Solaris

I’d seen the Tarkovsky film first, years back, and went into the novel assuming I roughly knew the shape of the story. I didn’t. The book shares almost none of the Earth-set scenes the films add, no visit home, no call from Gibarian before the psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at the station, it’s a much more contained, colder piece of work than either adaptation, and the vague, open ending the films are known for isn’t quite where Lem leaves things either.

The premise is simple to state and genuinely strange to sit inside: a planet entirely covered by a single ocean that may or may not be a vast, alien intelligence, one humanity has spent a documented, uncounted string of years failing to actually communicate with. Kelvin arrives at the research station to study it and instead gets confronted with something the ocean generates from his own memory, a presence from his past he can’t explain and can’t get rid of. The book is short and dense, very little filler, and it does this thing where it keeps cutting away into invented academic history of Solaris studies, essays and theories from decades of failed contact attempts, which sounds like it would slow the book down and instead deepens exactly how alien and unresolved the whole situation is.

It’s not a fast or comfortable read. A few stretches, particularly the summarized scholarly history of Solaristics, ask real patience of you, and I understand readers who found it a tough, dull wade through relative to its length. I didn’t feel that, but I get where it comes from.

What’s stayed with me is the ending’s refusal to resolve anything neatly, hope without evidence it’s warranted. One of the smartest, coldest pieces of science fiction I’ve read, and genuinely nothing else I’ve read since has scratched quite the same itch.