December book study: Solaris

I hope not to offend, but half way through and this is a snooze. I'm not skipping the history lesson, assuming there is a reason he included it. The 60's were a time when big ideas trumped big storytelling - shame, because it's a cool idea.

After not finding a copy in my city, I gave in and ordered it off Amazon. I may be a little late to the discussion, but I hope to join in later in the month! Maybe in the meantime I'll try watching the movie again.

All but finished now. Lem had a great idea, a brilliant idea, that's why it's still with us, but it's not fantastic storytelling. It appears to me that the criteria for getting a book deal back in the day was a good idea.

Solaris must have had something other than just "a great idea" as it has been filmed twice. There's also a 1968 adaptation for Soviet TV which I haven't seen.

As for the idea, I agree with you - the descriptions of the nature of the unknowable planet with its one vast oceanic lifeform certainly deliver a proper SFnal sensawunda kick. I'm in no position to comment on the original as my Polish is strictly tourist standard at best, but the translation is more than a little wooden in places. I guess Polish-to-English translators weren't thick on the ground in 1970. Lem was certainly not happy (he could read English fluently) but the rights never reverted to him as the novel has never been out of print in Poland, and the publishers have not authorised a new translation. And Lem is no longer with us now. The novel did feel a little dated in places, but then it was first published in 1961 - and ideas of storytelling have changed since then, including open-ended emotion/idea based resolutions instead of plot-based resolutions.

On the whole, I did like this novel. It is introspective, for sure, but it's of a strain of philosophical SF which I'm not sure is in favour nowadays. (Publishers, major UK ones at least, tend to go for space opera or very hard and techy stuff.) It's also from a time when SF novels were much shorter then than they are now - Solaris runs just 65,000 words, as per Amazon.com's text stats. I don't have the background knowledge as to how much Lem was part of a genre in Poland - but I think I'm right in saying that he was published in the UK as general fiction, albeit by a publisher (Faber & Faber) who published a lot of SF in the 60s and 70s, and SF readers were certainly aware of it, especially in the wake of the 1972 film version, which was often regarded as the Russian answer to 2001.

I'll say more when I've watched both film versions. I watched the 2002 Steven Soderbergh/George Clooney version on Sunday on DVD (first viewing since I saw it in the cinema). I'll try to watch the Tarkovsky 1972 film before Christmas, though it will need scheduling as it's two and three quarter hours long. Both films deviate from the novel in significant ways.

I'm a big fan of Tarkovsky .It was only after watching his version of Solaris I read the book.The story is about the difficulty and failure of human communication .To me Lem was able to view the human condition in a interesting and detached way.It was his ideas that became the corner stone to a number of Tarkovskys films .Unfortunately, I found the book disappointingly boring

I got my copy in the mail yesterday and I'm 3/4 through. It's weird because I don't usually like hard sci-fi, but I like this. Admittedly I have started skimming through the lengthy back stories (i.e. anytime the MC starts reading yet another account of all the weird shit the ocean can do) but there are some things that Lem does that keeps me interested. He's pretty good with ending chapters on a cliffhanger (especially early on in the book), which is often enough to make me turn the page and slog through even more scientific jargon just to get some answers.

Yep, I finished the book, dull as slate. Still quite an interesting idea, but the writing, or perhaps the translation, was not at all interesting.

Finished it yesterday. I'm almost tempted to go through and try to figure out how much of the book is actual event and how much of it is stuff from books that the MC reads. Not that I have anything against epistolary novels, I love them, but that's not what's going on here. Here a whole chapter will be taken up by the MC summarizing twenty years of theory, throwing in names left and right of people who have very little bearing on the actual plot. I think Lem missed a chance here, as if he had actually included exerts from the books the MC reads instead of just long, boring summaries he could have done some really neat world building and added different voices to the novel. For example, I really liked the segment that was a transcript between a guy who had been on Solaris decades earlier and some scientists. If there had been more parts like that, sections that suggested a story within a story, sections where the writer played around with the format, it could have been a more interesting read.

A word on the two film versions - one directed by Andrei Tarkovsky in the USSR in 1972 and the other by Steven Soderbergh in the USA in 2002. For convenience I'll refer to them by their director's surnames. Spoilers follow.

Both films expand on the novel's theme of how much we are defined by our memories and to what extent we live in them, and both elaborate on the ending which feature Kelvin living on in a Solaris-made "reality". In the Soderbergh, Kelvin realises this when he cuts his finger (in a reprise of a scene from the beginning of the film) and it heals up instantly.

Both deviate from the novel by having opening sequences set on Earth before Kelvin goes to Solaris. In the Tarkovsky, this prologue goes on for half an hour, and spends much time on Kelvin's relationship with his father. This pays off at the end of the film. Another difference is that Kelvin's dead wife is called Hari rather than Rheya as she is in the novel and in the Soderbergh film.

Soderbergh has elsewhere shown a fascination with antichronological time sequences (see Underneath, The Limey and to a lesser extent Out of Sight) and he does so here, with several flashbacks to Kelvin and Rhea's love story, sometimes with visuals and soundtracks in different timelines.

Tarkovsky's film was his third feature. At this time he was developing his own style and preoccupations by working in particular genres - the war film (Ivan's Childhood), the medieval epic (Andrei Rublev) and this SF film. With his next film Mirror, he moved into more personal and philosophical areas, sometimes obscure, though in Stalker (1980) he made another SF film, based on the Strugatsky Brothers' novel Roadside Picnic. Solaris was seen at the time as the Russian answer to the then-recent 2001. It is undeniably slow-paced (a road-trip sequence early on is a notorious sticking point for some viewers) but it's certainly worth staying with.

Soderbergh's film had mixed reviews at time. I did like it then and found on rewatching it that it stood up well. It underperformed at the box office, as despite a major star (George Clooney) in the lead role, it's a SF film which relies more on ideas than special effects and is ultimately an arthouse film with a $50 million price tag.

Just an addendum - the Lem estate have announced that a new English translation of Solaris is due this year, this time directly from the Polish original. However, it will only be available as an e-book or an audiobook (the latter at least already available).

Further to my post about the film versions, it's worth mentioning that Tarkovsky thought Solaris was his worst film. Others disagree. It's certainly more accessible than some of his others.