How one science Fiction author turned Horror's most worn out trope on its head

As Dr. Kris Kelvin heads towards the planet Solaris, a sense of unease settles upon him. The arrival of a newcomer from Earth to a remote space station on a distant planet typically sparks great interest. However, this time, Kelvin realizes that none of the researchers living on Solaris will welcome his arrival. Within a matter of hours, It becomes clear to him why: the station's inhabitants are preoccupied with enigmatic guests—mysterious entities created by the vast ocean that dominates the alien world.

"Solaris," the acclaimed science fiction novel by Polish author Stanisław Lem (I think it's a masterpiece), is at its center a book about the limitations of human knowledge when confronted with the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The narrative revolves around Kelvin's realization of the insurmountable barriers that hinder human comprehension in the face of the truly alien. Only when Kelvin is visited by a haunting manifestation of his deceased wife, conjured from his own memories by the mysterious ocean of Solaris, does he begin to grasp the impossible situation faced by the human inhabitants of Solaris, himself and the rest of the space station's crew.

All attempts to decipher the ocean's actions, let alone its motivations, prove futile. That impenetrable wall has a name: the science of Solaristics. Kelvin, perusing the volumes that line the station's shelves, reveals to us the failure of human science to penetrate the ocean's mysteries since the discovery of Solaris. Is that ocean (which isn't really an ocean, as it is not made of water) a sentient being? Does it acknowledge humanity's presence on its planet? Is it attempting to establish communication with the researchers? Such questions remain unanswered throughout the novel.

Dr. Snout is one of the two remaining researchers at the station alongside Kelvin (the third, Kelvin's former mentor, committed suicide hours before Kelvin's arrival), and he becomes the sole confidant with whom Kelvin shares a common understanding. Its Snout who articulates the core dilemma: by reaching the stars, humanity faced its biggest failure, which was a failure of the imagination. Our inherent incapacity to comprehend the wholly other. Our species navigates the universe armed only with the knowledge it possesses, limited by the boundaries of its own understanding:

But despite the mystery, the confusion, the helplessness, and all that derives from what Kelvin at the closing of the novel calls "The time of the cruel wonders" – at least one experiment manages to provide Kelvin with some important clarity about his situation. Whatever happens on the station, he knows that he is not hallucinating it all, that everything he sees and experiences is really happening to him. He achieves this understanding through an experiment he performs. Kelvin calculates the orbit of one of the satellites around Solaris and compares his calculations to the actual output of the station's computer. If there is a deviation between his calculation and that emitted by the computer – which will undoubtedly originate from the influence of the two suns of Solaris on the satellite's movement - this means that the computer that calculated the deviation is real, as is the room in which the computer is located, as is the station, the ocean, and the planet Solaris. In other words, Calvin is not imagining anything. And not only that, a few seconds after the experiment ends, Kelvin discovers a piece of paper that indicates that a similar experiment was already carried out by one of the other researchers on the station.

Lem's choice to include this experiment in the novel is not an obvious choice. And that's what makes it so interesting and unconventional. The genres of fantasy, horror and the supernatural (and not only them) are filled to the brim with stories that suspend the final answer and leave it up to us, the readers, to decide whether a character - usually the narrator - has hallucinated everything, whether he or she have gone mad, whether someone makes them think they're experiencing something that does not exist or, in fact, everything is real and the supernatural elements did enter into reality. Lovecraft made a career of it. And Edgar Allan Poe before him. But what used to be a writing technique that pulled the rug of the real (so to speak) from under the reader's feet has become over the years and with endless usage nothing more than a hollow trick that is perpetuated time and time again. Consider a modern example: by the end of the movie Joker with Joaquin Phoenix we the viewers are left with the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Arthur (who we saw complete his transformation into the Joker only a scene or two ago) imagined all of it. Maybe everything we saw (or the important parts, I guess) is a hallucination. The first time I watched the movie and got to that final scene, It wasn't my perception of reality that was shaken, but my caring for Arthur. I remember asking myself, why did I "bother" to identify with this character for two hours if it was all in his head?

But not so in Solaris. It's as if through this little experiment Kelvin conducts, Lem the author appears behind us, telling us in simple words: even if the literary world I've created sounds insane and the predicament the characters find themselves in is impossible to navigate, all of it is real. And therefore - as Kelvin realizes by the end of the experiment - also absolutely discouraging. It is better to take solace in the fact that you've lost your mind than to go out and face the truly other.

"I was not mad. The last ray of hope has faded. I turned off the transmitter, finish what was left of the coffee flask and went to bed", Dr. Kris Kelvin tells us at the end of the chapter. In the next one he will finally meet Harey, his dead wife, or in fact - a memory of her taken directly from his sleeping mind. Now that we know and understand beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything is real, we can delve into the real madness.

• The translation used in the essay is by the prolific Polish language literary translator Bill Johnston from 2011. This is not only a great translation but also the first direct Polish-to-English translation of Solaris. It’s avaliable only in audio or ebook form but I won’t be the first to say that you should still listen/ read it and not the other one from 1971 which is made from the french and contains many errors and omissions.

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