Stefen’s Bookclub – February

Solaris
by Stanislaw Lem

I had other plans for the book we would be discussing for our first meet of 2018, but for a bunch reasons that one will have to be next year sometime. Instead I brought this one forward. I was intending to have a few more books between the October book Blindsight and this one, because they’re both about alien first contact and the difficulties of communication. I don’t think we’ll have too much time for comparisons however as there in plenty to unpack in the book itself. Written in Lem‘s native Polish in 1961. In 1970 an English translation of the 1964 French translation was published and remains, despite some criticism, the only version in print and is the one we have copies of. In 2011 Audible commissioned, with the approval of the Lem estate a new translation for their audio production. The translator was Bill Johnson, and his version was later released briefly as an e-book.

Solaris begins with the arrival of a scientist on a space station orbiting an alien world. It is completely covered with an ocean with unusual properties. Efforts to discover why have so far been unsuccessful and the researchers have recently been doing more observation than investigation. Frustrated, they start to consider unauthorised alternatives.

There has been a lot written about this book, as well as two movie adaptations. It’s only short, at a little over two hundred pages, but I think there will still be plenty to talk about.