Solaris

"Yes, it’s a great example. It’s a Polish science fiction novel from the post-war era, and it’s about the notion of a sentient planet—a version of the Gaia hypothesis. In our current era of the Anthropocene and climate change, there’s a sense that we need to rethink the boundaries between the human and inhuman. So in one way this book is more alive now than it has been at any time since 1961. That’s another thing about B-side books—it’s not that they always ought to have been A-sides. It’s more that now, in 2021, we should be thinking about them in a fresh way. Yes, as you say, it asks big questions. Can a sea be conscious ? What happens if other planets abide by different laws of physics? The writer who selected Solaris for B-Side Books is a wonderful Americanist named Kate Marshall. She’s interested in speculative fiction, generally, but also in categories of the weird. Her case for Solaris , which I 100% agree with, is that it’s not just that Lem is interested in the notion that the laws of physics might be different on another planet, but the idea that the planet can connect—telepathically or psychically— with human beings, who come to understand it through some kind of dream-experience. I think Lem’s fixation—I’ve read a lot of Lem, I really love him—is that we humans struggle more than we admit to comprehend a vast universe that is much more complicated than we think. No matter where we go, we’re going to bring our own human cognition, our conceptual apparatus with us. In Solaris, the intelligent sea and the scientists—Solaris and the “Solarists”—meet in this dreamspace, a kind of imagined bridge. It’s shaped by the channel of communication, the human ability to dream, but it’s a genuine encounter with the other. “It’s not that these books always ought to have been A-sides. It’s more that now, in 2021, we should be thinking about them in a fresh way” It’s an amazing book. Kate even connects it to the current post-humanist environmentalism. I really like the thought experiment in her piece; she says that this should be a model for us as we try to think about the ethics of responsibility towards our own planet. Our ethical obligation is not just to other human beings, it’s to everything. Yes, I agree with that. And, you know, Lem and people like Kurt Vonnegut were writing in the shadow of World War Two. Both Lem and Vonnegut suffered personal trauma: Vonnegut was in Dresden when it was firebombed. People who survived the atomic conflagration of World War Two had a new apprehension of the human capacity for destruction that took a long time to trickle out into the culture at large. But science fiction was there in the 1950s and 1960s. I mean, I’m writing a book about Ursula Le Guin right now, and I do find that those mid-century writers have taken on board not only the nuclear threat but the gargantuan hyper-agency of humans after World War Two, and they are grappling with it."

"Yes. This is my favourite example of a truly alien alien. In the book, they are not even sure if it is self-aware or intelligent. Basically, humans have discovered an alien planet called Solaris. Its surface is covered by an ocean. But over the course of the book, you realise that this is not a body of water. It is a planet-spanning liquid body of some kind, but it seems to be an alien entity as well. It creates strange shapes and constructions out of its own matter that seem like manifestations of complex math. They can’t tell if these are weird reflexes, thoughts, dreams, or attempts at communication. When human astronauts go to the shore of the ocean, it seems to reach for them physically. It reminds me of that scene in Moana where she meets the sea, and it reaches out and drops a shell in her hand. It’s a lot like that. The book opens after the crew of a space station on the planet has bombarded the ocean with some kind of radiation to try to get it to react. It has responded by creating physical manifestations of human beings out of the memories of the human crew of the station. Every crew member meets this weird, ghostly presence of someone they know. These are not ghosts, but physical bodies. The main character is visited by his long-dead wife, who has been crafted out of his memories. She doesn’t know anything that he doesn’t know. But she seems to think that she is a person and that she is there. It’s tremendously weird and spooky. Yes. And, you know, it’s very much a mid-century sci-fi book. The way the technology is imagined is really funny to me. Like, they have faster-than-light travel, but also a physical library. There’s a whole academic field of studying this opaque, alien entity where they sit and read books and look at microfiche. So much of the plot or the conflict of the book wouldn’t happen if they had security cameras and could see what was really happening. But without that, it’s all a mystery: who is real, and where do they go? It’s also a very mid-century sci-fi book in that it feels like a very male point of view. The main character is a man visited by his beautiful 19-year-old wife who only exists as a manifestation of his thoughts and ideas. I was not won over by that. But it is still a really fascinating imagining of how humanity would confront the impossibility of understanding a truly alien alien. I don’t think that Solaris was meant to be a metaphor for trying to communicate with other life on Earth. But I do think that our attempts to understand and imagine our way into the experience of other life on Earth does tell us a lot about what alien contact might be like. Examples that I write about in my book include dolphins and bats, which—interestingly—we are closely related to, relatively speaking, but live in different environments. They both live in three dimensional environments: dolphins swim underwater, bats fly. They both used different senses—echolocation and sonar—to engage with their environments. So it makes sense that their worldview, their experience of the world, their communication methods would be very different from ours. Whereas if we met an alien that also lived on land and breathed the air and manipulated objects with their hands, it’s maybe more likely that they would share the same sense as us. And, as Ed points out in his book, therefore have a similar experience of the world and the way they move through it."