Solaris

Source: gleech · Original review

Incomplete notes in a rush:

Unlike most fiction it contains actual thinking. This time there's an anti-scifi edge, not much humour in it, and in medias res, with the exciting first contact with Solaris tucked away into history - failed, frustrated, anticlimactic.

I don't know if he ever saw Star Trek but this is a crushing blow to it:

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us — that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence — then we don't like it any more.

In passing, he does actual philosophy. Here in the mould of Descartes - how to distinguish your own psychosis from a real anomaly?

an experimentum crucis—which would show me whether in fact I’d gone mad and was at the mercy of phantoms created by my own imagination, or whether, however absurd and improbable they were, these experiences were in fact real.

...my sick brain (if indeed it was sick) would produce any illusion I required of it. After all, it’s not just in sickness; even in the most ordinary dream we find ourselves conversing with people we do not know in our waking life, asking these dream figures questions and hearing their answers. When this happens, even though the figures are in fact only products of our own mind, parts of which have temporarily become detached and given a fake independence, we still don’t know what words they will utter until, in that dream, they speak to us. Yet in reality the words are concocted by that other, separated part of our own mind, and so we ought to know them at the moment we think them up and put them in the mouth of a fictional character. Whatever I might plan and carry out, then, I could always tell myself I was acting the way we act in dreams. Neither Snaut nor Sartorius needed to even exist in reality, and so asking either of them questions was pointless.

I could take some powerful medication, like peyote for example, or something else that produces hallucinations or graphic visions. Experiencing such things would prove that what I had taken really existed and was a part of the material reality surrounding me. But, I thought further, that too would not be the critical experiment I was after, because I knew how the substance (which I of course would have to select) ought to act on me, and so it could also be the case that both the taking of the medication and the effects it caused were equally products of my imagination...

My reasoning was as follows: from the sky maps I ought to derive figures that were not exactly the same as those provided by the Satelloid, since the Satelloid was subject to complex perturbations as a result of Solaris’s gravitational pull, of its two mutually orbiting suns, and also local variations in gravitation caused by the ocean. When I had both sets of figures, those provided by the Satelloid and those calculated theoretically on the basis of the sky maps, I’d correct my own reckonings. At this point the two groups of results ought to match to the fourth decimal place; discrepancies would remain only in the fifth decimal place, as being caused by the unpredictable influence of the ocean.

Even if the figures the Satelloid provided were not real but a product of my own crazy mind, they still couldn’t match the other series of numbers—even if my brain was sick, it would not be capable under any circumstances of the computations performed by the Station’s calculator. Such a thing would have required months of work. So then, if the figures tallied, the calculator existed in reality and I was actually using it, not just imagining I was.

He spends some time trying to put across the scale of the polytheria thing:

The fate of a single person can mean many things, the fate of several hundred is hard to encompass; but the history of thousands, millions, means essentially nothing at all. A symmetriad is millions, no, billions, to the nth power; it is unimaginability itself. What of it if, in the recesses of one of its aisles that is a ten-fold version of a Kronecker space, we stand like ants holding onto the folds of a breathing vault, that we watch the rise of vast planes grayly opalescent in the light of our flares, their interpenetration, the softness and infallible perfection of their resolution, which only lasts a moment, for everything here is fluid—the content of this architecture is motion, intent and purposive. We observe a fragment of the process, the trembling of a single string in a symphonic orchestra of supergiants, and on top of that we know—we only know, without comprehending—that at the same time, above us and beneath us, in the plunging deep, beyond the limits of sight and imagination there are multiple, million fold simultaneous transformations connected to one another like the notes of musical counterpoint.

"[Solaris] thinks our most important state is sleep, precisely. That’s why it does what it does. So Sartorius wants to send it our waking state—our conscious thoughts. You follow?”

Note that the old translation is not a real translation. You want the 2011 Bill Johnston one, which thankfully (I am told) is now the default audiobook.