Solaris – The Definitive Edition
by tristero
I wish I could recommend Solaris – The Definitive Edition for science fiction fans… but that would be to artificially limit its audience. In this translation – which, because of rights issues, is only available as an audiobook or an ebook – Solaris is revealed as a work of literature, one that has more in common with Moby Dick (a comparison Lem himself makes) than with other sci-fi/fantasy/horror novels. For example, Lem is clearly influenced by the work of horror writer HP Lovecraft, but he is a much more versatile and profound writer. The Ocean descriptions were obviously intended as Lovecraftian parodies, but what Lem wrote is so exquisitely beautiful, bizarre, and horrific – all at the same time – that it transcends its source.
For fans of the original US edition – which was an English translation of a French translation of the original Polish – you will be in for a pleasant shock. Based on my skimming of it, the Solaris most Americans know truly was as bad a hatchet job as Lem always claimed it was.
After I finished listening to the novel, I rewatched Tarkovsky’s Solaris and – Dennis Hartley will kill me for saying this – was very disappointed. It is an interesting film (and the music is fantastic), but Tarkovsky has different concerns – a human love story, the return of the prodigal son – while the novel is far more original and much stranger. It’s about the incomprehensibility of the trans-human and how attempts to understand not only lead to failure and even catastrophe, but ultimately end up showing us merely our own reflection. Moby-Dick indeed! Tarkovsky’s film relegates this extraordinary conception to mere backdrop and focuses on just part of the story, an entirely human, and reasonably predictable, drama – “Love in Space” as Lem cynically calls both Tarkovsky’s and Soderbergh’s films.
Is Solaris – the novel- a masterpiece? I don’t want to scare you off, so let’s just say that if not, it’s awfully close. Please don’t miss it.