the inhabitants of Winter to join The Hundred Worlds, but the inhabitants are very skeptical and old fashioned. They’ve never had a visitor come from space before, and they don’t even really believe that Genly came from space at all… except that Genly, unlike everyone else on Winter, is male, a person who always displays the physical characteristics of a man. This blo
Read more

Ender's Game - spoiler-free review

Ender’s Game is so many people’s absolute favorite book, and for good reason. It’s well-written, well-paced and has something for every age of reader. As a kind you might gravitate to the action and the cool zero-gravity games. As a teen you might relate more to Ender’s struggles with his family and with growing up and having new responsibilities thrust on him. And as an adult you’re probably going to find the psychological and ethical angles of the book most fascinating. This is why Ender’s Game is one of the very few books the I’ve reread. Ender’s Game follows Ender, a little boy from Earth who gets sent to a Battle School, a school in space where kids barely study regular subjects and instead devote their time to a sport that’s played in a giant, zero-gravity room. Two armies of children armed with laser guns battle each other for points, prestige and the skills necessary to move on to Command School where they’re trained to command fleets of space ships, all in preparation for the
Read more

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds - spoiler-free review

If you want a one-line review, here it is: House of Suns is like We Are Legion (We Are Bob) ... just way more exciting. House of Suns is technically a hard sci-fi space opera. Technically. But that generic description doesn’t do this galactic murder mystery justice. Let’s start with the premise. Six million years before the story’s main plot, Abigail Gentian created 1000 clones (aka, “shatterlings”) of herself and sent them out across the galaxy. Every once in a while (say, a couple hundred thousand years) the shatterlings reunite and exchange memories from their adventures in space. But at the latest reunion, the Gentian Line is ambushed. Most of the shatterlings are killed. And that’s where House of Suns begins. The book follows two plot lines, one about the shatterlings and how they search out answers and revenge and one about Abigail Gentian and her story up until she cloned herself. Alastair Reynolds did an awesome job balancing action, interesting characters and a mysterious plo
Read more