One crucial point is that the ocean’s strange properties relate to the planet’s unlikely capacity to stay in a relatively stable orbit movement between its two suns: in other words, this particular three-body problem gets solved by intentional tidal forces.

It is a bit tricky to relate Kelvin’s mind-bending encounters with the vast being that covers Solaris without spoilers. Even the scientist’s landing on the station strikes a discordant note: rather than a human voice answering his hail, he hears “successive bursts of static … against a background of deep, low-pitched murmuring.” It’s as if “the very voice of the planet itself” were coming over his radio. Kelvin finds himself in a decayed environment inhabited by elusive, unstable (and in some cases dead) colleagues. The planet’s entire surface is covered by one vast sentient ocean: think of that wave-wracked water world that greeted Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar. He joins the bedraggled group of fellow Solarists on a space station orbiting the only planet of a binary solar system. Solaris begins with the arrival of Kelvin, a scientist-an expert in “Solaristics,” no less.

Lem’s vision of oceanic vitalism likely speaks more cogently to readers today than it did to his audience half a century ago. In 2018 we have begun to grapple, tentatively, with the almost pantheistic notion that Earth’s seas may be alive with a will and logic all their own. Yet what keeps drawing me back to the original novel is something that eludes adaptation: the trenchant exteriority of the novel’s ultimate protagonist, Solaris itself. Is there a more entrancing account of an encounter with nonhuman sentience than Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris? The reputation of this 1961 masterwork of Polish science fiction, translated from the 1964 French translation into English in 1970, largely depends on various film adaptations, including Tarkovsky’s stunning 1972 reimagining.

Solaris lem book