We’ll continue exploring Lem’s influence on world SF by discussing his ground-breaking novella Solaris.

 

Littrans 207, Slavic SF (Spring 2021), 3-11 Thursday

 

 

Today’s topic

We’ll continue exploring Lem’s influence on world SF by discussing his ground-breaking novella

Solaris.

 

Let’s go over the quiz on Solaris

1.  Solaris is: (a) a sun in a distant solar system; (b) a space station orbiting a planet in a distant solar system; (c) an ocean planet; (d) a corporation that exploits other planets for their resources.

2.  Kris Kelvin is: (a) an expert on rocketry; (b) a spaceship pilot; (c) a political leader on Earth; (d)

a psychologist.

3.  The crew on the space station fully understand their object of study: true or false.

4.  Harey/Rheya, Kelvin’s romantic partner, journeys with him: true or false.

5.  What special power does Solaris have? Let’s discuss this!

 

Start-of-class discussion

Guide questions to the novella. Contributions?

1.  What is special about the character of Rheya (Harey in the original Polish)? What does her character, and Kelvin’s relationship to it, contribute to our reading?

2.  How does Solaris deviate from a clichéd space-exploration/adventure tale?

3.  What do we know about Solaris as a planet? What does it want?

4.  How does the novella manipulate the traditional SF theme of first contact?

 

 

Lecture Note

As with Zamyatin’s We, we won’t analyze this novella (and its implications) in depth. It is a work that you might want to return to for your reflection paper: you won’t find a lack of secondary criticism related to it.

 

Intro quotes

1.  Lem thought that “in the face of life-and-death problems that confront our civilization, literature needs to embrace the new role of diagnosing their nature and potential impact—if need be, by developing novel forms of expression adequate to the scale of the issues at stake. Grappling with

phenomena of a radically and globally destabilizing character, he argued, fiction can hardly keep falling back on the canons of narration practiced by Victorian storytellers” —a Lem critic.

 

2.  For Lem, SF “is a laboratory for trying out experiments in new ways of thinking; it should be a spearhead of cognition. It should attempt what hasn’t been thought or done before” —a Lem critic.

 

How might SF save us? How could it help us?

-  In other words, let’s take Lem’s (and Suvin’s) approach to SF seriously for a moment and hypothesize how it might work. The example I’ll mention here is climate change—which is another way of saying the rather difficult-to-overcome civilizational crisis that humanity finds itself in.

-  I was born in 1967, and in my life we’ve gone through, at least as I see it, several different stages with regard to this issue:

 

Stage 1: We weren’t aware of it (or were we?), but we began to understand that the planet is one giant ecosystem in the 1960s and 1970s (i.e., the so-called Gaia hypothesis, which we’ll return to below).

 

Stage 2: We started to discuss, research, and document the details of how the climate is changing.

-  Scientists led the way here, but were (at least initially) extremely cautious about speculation as to cause and also about the consequences (i.e., how bad it might get).

-  Many (powerful) people denied for a very long time that climate change was caused by human activity.

-  It took a while for a general consensus to form that human activity is indeed the cause of climate change, and we seem to have reached that consensus only in the five or maybe ten years (which is not to say that everyone agrees, but that more agree than disagree).

 

Stage 3: ?

 

 

Stage 4: We have started preparing for the consequences of increasingly dire climate modeling in certain concrete ways:

-  Economists have begun trying to put price-tags on it.

-  Cities have started project-planning to try to avert the worst consequences they will likely face.

-  Scientists have started speculating about ways to reverse the effects.

-  Politicians have worked toward international climate accords (the Paris agreement) and/or have proposed legislation (the Green New Deal).

-  National militaries have begun planning for a catastrophic future where food and clean water are scarce and populations strongly affected by climate change are forced to migrate? (The question mark here means that I don’t know for sure that this is the case, but I would be surprised if it isn’t.)

 

But what, then, is Stage 3?

-  It’s the stage where we care deeply about it as a society and try to really understand why it’s happening—and to assign some blame and take real responsibility for it.

-  Stage 3 is when we seriously discuss changing our societal structures because they may potentially result in the destruction of human civilization.

-  Stage 3 is where SF, if taken as a serious form of sociocultural discourse, has a role to play, at least in Lem’s and in Suvin’s vision.

-  If SF has the potential, as Lem argues, to save human civilization, then we must definitely stop thinking of SF as a form of (largely escapist) entertainment.

-  I would argue, however, that it’s also a stage that we have largely (but not entirely) skipped, which may not bode well.

 

Contextualizing Solaris

Lem wrote the book in 1961, which was an annus mirabilis in Lem’s literary production.

-  The novella was composed in the mountain resort town of Zakopane in southern Poland over several intense weeks of writing.

 

Solaris as great example of Suvinian SF: the estrangement here facilitates a cognitive return.

-  Like some of the most celebrated SF works, it does a great job, in the words of one critic, of “representing the other without losing touch with the familiar.”

-  This is true in general of Lem’s writings from 1961 onward, and Lem himself said that these works “incorporate cognitive problems in fictional form that do not oversimplify the world, as did my earliest, naïve science-fiction novels.”

-  Lem is mainly a writer of ideas, although he usually also tells a really great story.

 

 

UKLG on the novel’s (and Lem’s) impact

-  It appeared in English translation only in 1970.

-  UKLG writes: “It was a revelation to us in America, not only of a brilliant book, but of a science- fiction writer who we now learned was immensely popular in his native land and well known throughout Europe, but of whom most of us knew nothing.”

 

Discussion questions

What is special about the character of Rheya (Harey in the original Polish)? What does her character, and Kelvin’s relationship to it, contribute to our reading?

-  She’s a duplicate, but she doesn’t know it, at least not at first.

-  She’s a deeply moving character, who voluntarily commits suicide at the end.

-  She turns the book into more than SF: it’s also a romantic story made compelling by the SF twist.

-  She also embodies one main theme of the novel in her attempt to come to terms with her “humanity.”

-  As some have pointed out, however, she’s not really Rheya/Harey: she’s Kelvin’s version of her that the planet somehow draws from his head and reanimates.

 

How does Solaris deviate from a clichéd space-exploration tale?

-  In many ways! For one thing, it’s more of a horror-story or ghost-story than a SF tale, and it has something of a mystery-story involved in it, too.

-  It frustrates the clichéd space-adventure story by questioning its very premises.

-  Lem once again takes what could have been space opera (and romantic space opera) and imbues it with a philosophical air.

 

What do we know about the Solaris as a planet? What does it want?

-  We are led to think it’s one sentient being, but we never know that for sure.

-  We don’t know why it reads the human minds and sends duplicates of loved ones: are its intentions good or evil?

-  It almost seems totally indifferent to the human visitation.

-  It’s a mystery throughout, and that mystery is never resolved—although Kelvin vows to try to figure it out.

 

How does Solaris manipulate the “first contact with aliens” theme in SF?

-  We might say that most SF that deals with this theme depicts aliens as human projections in various ways: the aliens are us in one way or another (cf. H. G. Wells’s War with the Worlds: in one reading, the Martian invaders represent an allegory of British imperialism).

-  Lem doesn’t take this route: his aliens are inscrutable.

-  Lem turns the cliché of first contact on its head: his aliens are so alien that we can’t understand them at all.

-  He forces us to think out of our SF comfort zone here.

-  One key sentence in the novel that speaks to this is: “How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?”

-  Lem’s focus, then, is not really on the aliens (the ocean planet) at all, but rather on human limitations and human arrogance.

-  Are we really interested in the alien world or do we simply want to extend the boundaries of the human world? If the latter (and it probably is the latter), then this is a form of imperial conquest masquerading as scientific research.

-  Another key quote is: “Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”

-  One critic asserts that Lem “begins to question the anthropomorphic premises behind the exploration of space,” and another critic has identified a principle that runs throughout Lem’s works—that humankind is not the measure of all things.

-  Is this lesson something we need to take to heart in order to pass some kind of galactic civilizational test? Is the lesson we need to learn in order to survive as a technologically advanced species—which may well be how we pass that civilizational test?

How might we understand Solaris in terms of the Gaia hypothesis, which was advanced by James Lovelock (and others) in the early 1970s?

-  Lem anticipates this hypothesis: the whole planet is one giant ecosystem.

-  Accepting the idea behind Gaia changes—or rather should change—how we view ourselves: we aren’t lords of the planet, external to it as exploiters of its resources for our own gain, but instead we are parts of the larger ecosystem itself.

-  And if we’re the only sentient and technologically advanced parts of that ecosystem, then perhaps our strategy should be to act as guardians of it instead of its exploiters/destroyers?

 

Some main themes of the novella as perceived by critics

-  The failure to perceive properly, which results in a failure to communicate.

-  The puzzling nature of reality and the limits of science.

-  A satire on scientific research: e.g., the long passage in chapter 11 on “Solaristics.”

-  The impossibility of separating the observer from the observed or the observation.

-  Solaris as Freudian: the planet as manifestation of Freud’s unconscious.

-  “Otherness” and identity.

 

 

Some critical reactions

1. Lem himself: “The common denominator [in a number of his works, including Solaris] is my deep conviction that any meaningful form of contact—or, even less, cooperation or confederation—with extraterrestrial intelligences is simply not possible. The reasons for this owe to the almost limitless diversity and distribution of evolutionary paths taken by different forms of life and civilizations.”

 

2.   The planet of Solaris in its strangeness and unpredictability “denies our devouring urge to transmute all alterity into versions of sameness, and that is why the scientists cannot cope with it.”

 

3.   The novel has a “perfectly judged tone of uncanny uncertainty: it consistently refuses the straightforward explanation of the characters’ situation, precisely captur[ing] the way encountering the other forces us to encounter ourselves, the way it can reveal things about ourselves which are intensely uncomfortable.”

 

4.   Ultimately the novel “is an exhibition of the inability of human understanding to achieve a final stage of knowledge; perhaps it implies also that human understanding at best can understand itself, but nothing outside itself.”

 

5.   In rereading the novel, UKLG saw “again how immediately one perceives it as a genuinely serious work of science fiction in the tradition of the older masters of the form. Lem resembles Jules Verne in the audacity of his invention and in a certain stateliness or aloofness of style even when narrating in the first person. He is like H. G. Wells in his alertness to where the cutting edge of science lies at the moment, and to the social implications of his fable. Like both Verne and Wells, he is a shamelessly good storyteller, using all the tricks of withholding and revealing information to keep the reader in suspense.”

 

Book covers: what aspect of the novel’s message has the cover artist targeted?

 

Selected bibliography of critical analysis for Lem’s Solaris

Note: I’ve uploaded this to Learn for those who want to follow up on any of the analyses.

-  Edward Balcerzak. “Language and Ethics in Solaris.” Science-Fiction Studies 2 (1975): 152-6.

-  James Blish. Review of Solaris. Magazine of Fantasy and SF 40 (May 1971: 42-3.

-  Istvan Csicsery-Ronay. “The Book is Alien: On Certain and Uncertain Readings of Lem’s

Solaris.” SF Studies 12 (1985): 6-21.

-  Manfred Geier. “Stanislaw Lem’s Fantastic Ocean: Toward a Semantic Interpretation of Solaris.” SF Studies 19 (July 1992): 192-218.

-  David Ketterer. “Solaris and the Illegitimate Suns of SF.” Extrapolation 14 (1972): 73-89.

-  Ann Weinstone “Resisting Monsters: Notes on Solaris.” SF Studies 21 (July 1994): 161-6.

-  Abraham Yossef. “Understanding Lem: Solaris Revisited.” Foundation 46 (1989): 51-8.

 

 

Text for end-of-class discussion

1.  Weissert, “Lem and a Topology of Mind”

2.  Swirski, “Solaris! Solaris. Solaris?” Contributions?

 

Your homework is on the week-by-week syllabus!

You should definitely start thinking about a topic for your reflection paper, but look at the assignment guide on Canvas first. The paper will be due on 3-31. Please send me questions that you might have by email.