A CLASSIC CALLED SOLARIS
Science fiction is not my shtick, yet this compelling read felt very different the second time around.
I’m trying to process all those things, however tiny, that I came away learning during the many weeks of life in a locked-down planet in the year 2020. On March 16th that year, right around the time India was curling into its own shelter-in-place, a writer-translator by name Arunava Sinha—look up my posts on Chowringhee and The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die—put out a post on social media wondering if likeminded friends might be interested in participating in an international book club on Google Meet. I signed up.
We ended up sampling some eighteen books in all and during that time, we also managed to read several books in translation. The morning we read parts of Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, it spawned an animated discussion about science fiction. Someone mentioned the name Stanislaw Lem. A couple of them gasped, I remember, as if the name sent electric shocks through their beings. I googled the name, jealous that someone had experienced reading and savoring something that I had not.
This is not to say I hadn’t read anything at all in that genre; as a teen I read H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and The Invisible Man and actually enjoyed them. But as luck and great misfortune would have it, I was just about then also discovering Mills & Boon and its many gifted authors. Janet Dailey’s love scenes were the most masterful of all and the enormous amount of friction in this category of literature may have derailed me from the path to great literature, including science fiction, once and for all.
Fast forward some four plus decades into my seventh decade of life on this planet, and I found myself ready to read Lem’s work titled Solaris. I finished the book in one sitting during the height of Covid. Solaris was published in 1961 and the translation that I read—not totally approved by the writer himself—who read in Russian, German, French and English—is a translation, by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, of the French translation of this Polish work.
One of his best-known works, Solaris follows a crew of scientists on a research station as they attempt to understand an extraterrestrial intelligence, which takes the form of a vast ocean on the eponymous alien planet. The protagonist is an intrepid psychologist by name Kris Kelvin who has been intrigued by Solaris for as long as he can remember.
On earth, there are any number of theories propounded by scientists and philosophers on how this “omniscient ocean” is able to manifest itself in unseeing ways, tripping all human endeavors to study its processes. Over a hundred years, scientists on earth have persevered to understand this form of intelligence. Many have died in their pursuit of knowledge, swallowed up by the unexpectedly gory and disembodied spirit of an ocean revved up by two suns. On his own visit to the planet, Kelvin begins to see how the mission of their team to understand or stymie this alien intelligence with extraordinary power may have fatal consequences for him and his colleagues.
Solaris has been adapted many times for film, radio, and theater. The skeptical Lem was known to have remarked that none of the works actually captured the book's monitions on the limitations of human rationality.
I’m not sure I grasped that on my first read in 2020. Throughout that first reading of Solaris, I was tense, and I would have found it impossible to see it as anything but a fantastical tale. My second read has felt altogether different. I’ve even been thinking of this vast alien creature as one invested with spiritual powers.
I’m now rereading the story in a different frame of mind, unafraid of what is about to happen to Kelvin. Almost two years later, I too am in a different place. I’m midway through weekly lessons on The Bhagavad Gita, one of the holy scriptures for Hinduism. The references to the ocean are many in the teachings of The Bhagavad Gita. In one of the chapters, we’re told that the ocean, the indescribable force that occupies so much of our world, is simply another manifestation of the supreme being himself. Viewed through that lens, the ocean in Solaris, too, seems invested with mystic energy and, if anything, I’m more and more in awe of it.
“For some time, there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the ‘thinking ocean’ of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of ‘cosmic yogi,’ a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.
While reading Solaris’ descriptions of extra terrestrial intelligence now, it’s impossible to not think of many verses of The Bhagavad Gita that involve deliberations on matter, on consciousness and the mind. Early on in the book, Lem actually asks several questions of us. On my first read, I’d glossed over his commentary on the phenomena manifest in the “sentient” ocean. On this second read, however, I paid attention.
“The problem, which the methodologists hastened to dub metaphysical, provoked all kinds of arguments and discussions. Was it possible for thought to exist without consciousness? Could one, in any case, apply the word thought to the processes observed in the ocean?”
Reading Solaris for a second time has only reinforced my awe at the immensity of my planet and our universe. I’m seeing a novel—immensely rich in suspense and plot, and packed with intellectual fodder for science nerds—that challenges me to ponder the mysteries, many of which we may never quite understand, of our own planet.
Readers of Solaris will be confronted by the following question all through this work which again took me back to the key teachings of The Bhagavad Gita: Can we understand the universe around us without first understanding what lies within? It’s impossible to not also be struck by the entitlement human beings feel towards their own planet—seemingly much less complicated than the planet called Solaris—in what is an unknowable, infinite universe.
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