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8/12/2024

Solaris (2011 audiobook) Review with Spoilers

When listening to the album "Fantastic Planet" by Failure, the track "Solaris" stuck out. As I do with tracks that stick out, I look up lyrics and read them as I listen. Even though the Failure track based on this book spoiled it, I still decided to read it as the concept was interesting to me. As of typing this, I quite literally just finished listening to the audiobook and loved it. I've been talking nonstop about it to my friend, and I'm going to compile some of my thoughts into this post. Like I said, spoilers will be here. It feels impossible to talk about this book without spoiling something.

Solaris is a book about a giant single celled organism and the guys (Snaut, Kelvin, and Sartorius) studying it, it's so gargantuan that it covers an entire planet and is stated to physically push its orbit around the two suns that it circles. Throughout the book the reader learns more and more information about it through Snaut, Sartorius, and the academic journals that Kelvin reads. Kelvin is vaguely warned of something forboding by Snaut immediately after learning from him that the man he came there to meet (Gibrarian) has killed himself. Kelvin then spends nearly the entire book hallucinating his dead wife.

A lot of people have interpreted this book over the years as a love story, but as the book goes on I started to wonder how anyone got that interpretation, or why they'd want it to be a love story. This is a story about scientists studying something that's simultaneously studying them, both parties hurting the other without realizing it. Because how could an ocean think? Well, this one can. It probably thought the same about Sartorius, Kelvin, Giza, Gibrarian, and anyone else who stepped foot on Solaris years before them. Harey, Kelvin's late wife, appears to him in such a perfect manner that he has no reason to think it's NOT her. Even though she clearly isn't her, with Kelvin sending her into space the first time he sees her and her tearing down a spaceship door as an average 20 year old woman. I got frustrated with Kelvin while also understanding him almost the entire book as he talked about how "Harey" felt like Harey, even though he knew she wasn't Harey.

There's red flags before this that tell you that Harey isn't even real, like her being unable to leave Kelvin's side, the fact that when he goes to sleep she literally stops thinking, the fact that she appeared again after being blasted into space, and Kelvin himself stating that she's not real early on in the book. The saddest thing in the book to me is that even knowing this, Kelvin told her she had already replaced the real Harey. I already knew the twist when I started reading, so it didn't surprise me, but it did allow me to really look at the words Harey was saying throughout the book and keep that in mind.

Solaris, the alien creature that humanity has unknowingly been "communicating" with, never intended to actually hurt anyone, and just did so trying to understand them. It's not a malicious being, and as an alien it has no way of truly understanding us the same way we have no way of understanding it. I think that's what the book is about, at least. I really, really enjoyed this book and never felt bored during it, even during the more sciencey parts that went over my head. A lot of things are left to imagination, and I think it's better that way.

I recommend listening to the audiobook if you don't speak Polish, it's the only direct English translation as far as I know and have no idea what the older versions changed. I omitted a lot of things i wanted to say as not to turn this into a retelling of the entire plot.