Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
[Kbh.] Notabene 1973 223 s.
Description
"When psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he finds himself confronting a painful memory embodied in the physical likeness of a past lover. Kelvin learns that hs is not alone in this, and that other crews examining the planet are plagued with their own repressed and newly real memories. Could it be, as Solaris scientists speculate, that the ocean may be a massive neural center creating these memories, for a reason no one can identify? Long considered a classic, Solaris asks the question: Can we understand the universe around us without first understanding what lies within?"--Back cover.
Media reviews
NBD / Biblion
Hoewel "Solaris" schitterend is verfilmd, is het boek zelf niet overdreven goed. De hoofdpersoon is een psycholoog met weinig verstand van psychologie, die probeert fysische problemen op te lossen, waar hij - en met hem de schrijver - nog minder verstand van heeft. Het gegeven is veelbelovend. De
Show More
planeet is bedekt met een oceaan die leeft en zichzelf en zijn zonnestelsel kan manipuleren. De onderzoekers en de oceaan proberen met elkaar in kontakt te komen. De onhandige oceaan zaait daardoor dood en verderf. De mogelijkheden om de armoedige "science" te compenseren met spannende "fiction" worden om zeep geholpen door lange pseudo-wetenschappelijke verklaringen over de fysiologie van de planeet, wat de indruk wekt dat een kort verhaal is uitgerekt tot een boek.
Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member Stevil2001
Strange things are afoot on Solaris. They always have been, but as psychologist Kris Kelvin has discovered, they've just gotten a whole lot stranger. I think I generally prefer Lem's more comic works to his serious ones, but this is his serious mode at its finest. Solaris explores humanity's need
Show More
to understand and to know the other-- and ends up concluding that we have no such need, as we simply want to make the other like us. "We have named all the stars and all the planets, even though they might already have had names of their own." It moves a little slowly at times, but the sense of mystery is well done, as are the characters' very subdued yet entirely real reactions to this strange, unfathomable occurrence that has been thrust upon them. Kris discovers that his long-dead lover Rheya has been returned to him... but is it really her? This doesn't get quite as much play as it should, given that it is the novel's emotional center, just as the (fascinating) exploration of the planet is its intellectual center. As much as Kris can never know Solaris, he can never know Rheya, and he can never know himself. But he feels the need to keep on pushing forward regardless. The last line of the novel is absolutely haunting. Show Less
LibraryThing member bcquinnsmom
Dr. Kris Kelvin arrives at space station Solaris as part of a team which is supposed to be examining the planet's ocean, which makes up most of the planet except for land masses which altogether are smaller than Europe. Instead, he finds his mentor has committed suicide and strange happenings are
This is a great book and I highly recommend it. There are certain caveats with this recommendation. First, the book satirizes space theorists, by presenting fictional theoreticians and their contending views, so the book is filled with alternating theories about Solaris as conveyed in research materials Kelvin consults not only regarding the planet, but on the nature of contact with non-human "civilizations." This may seem tedious to some of you, but to me it was very interesting. Second, don't expect cut and dried answers. It is a book that will leave you trying to sort out what's really going on, but to me the open ended story was a great draw.
Third, the book is really about what lies in man's conscious and unconscious, and begs the question: how can we possibly begin to understand the universe without understanding ourselves, individually and as a species, first.
ps: do not see the movie without first reading this book
Show More
occurring with the other two remaining scientists. He himself falls victim to the ocean's influence when upon waking after his first night there to find his dead wife alive and unable to leave his side. You get sucked in from the outset, even though a lot of things are never really explained. You can, however, have a field day guessing and deducing from the clues the author has given you.This is a great book and I highly recommend it. There are certain caveats with this recommendation. First, the book satirizes space theorists, by presenting fictional theoreticians and their contending views, so the book is filled with alternating theories about Solaris as conveyed in research materials Kelvin consults not only regarding the planet, but on the nature of contact with non-human "civilizations." This may seem tedious to some of you, but to me it was very interesting. Second, don't expect cut and dried answers. It is a book that will leave you trying to sort out what's really going on, but to me the open ended story was a great draw.
Third, the book is really about what lies in man's conscious and unconscious, and begs the question: how can we possibly begin to understand the universe without understanding ourselves, individually and as a species, first.
ps: do not see the movie without first reading this book
Show Less
LibraryThing member OleDynamo
The penultimate sf novel for tomorrow. Basically asks what it would be like to meet an alien with god like powers, how would you react.
What is a person? What is the soul? You will be asking yourself after you read this. Don't see either of the movies, they are both seriously flawed and off the mark.
What is a person? What is the soul? You will be asking yourself after you read this. Don't see either of the movies, they are both seriously flawed and off the mark.
LibraryThing member andreablythe
Solaris is a planet that orbits two suns, able only to maintain it's orbit by the fluctuations maintained by the living ocean that inhabits the entire surface of the world. This strange ocean, alien in every sense of the word, defies every theory or definition scientists attempt to use to explain
Enter Kelvin, who upon his arrival discovers that the scientist who hired him is dead under apparently mysterious circumstances. He finds the station disheveled and the two remaining scientist in varying states of paranoia to the extent that they won't even explain what's happened. At first he thinks they may have gone insane, until he has a strange visitor and discovers the truth for himself.
Solaris grabs the reader's attention fairly quickly with the mystery of what's happening at the station, which is a good thing. The intrigue and psychological threat of the visitor is interspersed with the massive amounts of techno/bio babble, which comes up as Kelvin looks into past theories and explorations on the ocean. All of which is vital to the story, because it contributes to the incomprehensibility of an alien that has no comparison to earth or human standards.
This book was deeply fascinating on many levels, from the truly alien alien to the philosophical and psychological concerns brought up by the visitors to they mystery and discovery of what happened and how these three men try to resolve the situation, each perceiving the problem through their unique human lens.
Solaris is not casual reading, but it's a wonderful book and one I highly recommend.
Show More
it. Every answer springs forth more questions, more debate, more theories, building into a flurry of activity on and about the world. As time goes on, scientists remain so confounded by this world and its living ocean that the fire of investigation has died down and only three scientist remain on the station.Enter Kelvin, who upon his arrival discovers that the scientist who hired him is dead under apparently mysterious circumstances. He finds the station disheveled and the two remaining scientist in varying states of paranoia to the extent that they won't even explain what's happened. At first he thinks they may have gone insane, until he has a strange visitor and discovers the truth for himself.
Solaris grabs the reader's attention fairly quickly with the mystery of what's happening at the station, which is a good thing. The intrigue and psychological threat of the visitor is interspersed with the massive amounts of techno/bio babble, which comes up as Kelvin looks into past theories and explorations on the ocean. All of which is vital to the story, because it contributes to the incomprehensibility of an alien that has no comparison to earth or human standards.
This book was deeply fascinating on many levels, from the truly alien alien to the philosophical and psychological concerns brought up by the visitors to they mystery and discovery of what happened and how these three men try to resolve the situation, each perceiving the problem through their unique human lens.
Solaris is not casual reading, but it's a wonderful book and one I highly recommend.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Gwendydd
This starts out as a fascinating and creepy story: the narrator travels to a space station above the planet of Solaris. Most of the planet's surface is covered with a mysterious ocean, which appears to be one giant organism. He finds the space station in a strange state of chaos: one man has
The beginning of the book is very interesting, but it peters out about halfway through... The book spends a lot of time describing the history of the study of Solaris' ocean. Although I admire the creativity and detail Lem puts into this, it unfortunately bogged down the story, and nothing really happened in the second half of the book. I found the end to be very unsatisfying.
I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator was fantastic: however, because the book is so full of scientific theories, it was a little difficult to process as an audiobook - I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had read it on paper.
Show More
committed suicide, and the other two men on the station are in a very strange mental state. Soon he realizes that there are visitors on the space station. In fact, he soon has his own "guest" - an ex-girlfriend who committed suicide when he broke up with her years ago. For the rest of the book, the narrator tries to figure out what this strange person really is, what her relationship to the ocean is, and ultimately, what the ocean is.The beginning of the book is very interesting, but it peters out about halfway through... The book spends a lot of time describing the history of the study of Solaris' ocean. Although I admire the creativity and detail Lem puts into this, it unfortunately bogged down the story, and nothing really happened in the second half of the book. I found the end to be very unsatisfying.
I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator was fantastic: however, because the book is so full of scientific theories, it was a little difficult to process as an audiobook - I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had read it on paper.
Show Less
LibraryThing member antao
Lem's description of the surface of “Solaris” is so extraordinary and poetic that a movie that never shows the planet is missing the point that everything it creates has come from itself as its own form of communication. Lem himself (who ought to know best) said that the novel was about
Lem is perhaps the first great pessimist of hard SF literature (there were probably always more pessimists in the East than in the West, but the overwhelming majority of them were in the field of social science fiction). On another level, Solaris for me is an indictment against the self-centredness of human civilization and modern science, as well as the lack of imagination of the scientific community. The title character of the story, the mysterious planet, is the absolute "alien", whose basic properties are not even understood by the scientists of the distant future. They come up with hundreds of theories that lead nowhere without doing anything about it, and when the “creature” (entity?) contacts them, it does so on a level that people would prefer not to acknowledge. Because despite all its results - perceived or real - the human mind is only one step away from the primitive animal world, but it is by no means certain that this is the same for other sentient entities.
This re-read this time round, highlighted for me a special feature of the novel: it analyses itself on the fly. The "solarist" science that emerges step by step in the story - the collection of fictitious books written about the planet - does not only produce theories, but also practices self-reflection. When a future writer talks about the failure of science, or about its transformation into a messianic religion (because we believe that one day there will be a Grand Theory That Answers Everything), then Lem metaphorically adds marginal notes to his own novel.
Most contemporary SF authors with the arguably exception of Peter Watts to a lesser extent Alastair Reynolds are actually writing about people when they write about "aliens" - extremely distorted, emphasizing certain characteristics of us, or adapting to different physical requirements, but still human-like civilizations - but here Lem laid the foundations of a new trend that did not extend to the vast majority of contemporary space opera.
What about Tarkovsky’s movie? It was the most fucking, pointless, incomprehensible, pretentious boring piece of shit I ever had to endure. Imagine 3 hours of sitting around waiting for something to happen, but it never does. The actors are all on vicodin, the plot is nebulous at best, and the characters are absolutely unrelatable. Was it too much to ask for one single interesting thing to happen throughout the entire movie? Was it too much for it to have provoked any thought other than when does the movie start? As for the gender issue, I'm afraid that by 'flipping' gender in a work that many in the audience know, you simply draw attention to a directorial decision that will too many seem just perverse. “Solaris” was written when it was written, even though it is in a lot of ways timeless, and at that time most space scientists and astronauts were men. Gender flipping may arise from a desire to remove gender issues from a work but in fact succeeds only in making the work about gender. In fact gender is one of the less important aspects of the story. How anyone gets the idea from the Tarkovsky version that Solaris is some sort of embodiment of Female is one of the most 'impregnable' things I’ve heard. Utter bollocks!
NB: For this re-read used the edition by Bill Johnston, directly translated from Polish into English. Still a 5 star read for me after all these years.
SF = Speculative Fiction.
Show More
communication and not about gender. Lem was very much interested on how would humans react to an entity so different from themselves? How unbearable would it be if your only form of communication were to be your own thoughts repeated back to you, in physical form? Kelvin's wife's suicide was an expression of non-communication but when she is resurrected for him, both of them still find it impossible to understand her presence in his life. The planet communicates with its visitors the only way it can, by picking up chaotic human thoughts and recreating what it finds there. But just as you cannot understand any conscious motivation in what the planet does, the planet does not read the difference between memory, desire and guilt, and simply repeats the riddle back to you - which you may well have travelled so far to escape from. Is it in fact conscious at all? Lem was one of the first SF writers to envisage that in travelling out of the earth, we may encounter entities that are so different in biology and behaviour that we may not even realise that they are entities, with no human characteristics at all. China Mieville's 'Embassytown' is another novel presenting us with a completely unhuman species, and as a study of how two species whose language systems are wildly different may communicate (unfortunately miles away from Lem’s masterpiece).Lem is perhaps the first great pessimist of hard SF literature (there were probably always more pessimists in the East than in the West, but the overwhelming majority of them were in the field of social science fiction). On another level, Solaris for me is an indictment against the self-centredness of human civilization and modern science, as well as the lack of imagination of the scientific community. The title character of the story, the mysterious planet, is the absolute "alien", whose basic properties are not even understood by the scientists of the distant future. They come up with hundreds of theories that lead nowhere without doing anything about it, and when the “creature” (entity?) contacts them, it does so on a level that people would prefer not to acknowledge. Because despite all its results - perceived or real - the human mind is only one step away from the primitive animal world, but it is by no means certain that this is the same for other sentient entities.
This re-read this time round, highlighted for me a special feature of the novel: it analyses itself on the fly. The "solarist" science that emerges step by step in the story - the collection of fictitious books written about the planet - does not only produce theories, but also practices self-reflection. When a future writer talks about the failure of science, or about its transformation into a messianic religion (because we believe that one day there will be a Grand Theory That Answers Everything), then Lem metaphorically adds marginal notes to his own novel.
Most contemporary SF authors with the arguably exception of Peter Watts to a lesser extent Alastair Reynolds are actually writing about people when they write about "aliens" - extremely distorted, emphasizing certain characteristics of us, or adapting to different physical requirements, but still human-like civilizations - but here Lem laid the foundations of a new trend that did not extend to the vast majority of contemporary space opera.
What about Tarkovsky’s movie? It was the most fucking, pointless, incomprehensible, pretentious boring piece of shit I ever had to endure. Imagine 3 hours of sitting around waiting for something to happen, but it never does. The actors are all on vicodin, the plot is nebulous at best, and the characters are absolutely unrelatable. Was it too much to ask for one single interesting thing to happen throughout the entire movie? Was it too much for it to have provoked any thought other than when does the movie start? As for the gender issue, I'm afraid that by 'flipping' gender in a work that many in the audience know, you simply draw attention to a directorial decision that will too many seem just perverse. “Solaris” was written when it was written, even though it is in a lot of ways timeless, and at that time most space scientists and astronauts were men. Gender flipping may arise from a desire to remove gender issues from a work but in fact succeeds only in making the work about gender. In fact gender is one of the less important aspects of the story. How anyone gets the idea from the Tarkovsky version that Solaris is some sort of embodiment of Female is one of the most 'impregnable' things I’ve heard. Utter bollocks!
NB: For this re-read used the edition by Bill Johnston, directly translated from Polish into English. Still a 5 star read for me after all these years.
SF = Speculative Fiction.
Show Less
LibraryThing member pgmcc
I was very disappointed when I read Solaris. It is a book I had been looking forward to reading for years.
For me it was too slow and drawn out. There were too many things left for the reader to "understand" or think up for themselves. I found the descriptions of the ever changing planet forms
Some people say "Solaris" was Eastern Europe's response to "2001, A Space Odyssey". Well, I had problems with that movie. There were parts of it that were tedious and other bits that were excellent. I did, however, think the novelisation was brilliant and "The Sentinel", ok!
(2001 was more "good", than "tedious". It pushed the envelope in so many ways and gave us so many new things; both in cinematography and Science Fiction tropes.)
The "Solaris" novel was a good response to the tedious parts of the "2001" movie; it mirrored them well.
For me it was too slow and drawn out. There were too many things left for the reader to "understand" or think up for themselves. I found the descriptions of the ever changing planet forms
Show More
tedious. I had been thinking of watching the George Clooney film, but now I don't think I'll bother.Some people say "Solaris" was Eastern Europe's response to "2001, A Space Odyssey". Well, I had problems with that movie. There were parts of it that were tedious and other bits that were excellent. I did, however, think the novelisation was brilliant and "The Sentinel", ok!
(2001 was more "good", than "tedious". It pushed the envelope in so many ways and gave us so many new things; both in cinematography and Science Fiction tropes.)
The "Solaris" novel was a good response to the tedious parts of the "2001" movie; it mirrored them well.
Show Less
LibraryThing member CBJames
In the 1960's science fiction was about ideas. It was also about rocket ships and invading space aliens, but there was still plenty of room for books about ideas. Even ideas based in actual science. This is still true, but you'd never know judging from what's playing at the local theatre and on
Once in a while, yes, but not like in the 1960's.
Solaris is about a thinking planet that knows us better than we know ourselves. It's not really the planet that thinks but the ocean sized life form that appears to make up the planet, but that's besides the point. The planet can read the minds of the men in the space station orbiting it. More than that, it can read their subconscious minds. It knows things about them that even they do not know: their secrets, their sins, their desires, the things they try to deny about themselves.
For reasons the men never understand, Solaris begins sending people to them, people from their past. In the narrator's case a girlfriend who died years before. The two have unfinished business, we suspect the narrator is somehow the cause of the girlfriend's death. Because Solaris knows her only from the narrator's memories, she is imperfect. She's just like he remembers her, but she is not quite like herself. She's the girl he remembers falling in love with, not the actual girl he loved.
The temptation lies in whether or not the narrator should accept her, allow her to live or run from her. Is she a trap sent by the planet to destroy their mission or is she a gesture of peace, and attempt to establish friendship? The narrator only knows that he is falling in love with the girl before him.
Imagine you could have an old love back again. Imagine that old love to be the person you wanted, the person you enjoy remembering, not the actual person, but the one you thought was the true one before everything went wrong. Is giving you that person an gesture of peace or an act of aggression?
You won't find anything like that on the Sci Fi channel.
Show More
cable television. Not much in the way of ideas there. Once in a while, yes, but not like in the 1960's.
Solaris is about a thinking planet that knows us better than we know ourselves. It's not really the planet that thinks but the ocean sized life form that appears to make up the planet, but that's besides the point. The planet can read the minds of the men in the space station orbiting it. More than that, it can read their subconscious minds. It knows things about them that even they do not know: their secrets, their sins, their desires, the things they try to deny about themselves.
For reasons the men never understand, Solaris begins sending people to them, people from their past. In the narrator's case a girlfriend who died years before. The two have unfinished business, we suspect the narrator is somehow the cause of the girlfriend's death. Because Solaris knows her only from the narrator's memories, she is imperfect. She's just like he remembers her, but she is not quite like herself. She's the girl he remembers falling in love with, not the actual girl he loved.
The temptation lies in whether or not the narrator should accept her, allow her to live or run from her. Is she a trap sent by the planet to destroy their mission or is she a gesture of peace, and attempt to establish friendship? The narrator only knows that he is falling in love with the girl before him.
Imagine you could have an old love back again. Imagine that old love to be the person you wanted, the person you enjoy remembering, not the actual person, but the one you thought was the true one before everything went wrong. Is giving you that person an gesture of peace or an act of aggression?
You won't find anything like that on the Sci Fi channel.
Show Less
LibraryThing member BayardUS
I had tried Lem before in the form of The Cyberiad and A Perfect Vacuum and wasn't able to get through either. I'm glad I didn't give up on him, though, as Solaris is one of the finest pieces of science fiction I have ever had the pleasure of reading.
Lem captures true otherness with the planet
Of course if an alien alien is all that Lem accomplished with this book it might not be that great overall, but luckily he uses this book and the titular alien to explore what it means to be human, as the great works of science fiction are wont to do. We learn how man has studied Solaris for years, ascribing theories to it and attempting to understand it, always having made assumptions about the planet's desire to reciprocate that prove untrue. Kris Kelvin arrives at the station hovering above Solaris to continue that research, only to find that the planet has created new manifestations from the memories of the station's few inhabitants. Revenants from the past are given new life- but are they human? Or even alive at all?
The opening of this book is terrifying as few books are, all the while raising questions about what makes something alive, and how we should respond to the negative memories that haunt every person's brain. The closing of the book also leaves many questions to ponder. The book trusts the reader, always a plus. In sum the book inspired a myriad of emotions in me as well as left me with much to think about, an impressive feat for such a slim volume.
If you like science fiction at all, read Solaris. It's not just a great book in the genre, it's a great book period.
Lem captures true otherness with the planet
Show More
Solaris, while nearly every other science fiction book I've read feature aliens that are the literary equivalent of guys in rubber masks. It's almost infuriating to read science fiction featuring these kind of "aliens" now, since Lem showed me how it's done right.Of course if an alien alien is all that Lem accomplished with this book it might not be that great overall, but luckily he uses this book and the titular alien to explore what it means to be human, as the great works of science fiction are wont to do. We learn how man has studied Solaris for years, ascribing theories to it and attempting to understand it, always having made assumptions about the planet's desire to reciprocate that prove untrue. Kris Kelvin arrives at the station hovering above Solaris to continue that research, only to find that the planet has created new manifestations from the memories of the station's few inhabitants. Revenants from the past are given new life- but are they human? Or even alive at all?
The opening of this book is terrifying as few books are, all the while raising questions about what makes something alive, and how we should respond to the negative memories that haunt every person's brain. The closing of the book also leaves many questions to ponder. The book trusts the reader, always a plus. In sum the book inspired a myriad of emotions in me as well as left me with much to think about, an impressive feat for such a slim volume.
If you like science fiction at all, read Solaris. It's not just a great book in the genre, it's a great book period.
Show Less
LibraryThing member thorold
Lem builds a complicated philosophical novel around one of the hoariest chestnuts in science-fiction, the "first contact" between humans and an alien life-form. What happens, Lem asks himself, if the alien life-form is so different from us in every possible way that we find we have nothing
Astrophysicists and planetary scientists have been studying the planet Solaris for decades, having first noticed it because it is in a stable three-body orbit that appears to contravene the laws of physics. It seems that the planet's "ocean" is actively correcting the orbit to optimise conditions for itself, and scientists are eventually forced to the conclusion that the ocean itself is a planet-sized organism. Through a new arrival on the planet, the psychologist Dr Kelvin, Lem takes us through the development of human ideas about Solaris. Which parallel, in curious ways, the history of human ideas about ourselves and our own world...
This wasn't really what I was expecting from a novel about an alien planet: the foreground story about the research station and the strange events that Kelvin encounters there is really only a skeleton, and the bulk of the book turns out to be a sophisticated, ironic meditation on the history of ideas (and the follies of science) that wouldn't have been out of place in Swift. And some unexpectedly poetic language when describing the strange and beautiful world of Solaris and the human attempts to impose meaning on it. Very interesting.
In passing, but of course quite irrelevant, it was fun to find a lot of very 1960s peculiarities in Lem's description of the "future" - the research station's library is full of paper books and microfilms, the electronics they use has to warm up its tubes before it does anything, they record electronic signals on photographic film, and the researchers obtain privacy by hanging a cloth in front of the screens of their video-phones...
(I read this in German because that was what happened to come to hand first; after reading it, I found out that there is an ongoing controversy about the 1970 English translation, which was based on a French version and is said to be of inferior quality.)
Show More
meaningful to say to each other, and no way to express it even if we had something to say? Astrophysicists and planetary scientists have been studying the planet Solaris for decades, having first noticed it because it is in a stable three-body orbit that appears to contravene the laws of physics. It seems that the planet's "ocean" is actively correcting the orbit to optimise conditions for itself, and scientists are eventually forced to the conclusion that the ocean itself is a planet-sized organism. Through a new arrival on the planet, the psychologist Dr Kelvin, Lem takes us through the development of human ideas about Solaris. Which parallel, in curious ways, the history of human ideas about ourselves and our own world...
This wasn't really what I was expecting from a novel about an alien planet: the foreground story about the research station and the strange events that Kelvin encounters there is really only a skeleton, and the bulk of the book turns out to be a sophisticated, ironic meditation on the history of ideas (and the follies of science) that wouldn't have been out of place in Swift. And some unexpectedly poetic language when describing the strange and beautiful world of Solaris and the human attempts to impose meaning on it. Very interesting.
In passing, but of course quite irrelevant, it was fun to find a lot of very 1960s peculiarities in Lem's description of the "future" - the research station's library is full of paper books and microfilms, the electronics they use has to warm up its tubes before it does anything, they record electronic signals on photographic film, and the researchers obtain privacy by hanging a cloth in front of the screens of their video-phones...
(I read this in German because that was what happened to come to hand first; after reading it, I found out that there is an ongoing controversy about the 1970 English translation, which was based on a French version and is said to be of inferior quality.)
Show Less
LibraryThing member gbill
Kris Kelvin arrives at a station hovering above the planet Solaris, which has been studied and debated for centuries. Its life form, essentially the planet’s vast ocean, is very different from anything else encountered or conceived. It seems intelligent, but its actions and the swirling,
The book is top-notch science-fiction, and it’s easy to see why directors Andrei Tarkovsky and later Steven Soderbergh were drawn to it. It’s creative in concept, and probes the nature of sentience, God, and the limits of mankind, so perfectly captured in the Latin phrase expression “ignoramus et ignorabimus” (we do not know, and will not know). Our inherent anthropomorphizing of all we see is an aspect of this, as is the limit of our understanding of our own selves. The book also delves into loss, and what it means to be happy, even if happiness is artificially created. It’s taut and clean, though it has perhaps one too many sections devoted to the various debates from different camps of scientists known as Solaricists. More interesting for me would have been to get more visibility into some of the other visitors, but perhaps Lem does this to heighten the introspection and inwardness of the novel.
Quotes:
On god:
“…do you happen to know if there was ever a belief in an … imperfect god?”
“What do you mean by imperfect?” Snow frowned. “In a way all the gods of the old religions were imperfect, considering that their attributes were amplified human ones. The God of the Old Testament, for instance, required humble submission and sacrifices, and was jealous of other gods. The Greek gods had fits of sulks and family quarrels, and they were just as imperfect as mortals…”
“No,” I interrupted. “I’m not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candor of his human creators, but one whose imperfections represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that will lead to horror. He is a … sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first.”
On intelligence:
“For some time, there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the ‘thinking ocean’ of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of ‘cosmic yogi,’ a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence. The notion was incorrect, for the living ocean was active. Not, it is true, according to human ideas – it did not build cities or bridges, nor did it manufacture flying machines. It did not try to reduce distances, nor was it concerned with the conquest of Space (the ultimate criterion, some people thought, of man’s superiority). But it was engaged in a never-ending process of transformation, an ‘ontological metamorphosis.’”
Show More
fantastic structures it can create, are hard to decipher. There are new developments following some rogue experiments on the part of some scientists stationed there, which have resulted in “visitors” to the station. The visitors are highly personalized to Kelvin and the two men still stationed there, but I won’t say more about who/what they are, partly because Lem (wisely) has a degree of ambiguity in the story, and partly to avoid spoiling it.The book is top-notch science-fiction, and it’s easy to see why directors Andrei Tarkovsky and later Steven Soderbergh were drawn to it. It’s creative in concept, and probes the nature of sentience, God, and the limits of mankind, so perfectly captured in the Latin phrase expression “ignoramus et ignorabimus” (we do not know, and will not know). Our inherent anthropomorphizing of all we see is an aspect of this, as is the limit of our understanding of our own selves. The book also delves into loss, and what it means to be happy, even if happiness is artificially created. It’s taut and clean, though it has perhaps one too many sections devoted to the various debates from different camps of scientists known as Solaricists. More interesting for me would have been to get more visibility into some of the other visitors, but perhaps Lem does this to heighten the introspection and inwardness of the novel.
Quotes:
On god:
“…do you happen to know if there was ever a belief in an … imperfect god?”
“What do you mean by imperfect?” Snow frowned. “In a way all the gods of the old religions were imperfect, considering that their attributes were amplified human ones. The God of the Old Testament, for instance, required humble submission and sacrifices, and was jealous of other gods. The Greek gods had fits of sulks and family quarrels, and they were just as imperfect as mortals…”
“No,” I interrupted. “I’m not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candor of his human creators, but one whose imperfections represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that will lead to horror. He is a … sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first.”
On intelligence:
“For some time, there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the ‘thinking ocean’ of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of ‘cosmic yogi,’ a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence. The notion was incorrect, for the living ocean was active. Not, it is true, according to human ideas – it did not build cities or bridges, nor did it manufacture flying machines. It did not try to reduce distances, nor was it concerned with the conquest of Space (the ultimate criterion, some people thought, of man’s superiority). But it was engaged in a never-ending process of transformation, an ‘ontological metamorphosis.’”
Show Less
LibraryThing member mojomomma
Hated this!
LibraryThing member bhutton
You would never know that this was written in 1961 Poland, it holds up so well. A haunting story of what its like to try to understand a truly alien intelligence and more importantly how a small group of people deal with reality breaking down around them while recognising what is happening.
The
The
Show More
audio version is a great use of the medium as the story is told from the first person. Show Less
LibraryThing member RandyStafford
My reactions to reading this novel in 2002.
Solaris, Stanislaw Lem -- This is not the first Lem I’ve read. I read some while I was in high school and had one of two reactions. It was boring or it was quite funny. I suspect I would have found this rather boring in high school. I liked it now,
“The Open-Ended Parables of Stanislaw Lem and ‘Solaris’”, Darko Suvin -- This is the first Suvin I’ve read, and, given what I’d heard about him, I expected jargon-ridden critical prose, but it was actually pretty plain spoken. It’s a useful guide to Lem’s works, especially the sf, as of its date of composition, 1970. (Solaris was the first Lem novel to be translated to English.) Lem’s fascination with technology is discussed, particularly cybernetic technology, and he’s written several non-fiction books on science. Lem seems rather well-read in British and American sf of the 1950s but gave up Western sf in disgust in 1965. Given what I’ve read of Lem in this novel and elsewhere, the comparisons to Olaf Stapledon and Swift seem appropriate, but I was surprised that Lem shows the influence of Jules Verne on his earlier works. Suvin has a briefly, but useful, discussion on Solaris itself. Suvin rightly notes that the novel’s beginning uses something like a detective-story plot model. (He assumes too much, though, in saying that all three scientists aboard the Solaris station are haunted by female simulacras of those they have lost or slighted. We only know that the other two have Doubles, not there identities.) He is right in that the novel talks about the Holy Contact when its human characters and the simulacras built from their thoughts don’t always agree or communicate well. Suvin says that Lem’s work characteristically notes that Western systems of thought are open-ended, are not capable of having the final say, will encounter novel circumstances they are unsuited to explain or predict or control. In some writers that would be a call to mysticism. Here, however, Lem’s diction and tone and details is all of a scientific nature. Science may not be able to explain Solaris, but it must try to even if it can’t. I think Suvin is less persuasive when he argues the novel’s end refutes both a technocratic notion of progress and a “decadent love of easeful death” (whatever that may be exactly). He sees these two philosophies allegedly represented by apocalyptic American sf (he uses, in quotes, “cosmic inferno” -- a term I’ve not heard and, perhaps, a reference to Kingsley Amis’ sf critical book New Maps of Hell) and Soviet sf’s utopianism. Allegedly, Lem and his fellow Eastern Europeans, exist not only in some geographical middle ground between the two superpowers but their types of sf. To me, this sounds like wishful thinking about the aborted Prague Spring that occurred shortly before Suvin published this piece. My suspicion is further aroused by Suvin’s claim that Lem’s refusal to adopt the promise of either philosophy is justified because “the brightest hopes of humanity” degenerate into Stalinist purges and the My Lai massacre. Apart from the objectionable moral equivalency, I don’t see how any tragic despair allegedly argued for in this novel can help us. Maybe it can. But I don’t see Lem making that kind of argument here. Still, it’s a useful essay.
Solaris, Stanislaw Lem -- This is not the first Lem I’ve read. I read some while I was in high school and had one of two reactions. It was boring or it was quite funny. I suspect I would have found this rather boring in high school. I liked it now,
Show More
though. However, I am curious as to why it’s translated from the French by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox and not translated from Polish, the language Lem writes in. The first part of the novel, as the narrator Kris Kelvin encounters the evasive Snow, sights mysterious women, hears the sounds of unseen strangers, and wonders what the mysterious wilderness of Solaris is up to, reminded me a bit of H. P. Lovecraft. The middle and the end, when the narrator ponders the difference between a simulcra of his dead love Rheya, becoming increasingly like the original, is definitely a venture into Philip K. Dick territory (a writer Lem admires). The novel was fast moving and had an austere, feeling about it. (I liked Lem’s last line, as Kelvin waits to see if the Rheya simulcra will return after he and his fellow scientists have driven it off: “I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.”) Lem does a nice job of weaving in the past history of Solaris explorations and theories of its origin with Kelvin’s dealings with Rheya and his fellow scientists. About the only thing that seems definitely proved, at least to the narrator, is that Solaris is, indeed, sentient. The simulcras it sends out -- and, significantly, we never see any of the other live scientists’ (we do see what appears to be the dead Gibarian’s companion) -- could be probes, instruments of “psychic vivisection”, or toys to amuse the mind of Solaris. At novel’s end, little is known about Solaris apart from its sentience. Its motives are ambiguous. It could be a solipsistic creature, the end product of a decadent civilization, or an entity exploring dimensions we aren’t aware of. I liked the speculation that man’s exploration of space was to search for a mirror and not something genuinely alien and different. (The same might be said of most sf.) I liked Lem’s speculation that our bodies may limit how we can even think of the universe much less perceive it even with mathematics and physics. I liked the narrator’s understandable dilemma and apathy about what to do with the seeming resurrection, mostly accurate, of a long lost love he may have driven to suicide. His intellectual awareness of her as a fake is there, but her image and actions trigger the responses the original Rheya did. Snow may urge Kelvin to stop being emotional and to proceed with driving away the Rheya creature, but he’s not sure he wants to. That unresolved dilemma, along with the unresolved nature of Solaris (thus Solaris the alien mystery reflecting, in mirror fashion, the mysteries of human bonding and love), is still there in the last line. One speculation about Solaris is that it’s a fast computing machine and that reminded me of a similar, planet-wide intelligence in Gregory Benford’s “A Dance to Strange Musics”. In Benford’s story, the physical nature of the planet is known as well as its sentience, but its thoughts are unknowable (we are, its memorable line says, like ants crawling across an encyclopedia next to it). Here, we are not sure of Solaris’ intent or exact nature, only its alien intelligence. Given that Benford is a part-time critic of sf, I would be surprised if he has not read Solaris and that “A Dance to Strange Musics” is not a response to it. “The Open-Ended Parables of Stanislaw Lem and ‘Solaris’”, Darko Suvin -- This is the first Suvin I’ve read, and, given what I’d heard about him, I expected jargon-ridden critical prose, but it was actually pretty plain spoken. It’s a useful guide to Lem’s works, especially the sf, as of its date of composition, 1970. (Solaris was the first Lem novel to be translated to English.) Lem’s fascination with technology is discussed, particularly cybernetic technology, and he’s written several non-fiction books on science. Lem seems rather well-read in British and American sf of the 1950s but gave up Western sf in disgust in 1965. Given what I’ve read of Lem in this novel and elsewhere, the comparisons to Olaf Stapledon and Swift seem appropriate, but I was surprised that Lem shows the influence of Jules Verne on his earlier works. Suvin has a briefly, but useful, discussion on Solaris itself. Suvin rightly notes that the novel’s beginning uses something like a detective-story plot model. (He assumes too much, though, in saying that all three scientists aboard the Solaris station are haunted by female simulacras of those they have lost or slighted. We only know that the other two have Doubles, not there identities.) He is right in that the novel talks about the Holy Contact when its human characters and the simulacras built from their thoughts don’t always agree or communicate well. Suvin says that Lem’s work characteristically notes that Western systems of thought are open-ended, are not capable of having the final say, will encounter novel circumstances they are unsuited to explain or predict or control. In some writers that would be a call to mysticism. Here, however, Lem’s diction and tone and details is all of a scientific nature. Science may not be able to explain Solaris, but it must try to even if it can’t. I think Suvin is less persuasive when he argues the novel’s end refutes both a technocratic notion of progress and a “decadent love of easeful death” (whatever that may be exactly). He sees these two philosophies allegedly represented by apocalyptic American sf (he uses, in quotes, “cosmic inferno” -- a term I’ve not heard and, perhaps, a reference to Kingsley Amis’ sf critical book New Maps of Hell) and Soviet sf’s utopianism. Allegedly, Lem and his fellow Eastern Europeans, exist not only in some geographical middle ground between the two superpowers but their types of sf. To me, this sounds like wishful thinking about the aborted Prague Spring that occurred shortly before Suvin published this piece. My suspicion is further aroused by Suvin’s claim that Lem’s refusal to adopt the promise of either philosophy is justified because “the brightest hopes of humanity” degenerate into Stalinist purges and the My Lai massacre. Apart from the objectionable moral equivalency, I don’t see how any tragic despair allegedly argued for in this novel can help us. Maybe it can. But I don’t see Lem making that kind of argument here. Still, it’s a useful essay.
Show Less
LibraryThing member William345
This is the classic gothic horror haunted house story revisited with an SF twist. It's a testament to the obtuseness of mankind, particularly unemotional, Cold-War era, scientific man. Three scientists on the remote planet Solaris seek contact with the lone enormous sensate creature occupying it --
Show More
the ocean. All sorts of experiments are tried over a century or more, but the planet and the humans never achieve, at least to the humans' satisfaction, adequate evidence of a measurable intellectual exchange. The ocean busies itself morphing into these massive shapes -- geometic, organic, and otherwise -- which strike the reader as expressive, but which are nevertheless inarticulate in human terms. When the scientists start bombarding the ocean with xrays, for lack of a better idea, the planet sends to each of them a visitor from an emotionally charged period of their own lives. The simulacra are derived from their memories and dreams. Kris Kelvin has just arrived on the planet. In his case, the simulacrum assumes the identical physical appearance and personality of his late wife, Rheya, who took her own life years before. The simulacra obviously constitute contact of a very high order, an enormously rich opportunity, it seems to me, to communicate one on one with the entity. But the horrified scientists never see that. They never talk to their visitors. They never come clean. Their fear drives them, purely fear, so all they can think of is a way to destroy the visitors. Therefore, they miss their chance. How sick and sad is that? This reader came to understand what was necessary after about page 100 or so. Yet the book drones on for another hundred pages. The novel is imaginative, certainly, but it runs out of ideas far too soon. The scientists never get it. One grows disgusted with them. The book never seems to end. Show Less
LibraryThing member Kristelh
I listened to the audio book which was released in 2011 and translated by Bill Johnston, providing the first actual translation from the Polish to English. The other translations were translated from the French which was translated from the Polish. This translation is also available in an e-book
Lem the author, wrote a philosophical novel but Solaris also is a science fiction novel and it explores communication with an alien. The book starts with Kris Kelvin’s arrival by spaceship Promethus to the space station of Solaris. Solaris is an ocean and its atmosphere is not oxygenated. As Kelvin is flying to Solaris he misses several things he had hoped to see, the book starts with failure to perceive and communicate. When he arrives he is greeted with confusion, decline and disorder. One scientist is barricaded in and another is drunk and afraid. The man that Kris was to work with on the station has died.
May contain spoilers*************************
The people on the space station have “visitors”. Kelvin notices child sounds coming from the room where Dr. Sartorius is hiding. The other, Dr. Snaut talks about visitors and Kris notices his bloody knuckles. Kris also sees a giant black woman who is connected to the dead scientist. Soon Kris is visited by his own, Harey. We soon learn that Harie had been Kris’s partner and that she suicided after Kris had left her and told her she wasn’t brave enough to kill herself. Kris discovers the injection site where the poison was injected and her dress has no zipper. The ocean is creating these visitors from reading their minds. Kris understands this but becomes attached to this Harey.
There are many philosophical themes in this book, one being a defective God.
Themes: failures to perceive, breakdowns in communication, puzzling nature of reality and limits of science.
First sentence: At 1900 hours, ship’s time, I made my way to the launching bay.
Last words: I knew nothing, and I persisted int he faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.
Comment on movie: I have not seen the movie. I understand George Clooney plays Kelvin. I also understand that the movie was close to the book but did not capture the author’s vision and therefore this is one case where reading the book may be beneficial to understanding the movie to its fullest.
Opinion: Very good
Read: October 2014
Show More
and is approved by the Lem estate. The audio was narrated by Alessandro Juliani and I think it was well done. Lem the author, wrote a philosophical novel but Solaris also is a science fiction novel and it explores communication with an alien. The book starts with Kris Kelvin’s arrival by spaceship Promethus to the space station of Solaris. Solaris is an ocean and its atmosphere is not oxygenated. As Kelvin is flying to Solaris he misses several things he had hoped to see, the book starts with failure to perceive and communicate. When he arrives he is greeted with confusion, decline and disorder. One scientist is barricaded in and another is drunk and afraid. The man that Kris was to work with on the station has died.
May contain spoilers*************************
The people on the space station have “visitors”. Kelvin notices child sounds coming from the room where Dr. Sartorius is hiding. The other, Dr. Snaut talks about visitors and Kris notices his bloody knuckles. Kris also sees a giant black woman who is connected to the dead scientist. Soon Kris is visited by his own, Harey. We soon learn that Harie had been Kris’s partner and that she suicided after Kris had left her and told her she wasn’t brave enough to kill herself. Kris discovers the injection site where the poison was injected and her dress has no zipper. The ocean is creating these visitors from reading their minds. Kris understands this but becomes attached to this Harey.
There are many philosophical themes in this book, one being a defective God.
Themes: failures to perceive, breakdowns in communication, puzzling nature of reality and limits of science.
First sentence: At 1900 hours, ship’s time, I made my way to the launching bay.
Last words: I knew nothing, and I persisted int he faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.
Comment on movie: I have not seen the movie. I understand George Clooney plays Kelvin. I also understand that the movie was close to the book but did not capture the author’s vision and therefore this is one case where reading the book may be beneficial to understanding the movie to its fullest.
Opinion: Very good
Read: October 2014
Show Less
LibraryThing member mrtall
Well-imagined and creepy, this exploration of a 'first contact' with something truly alien works on several levels. Highly recommended.
LibraryThing member www.snigel.nu
One of my favourite novels of all. I like everything about it except the tedious descriptions of the ocean. I ought to reread it.
LibraryThing member clong
Solaris was the first Stanislaw Lem book to be widely distributed in America and is recognized as a sci-fi classic. It is a quick read, without much action, but much rumination on science and scientists. The planet Solaris takes snippets from the minds of the scientists who are supposed to be
I have a hard time seeing this working well as a movie, but from the cover of the edition I bought, it looks like they turned this into a "love story in space" movie starring George Clooney. I can only hope that I manage to avoid ever seeing it!
Show More
studying it, and uses what it learns from these snippets to experiment on the scientists. At a fundamental level Solaris is about how scientists' past/memories/beliefs impact their work. In a way it is asking "how can we (as individuals and as a race) expect to understand the universe around us if we don't understand ourselves?" I have a hard time seeing this working well as a movie, but from the cover of the edition I bought, it looks like they turned this into a "love story in space" movie starring George Clooney. I can only hope that I manage to avoid ever seeing it!
Show Less
LibraryThing member normaleistiko
Riveting mystery. I could not leave my chair, even though I was viewing it as a DVD at home. George Clooney is a wonderful actor in this. The directing is clear and compelling...each scene. This well paced movie is based on a book (and was made into a film in Russia) by Russian film maker and
Show More
writer, [Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky made this extremely deliberate science-fiction epic, an adaptation of a novel by Stanislaw Lem, a Russian film). Both the Russian film and the USA film are excellent. I think I just loved the story. Show Less
LibraryThing member euang
CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE THIRD KIND...: Having seen the film that starred George Clooney and was based upon this book, and having found it wanting, I decided to go to the source. I am glad that I did, as it is certainly better as a book than it is as a film. It is also far more profound than the
This book is much more than that, covering many themes. It is, first and foremost, about contact with an alien entity and communication of a type beyond our comprehension. Is it friend or foe? Who can say, as the source of the communication makes its pitch based upon an individual's memories, some good, and some bad? What it is communicating remains unfathomable. Still, the book provides much food for thought.
Show More
film, which concentrated on the love story. This book is much more than that, covering many themes. It is, first and foremost, about contact with an alien entity and communication of a type beyond our comprehension. Is it friend or foe? Who can say, as the source of the communication makes its pitch based upon an individual's memories, some good, and some bad? What it is communicating remains unfathomable. Still, the book provides much food for thought.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Shrike58
Having finally gotten around to reading this ostensible classic, I have to agree that this examination of what happens when the limits of human consciousness and comprehension run into the weirdness of the universe is classic. That said this novel does feel like a period piece, seeing as even the
I'd also like to see an analysis of this book as a product of post-Stalinist Communist culture, with the contrast between the radiant tomorrow and the shabby present on one hand, and the tragedies that cannot be spoken of on the other.
Show More
most challenging themes of the story have long since been absorbed into the wider field. What particularly sticks with me is the dead-pan satire that Lem uses to jab at the rituals and beliefs of the scientific community, closely followed by the upending that Lem gives to exploration as a triumph of the human spirit. Kevin Kelvin's arrival on a research station gone to hell in a hand basket still has some shock effect, even if the behavior of the characters doesn't always seem quite plausible. I'd also like to see an analysis of this book as a product of post-Stalinist Communist culture, with the contrast between the radiant tomorrow and the shabby present on one hand, and the tragedies that cannot be spoken of on the other.
Show Less
LibraryThing member angry-muppet
I should start by saying that I haven't seen the film version of this book, but after reading it I am quite keen to see the film.
This was a very interesting and intriguing science fiction novel. It kept me thinking throughout and it certainly wasn't predictable. The isolation of the characters was
This was a very interesting and intriguing science fiction novel. It kept me thinking throughout and it certainly wasn't predictable. The isolation of the characters was
Show More
well portrayed which led me to be very sympathetic to the lead character. Show Less
LibraryThing member shadowofthewind
A mysterious ocean studied for years yields no mysteries. The planet, solaris has been studied for hundreds of years, but scientists have discovered nothing more. The theories are diverse. A scientist goes to the space station to explore the planet. In the end he learns more about the nature of
Show More
love and himself. It's a sad and melancholy story. The study of the planet frustrates all involved. Kelvin and others on the station begin to see people from their past. Most notably Kelvin sees his long dead wife, dead from a suicide. All the characters despise these creation and seek to get rid of them. They discover they are manifestations of the ocean. Kelvin is different he begins to love this creation, even if it is a mainestation of his own mind made physical by the oceans powers. The others find a way to destroy these manifestations. Kelvin's wife asks to be destroyed. He is then faced with the reality that he will never see her again. Even when he visits the ocean its waves divert away from him. Love lost is lost forever. Last passage:We all know we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all of our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is dtest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis via sex non armoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into a jukebox...Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air that she breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hope for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that had remained. I did not know what acheivements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not passed. Show Less
LibraryThing member br77rino
Solaris is a planet far away from us, and the first one that mankind has visited that exhibits signs of life, though they are mysterious and hard to comprehend despite decades of research. Those who go to study it ... (no spoilers here!). Definitely a good read, and different from the movies, which
Show More
I enjoyed as well (both versions: the 1972 Russian one, and the 2002 English one with G Clooney). Interestingly, the book, the first movie, and the second movie, all have significantly different ways of telling the story. So if you like any of them, you should seek out the other 2. Show Less
Awards
Audie Award (Finalist — Science Fiction — 2012)
Geffen Award (2003)
The Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read (Science Fiction and Fantasy)
501 Must-Read Books (Emma Beare, 2006) (Science Fiction)
RUSA CODES Listen List (Listen-Alike — Listen-Alike to "Fractal Noise" — 2024)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1961
Physical description
223 p.; 18.2 cm
ISBN
8774900471 / 9788774900474
Local notes
Omslag: Peter Sugar
Omslaget viser en astronaut og en kvindeskikkelse, begge indhyldet i tåge og med nogle skarpe konstruerede former i baggrunden, måske en by.
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Oversat fra polsk "Solaris" af Rose-Marie Tvermoes
Notabene science fiction, bind 3
Omslaget viser en astronaut og en kvindeskikkelse, begge indhyldet i tåge og med nogle skarpe konstruerede former i baggrunden, måske en by.
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Oversat fra polsk "Solaris" af Rose-Marie Tvermoes
Notabene science fiction, bind 3
Similar in this library
Pages
223
DDC/MDS
| 891.8537 |