It was a pleasure to read Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, the source of two great movies, the 1972 Russian production directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and the 2002 American production directed by Steven Soderbergh including the incredible Jeremy Davies with one of the best screen weirdo performances ever. (It is only as I write this that I see that there was a 1968 Russian production called Solyaris that I didn’t know about.) The author was a Polish physician (1921 - 2006), and yet another famous person from Lviv. He is one of the most widely read science fiction writers in the world.

The protagonist in the novel, Kelvin, is a solaricist, a scientist (he is a psychologist) who studies the planet Solaris. Solaris was discovered decades before and it had such peculiar properties, e.g. the planet appeared to modify its own orbit around its pair of stars and the planet was covered by a non-water organic ocean that created huge evanescent structures that appeared to mimic buildings or cities, that generations of scientists and others had argued over whether or not it could be sentient. Kelvin arrives at a space station orbiting Solaris and what he encounters there is the plot. Lem has Kelvin describe various books in the station library, and he creates a fascinating complex history of Solaris study, including all of the researchers names and various ideas about Solaris that have fallen in and out of fashion over time. The novel is brilliantly conceived, and there are many beautiful rich descriptions of the planet’s appearance. I won’t mention the essential problem that the characters have, in case you haven’t seen the movies, but if the science fiction aspect of the novel is stripped away we are left with both a great horror story and an unusually insightful psychological study that asks the question, what can we ever truly know about ourselves and each other?

Another aspect of the novel that occurred to me was its applicability to the idea of artificial intelligence, especially artificial intelligence that is self-aware. Lem only mentions artificial intelligence when he comments that the station’s robots (unfortunately called “automats” recalling scenes of 20th century cafeterias) are missing.
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The Grand Canyon is erroneously described as being in Colorado.

The translation says that one of the characters face appears lifeless because he is wearing contact lenses. Was that true in 1961?