2001: A Space Odyssey
Half of the most influential SF artefact of the twentieth century.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Solaris about?
Psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at the station hovering over Solaris — a planet-wide ocean that may be a single organism, studied for a century by a science ('Solaristics') that has produced libraries of taxonomy and no understanding whatsoever. The ocean has lately begun answering: each crew member receives a visitor distilled from his most guarded memories, and Kelvin wakes to find his wife Harey, ten years dead by suicide, asking why he's looking at her like that. Contact as mirror, grief as experiment design, and the great library chapter — science confessing its own circularity — at the centre. The alien remains alien; that is the point, and almost no one else has dared it since.
Why it matters
World SF's most filmed philosophical novel — Tarkovsky's 1972 masterpiece, Soderbergh's 2002 chamber version — and the standing refutation of anthropomorphic first contact. Lem disliked both films, naturally.
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