Solaris

Solaris represents the diagnosis of “insanity” as a tool to enforce social conformity—to avoid accepting strange truths outside of a given community’s consensus reality. This representation is clearest in the story of André Berton, a pilot who participated in the first expedition to land on the exoplanet Solaris. Despite Berton’s lucid account of the bizarre and unlikely things he saw while piloting a helicopter over Solaris’s ocean through a deep fog, the expedition commission in charge of hearing his report decides that he must have hallucinated the experiences as a result of exposure to some extraterrestrial, poisonous gas—simply because the commission cannot fathom that Solaris’s ocean has the capabilities that Berton’s account, taken at face value, suggests it has. Similarly, the novel’s protagonist Kelvin and his colleague Snow, researchers on a later expedition to Solaris, end up discussing how if they told anyone on Earth what was happening on Solaris—namely, that the ocean was sending the human researchers “visitors,” apparently human replicas of people drawn from the researchers’ memories or imaginations—they would likely be confined to an insane asylum. Thus, the novel suggests that the label of “insane” actually says more about what a group considers normal than about the supposedly insane person. And the fact that so many deem Solaris explorers insane suggests that the powers that be prioritize conformity and comfort over genuinely advancing scientific knowledge by considering events or ideas that seem, at first glance, to be products of insanity.