One could spend hours just debating just the most popular interpretations of the meaning of Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction classic, Solaris. Of course, one would not really get too close to the kernel of truth at the center unless one could read and understand Polish. The English version of the novel most widely available is notorious for being not a translation of Lem’s original Polish, but a translation of a French translation of the original. A text twice removed from the original; one might approach the English-language version of Solaris with all the expectations of perfect understanding as one approach the King James Bible.
Rather than focusing on interpreting the meaning of the sentient and possibly godlike ocean covering almost the entirety of the planet Solaris that is the alien life form in this science fiction novel, a much wiser approach to analysis is focusing on the place of the Solaris ALF within the history of the genre. That the story is intended to be allegorical is clear enough and everyone is to draw rom the text any logical inferences about the allegorical meaning of it all they wish. A wealth of material is available from which to draw conclusions, so go at it. But while trying to understand the larger symbolic meaning of the Solaris black sea thick blood-colored foam, don’t overlook the significant place it has simply as a portrayal of intelligent alien life.
Lem published his novel in 1961. Between the Tripods of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds published in 1898 and the “bugs” of Heinlein’s 1959 novel Starship Troopers, alien life forms were presented by an overwhelming margin as recognizable creatures or machines or, mostly, humanoids. The conception of intelligent life on distant planets tended to be solid rather than viscous and for the most part had a form recognizable in some way to the humanity as what life forms possessing a brain of some sort should look like. Spiders obviously have some sort of brain going on inside that head regardless of the fact that they don’t look like humans except for having eight arms instead of two. But that’s the point: have have arms, just like us. The Tripods reflected the infernal machine-building which marked the Industrial Revolution so even if they didn’t resemble any particular earth creature, they still resembled something that the mind of man might himself create.
But an ocean? How does an ocean—or what the mass of liquid on the surface of Solaris might actually be—have a brain? The very concept of an alien creature which could not be simply welcomed into space station or which the scientists could descend to the surface to meet defies all the inherent logic of science fiction at the time. Movies had done their part to influence the genre: what could only be imagined while reading a decade earlier could now be seen come to life on the screen at the local theater every Saturday. The cinemas of the decade practically had a new alien to experience that frequently. And you know how business works, right? If movies make monsters of a certain type popular, guess what is going to start appearing more frequently in popular literature written by authors who are hoping to see their monster come to life next year when a studio buys the rights to it. So if space aliens that look like Devil Women or Cat-Women or even blobs or pods are popular and you are writing a novel hoping to join the craze and share the profits, why would you create an alien out of “x-billion tons of metamorphic plasma” that no one can even communicate with?
Well, you don’t. You only create such a strange and bizarre and unique alien being if you are serious about propelling the genre forward. Stanislaw Lem was no hack trying to cash in a fad sweeping the world. He decided to go the other way.
