Solaris, Stanislaw Lem, Faber, 0571219721, £6.99 |
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Aliens – let’s do aliens.
In presenting intelligent life on or from other planets, science fiction comes up against a basic problem: anthropomorphism.
Most SF aliens are either men in alien costumes or aliens in man costumes. They can look like us and behave differently or look like aliens but behave like us. Very very rarely do they convincingly look like aliens and behave like aliens.
One of the reasons for this is that irrelevant or incomprehensible behaviour is very hard to fit into a story. It’s like trying to write a romantic scene in which one of the lovers feels compelled to say the word ‘Popocatepetl’ every couple of minutes. You can do it, but it’s easier if the lovers restrict themselves to, ‘Darling, you’ve never looked so radiant as you do tonight.’
Although the meaning of ‘alien’ should really line up alongside ‘other’, the disappointment of most SF aliens is how recogniseably human or human-in-disguise they are.
Solaris solves the problem of alien anthropomorphism in a very succinct and original way: it splits the alien in two. One half is unknowable; the other is a series of fake human beings. Let me explain.
We are in the distant future. Space explorers from Earth have discovered many new planets but Solaris is perhaps the most fascinating of them all. It orbits two suns – one red, one blue – which should mean that it has an irregular orbit (but it doesn’t), which should mean that it is unable to support life (but it does).
The lifeform that inhabits Solaris is nothing of the sort you can imagine getting into a clinch with Captain Kirk. It is an ocean possessed of intelligence beyond anything we can grasp as intelligence. So massive is this ocean that, by moving around the surface of the planet, it can compensate for the eccentricity of orbiting two suns. In other words, it makes Solaris habitable for itself.
But more than this, it can imitate forms drawn from the visiting human minds. These grow out of its surface, like bizarre mountain-sized sculptures:
‘It was a… babe in arms. No, I exaggerate. It was probably two or three years old. It had black hair and blue eyes – enormous blue eyes! It was naked – completely naked – like a newborn baby. It was wet, or should I say glossy; its skin was shiny. I was shattered. I no longer thought it was a mirage. I could see this child so distinctly. It rose and fell with the waves; but apart from this general motion, it was making other movements, and they were horrible!’
Or, and this is a recent trick, it can send out stunning replications of figures from their past to haunt the scientists living on Solaris’ space station.
Dr Kris Kelvin arrives on the planet after an eighteen-month journey from Earth. He has come to join the scientific mission there, at the invitation of a man called Gibarian. But Gibarian is dead – suicide.
Kelvin sets out to investigate, and is aided and opposed in this by the two surviving Solarists, Dr Snow and Sartorious. But within a day, Kelvin is receiving his own visits from an avatar of the ocean, an incarnation of his own past: Rheya – a woman he loved ten years before and who also killed herself, because she thought he had left her.
Originally published in Polish in 1970, Solaris is one of the great achievements of world science fiction. In comparison to, say, Neuromancer, it has hardly dated at all. Kelvin consults microfilms not a microcomputer in the Station’s library, but very little else seems superseded. Stanislaw Lem had something very rare among SF writers, a decorum in the face of technology. Because he doesn’t lavish description upon it, there are no details for him to get wrong.
But we’ve got away from aliens.
By splitting his alien in two, giving it a human face which is false and a non-anthropomorphic form which is truly other, Lem solves one of the technical difficulties SF has always encountered:
How do you write about something that is of necessity beyond your experience?
A lesser novelist would have saved up the revelation that Rheya was an alien until the end of the book. Lem has her be unconvincingly human, or unconvincingly herself, from the start. And yet Kelvin can’t help loving her – loving her for the reconstituted fragments of their shared past that she embodies. But also loving her for the incomplete, beautiful, panicked being that she finds herself having to be.
If we start judging the limited level of reality others exist within, we pretty soon have to start judging our own. Especially in comparison with a brain the size of a planet.
‘The human mind is only capable of absorbing a few things at a time. We see what is taking place in front of us in the here and now, and cannot envisage simultaneously a succession of processes, no matter how integrated and complementary. Our faculties of perception are consequently limited even as regards fairly simple phenomena. The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word.’
Part straight SF, part detective story, part ghost story, part love story, part philosophical treatise – Solaris is definitely my kind of book.
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