Review: Solaris, by Stanisław Lem, I’m still swimming through the depths of this psychological and Kafkaesque existential piece. This book is a journey into the alien, the unknown, and the unresolved, a what's considered hard science fiction, where the themes of science, history of science, and meta analysis of science, is explored. Solaris camouflaged itself as a classical science fiction, but what lays underneath is layers among layers of how we operate in our own minds.
in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
At the center is Kris Kelvin, our flawed and very human protagonist, whose arrival on the space station orbiting the sentient planet Solaris marks the beginning of his internal descent. What struck me immediately was how Lem frames Kelvin’s encounter with Solaris as a confrontation with his own unconscious. The alien substance on the planet (this mind), and this ocean has the eerie ability to dredge up illusions based on the crew’s buried thoughts and repressed emotions. For Kelvin, this manifests as Rheya, a haunting embodiment of past guilt and unresolved trauma. Rheya isn’t just a "visitor", but rather, she’s a walking symbol of what Kelvin cannot let go of, a fragment of his own psyche brought to life by Solaris.
It’s this tension between reality and illusion, rationality and emotion, that Lem uses to pull us deeper into the story. The planet Solaris itself becomes a metaphorical brain, reflecting both the potential and limits of human understanding. We can study it, hypothesize about it, but ultimately, Solaris remains impenetrable, like the vast unconscious regions of our own minds. This is where Lem’s narrative style shines, it’s not about answering questions but about living with the discomfort of “not knowing.
Solaris evokes a Kafkaesque disorientation. Just as Kafka’s characters often find themselves lost in bewildering, surreal worlds ( Amerika came to mind), the space station orbiting Solaris feels similarly like a labyrinth. When the crew’s confused, their inability to truly understand what they’re up against, mirrors Kafka’s vision of human beings trapped in an inexplicable, sometimes hostile universe. Lem’s world-building is concise, almost clinical, a haunting hospital blue hue from the fluorescent bulbs, where the oppressive atmosphere creeps in through the interactions between the characters and the alien presence that surrounds them.
The psychological layering of the narrative is so intricate that it’s impossible not to question Kelvin’s state of mind throughout the story. It’s an exploration in liminality, where Lem blurs the lines between wakefulness, subconsciousness, and dreaming, often making the reader wonder: is Kelvin truly experiencing these events, or are they fragments of a hallucinatory, out-of-body experience? In this way, Solaris feels like it’s tapping into those deep psychedelic mescaline induced states. The author guiding us through a layered exploration of consciousness that dissolves the boundaries of the self. The final passages, with Kelvin’s repeated awakenings, evoke the disorienting, cyclical nature of dreams, where reality slips through your fingers like sand.
Oh! This book reminds me of Peter Watts’ Blindsight. Both novels place their characters in existential confrontations with the alien, the truly unknowable. In Blindsight, Watts explores what happens when something hides in our blind spots, how we might miss the most important aspects of our reality because of our own cognitive limitations. Lem explores a similar theme with Solaris, asking: how do we even begin to understand something so far beyond our experience? And maybe more importantly, how do we confront the darker parts of ourselves that surface in the attempt?
Lem doesn’t give us easy answers, there are no revelations, no grand resolutions. Solaris, like our own unconscious, remains a mystery. What I appreciate most is the way Solaris forces us to sit with the uncomfortable truths about human nature, about the limits of reason, and the inescapable reach of our past.
A grand metaphor.
Recommendation: for those who loves sci fi, psychology, philosophy, psychoanalytic.
Reading level: It’s a book where reading it on different aspects of your life, would bring upon make revisions to your thoughts. (Freshmen high school and up)
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BERTON: For me, it matters very much indeed. I have said that I saw things which I shall never forget. If the Commission recognizes, even with certain reservations, that my testimony is credible, and that a study of the ocean must be undertaken—I mean a study orientated in the light of my statements—then I'll tell everything. But if the Commission considers that it is all delusions, then I refuse to say anything more.
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BERTON: Because the contents of my hallucinations belong to me and I don't have to give an account of them, whereas I am obliged to give an account of what I saw on Solaris.
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PRESIDENT:… after due consideration, the Commission, composed of three doctors, three biologists, a physicist, a mechanical engineer and the deputy head of the expedition, has reached the conclusion that Berton's report is symptomatic of hallucinations caused by atmospheric poisoning, consequent upon inflammation of the associative zone of the cerebral cortex, and that Berton's account bears no, or at any rate no appreciable, relation to reality.
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PRESIDENT: The answer is simple. "No appreciable relation to reality" means that phenomena actually observed may have formed the basis of your hallucinations. In the course of a nocturnal stroll, a perfectly sane man can imagine he sees a living creature in a bush stirred by the wind. Such illusions are all the more likely to affect an explorer lost on a strange planet and breathing a poisonous atmosphere. This verdict is in no way prejudicial to you, Berton. Will you now be good enough to let us know your decision?
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I should be grateful if you could send me the following information by return post: i) Fechner's biography, in particular details about his childhood. ii) Everything you know about his family, facts and dates—he probably lost his parents while still a child. iii) The topography of the place where he was brought up.
The Monsters
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human mind is only capable of absorbing a few things at a time. We see what is taking place in front of us in the here and now, and cannot envisage simultaneously a succession of processes, no matter how integrated and complementary. Our faculties of perception are consequently limited even as regards fairly simple phenomena. The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word. The symmetriad is a million—a billion, rather—raised to the power of N: it is incomprehensible. We pass through vast halls, each with a capacity of ten Kronecker units, and creep like so many ants clinging to the folds of breathing vaults and craning to watch the flight of soaring girders, opalescent in the glare of searchlights, and elastic domes which criss-cross and balance each other unerringly, the perfection of a moment, since everything here passes and fades, The essence of this architecture is movement synchronized towards a precise objective. We observe a fraction of the process, like hearing the vibration of a single string in an orchestra of supergiants. We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint. It has been described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it.
The Liquid Oxygen
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"But you don't envy me." "Rheya, I don't know what your fate will be. It cannot be predicted, any more than my own or any other member's of the Station's personnel. The experiment will go on, and anything can happen…" "Or nothing." "Or nothing. And I have to confess that nothing is what I would prefer. Not because I'm frightened—though fear is undeniably an element of this business—but because there can't be any final outcome. I'm quite sure of that." "Outcome? You mean the ocean?" "Yes, contact with the ocean. As I see it, the problem is basically very simple. Contact means the exchange of specific knowledge, ideas, or at least of findings, definite facts. But what if no exchange is possible? If an elephant is not a giant microbe, the ocean is not a giant brain. Obviously there can be various approaches, and the consequence of one of them is that you are here, now, with me. And I am trying my hardest to make you realize that I love you. Just your being here cancels out the twelve years of my life that went into the study of Solaris, and I want to keep you. "You may have been sent to torment me, or to make my life happier, or as an instrument ignorant of its function, used like a microscope with me on the slide. Possibly you are here as a token of friendship, or a subtle punishment, or even as a joke. It could be all of those at once, or—which is more probable—something else completely. If you say that our future depends on the ocean's intentions, I can't deny it. I can't tell the future any more than you can. I can't even swear that I shall always love you. After what has happened already, we can expect anything. Suppose tomorrow it turns me into a green jellyfish! It's out of our hands. But the decision we make today is in our hands. Let's decide to stay together. What do you say?" "Listen Kris, there's something else I must ask you… Am I … do I look very like her?" "You did at first. Now I don't know." "I don't understand." "Now all I see is you." "You're sure?" "Yes. If you really were her, I might not be able to love you." "Why?" "Because of what I did." "Did you treat her badly?" "Yes, when we…" "Don't say any more." "Why not?" "So that you won't forget that I am the one who is here not her."