Solaris

Stanisław Lem was born on September 12, 1921, in the city of Lwów, which was then located in the Second Polish Republic (currently, the city is called Lviv and located within the borders of Ukraine). Though Jewish, Lem decided that he did not believe in an all-powerful, benevolent God due to evident evils present in the world. During the Nazi German occupation of Poland during World War II (1939–1945), Lem’s family hid their Jewish ethnicity using forged documents. In 1946, Lem serially published his first novel, The Man from Mars, about scientists experimenting on a crash-landed Martian cyborg, in a science-fiction magazine. Lem subsequently disavowed the novel, which he claimed to have written solely for the money. From 1948 to 1956, Poland (among other Eastern Bloc countries) saw a great deal of communist censorship, and Lem had to sprinkle novels such as The Astronauts (1951) and The Magellanic Cloud (1955) with communist utopian ideas and aesthetics to get them published. After communist censorship in Poland eased, Lem published prolifically, writing novels, short stories, essays, and philosophical treatises. In 1961, Lem published perhaps his most famous novel, Solaris, about researchers on a remote planet who encounter mysterious “visitors” apparently constructed by the planet’s maybe-sentient ocean. In 1982 he moved from Poland to Germany but moved back in 1988. Lem died in 2006.

Solaris (1961), which is premised on human scientific expeditions to planets outside our solar system, was published during the so-called “Space Race,” a Cold War (1947–1991) struggle between the capitalist United States and the communist USSR to dominate human travel to outer space. The beginning of the Space Race is often dated to 1955, when both the U.S. and the USSR officially declared that they planned to launch satellites into space. On October 4, 1957, the USSR successfully launched the first-ever human-designed satellite to orbit Earth, Sputnik 1. On November 3, 1957, the USSR successfully launched the first-ever mammal to orbit Earth, a dog named Laika. However, as the USSR had not developed the technology to bring the satellite safely back down to Earth, Laika died in orbit. On January 4, 1959, the USSR also launched the first spacecraft to leave Earth’s orbit, Luna 1, though this spacecraft missed its intended target, the moon, due to technical problems. However, it wasn’t until the year Solaris was published, 1961, that the first human being entered Earth’s orbit (Russian Yuri Gagarin, on April 12, 1961), and it wasn’t until 1969 that human beings first stepped on the moon (Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on July 21, 1969).

Solaris (1961) deals with the difficulty—perhaps impossibility—of human beings meaningfully communicating with alien life. Stanisław Lem wrote several other novels that likewise deal with the difficulty or impossibility of interspecies communication, including his first serial novel The Man from Mars (1946), about a Martian crash-landed on Earth; His Master’s Voice (1968), about a mathematician trying and failing to decipher an extraterrestrial message; and his final novel Fiasco (1986), about an alien civilization that refuses to communicate with human explorers. Subsequent famous works of science fiction about human beings’ attempts to communicate with aliens, which Solaris may have influenced, include Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987), in which aliens genetically engineer human survivors of a nuclear war to enable communicate and cross-species reproduction; Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (1996), in which human explorers’ translation errors and cultural misunderstandings of aliens have horrific results; and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998), in which learning an alien language fundamentally rewires a human linguist’s understanding of time and free will. Additionally, Solaris deals with a planet that ought to have an irregular, life-destroying orbit. Another science fiction novel premised on an exoplanet with an irregular orbit is Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem (2008). Finally, one character in Solaris, attempting to characterize the human scientists’ passionate obsession with their possibly alien “visitors,” alludes to English playwright William Shakespeare’s famous tragic play Romeo and Juliet (1597). It is possible that the tragedy influenced Stanisław Lem’s depiction of doomed lovers Kelvin and Rheya in Solaris, especially as Rheya, like Romeo and Juliet, dies by suicide.