He awakens on the station next to a vision of his long lost love Rheya… who died long ago. What happens next shakes Kelvin to his very core. Snow cryptically warns Kelvin to do nothing if he encounters anyone else on the station… although only Sartorius, Snow, and Gibarian are supposed to be there.

Sartorius is barricaded within his laboratory. Snow, who seems confused and delusional, and learns that Dr. When Kelvin arrives at the station, he finds it in disarray.

Over the decades, Solaris has gone from the most exciting scientific discovery of all time to a relatively unspoken embarrassment. But they have come no closer to understanding its nature, and have completely failed at making contact with it. They have explored the spontaneous structures that emerge from its depths, they have probed it with X-rays, they have theorized endlessly about it intelligence and motivations. It is, apparently, alive, covered almost entirely by what can only be described as a living ocean that has unfathomable power it is able, somehow, to control its own orbit around its binary star system.įor over a century since its discovery, Solaris has been studied by humanity. Kelvin has come to Solaris at the urgent and cryptic request of his former mentor Gibarian, who said nothing in his message about why he should come.īoth men have a history of researching the planet Solaris, which is unique among all the planets explored by humans through the galaxy. Solaris is told from the perspective of psychologist Kris Kelvin, and begins as he arrives at the research station Solaris, hovering above the enigmatic planet’s surface.

It is a book filled with ideas, not action, and it will leave you thinking about those ideas long after finishing it. Solaris is a quiet novel about contact with an alien intelligence that is utterly beyond human comprehension. Both were brilliant, thought-provoking novels, and it was only natural to proceed next to the famous Polish science fiction novel, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961). Back in March I read Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033 (2005), which was influenced heavily by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1972), which I read in May. I am nowhere near as versed in science fiction as I am in horror fiction, and recently I’ve been trying to remedy that somewhat, in particular focusing on science fiction by Russian and Eastern European authors.

Stanislaw lem's solaris