Posts Tagged ‘Oscar Wilde’
The Orbit of One’s Soul
Posted on: January 4, 2020
I finished Lem’s Solaris shortly after drafting my last blog post. I hadn’t realized how close I was to the end of the book!
I’d been warned (thanks wikipedia) that the books ends rather abruptly. And it does! the end is going along nicely, and then it just BAM, ends. I was like “where’s the rest of the story?” but no, all the rest of the pages in the book were blank.
Lemme give you some context, plot-wise. Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, has traveled out to the Station on the ocean planet Solaris, to continue his studies. There are only a few other scientists on the station, and when Kris arrives, he learns the man he hoped to meet and study with, Gibarian, has committed suicide.
All sorts off other weird things happen, that I won’t spoil, because they are the meat of the story. And if I mention them, I will color your experience, and I don’t want to do that.
Cool things about the station: there is a library! and it is full of paper books! When Kris needs to kill time, or just needs a quiet place to think, he goes to the library! The station also has video calling, you can basically Skype/Facetime other people in other locations in the Station. pretty neat!
Scientists have been studying Solaris for decades. We’ve convinced ourselves that the planet-covering ocean is sentient, and maybe intelligent, and that when the ocean solidifies itself and sometimes imitates us, that it is trying to communicate with us. The strange happenings on the station, is that also the Ocean trying to communicate with us?
The whole concept of the novel is that there are things humanity will never understand, that we need to be at peace with the fact that we will never be able to communicate with Solaris, that we may never be able to communicate with an alien intelligence, ever. We can’t seem to figure out the best way to make contact with Solaris, and Solaris sure as hell has no freakin’ idea how to communicate with us in a way that makes any sense. We can observe each other, we can attempt to communicate, but we will never succeed. Failure is in itself, the knowledge that the thing you are trying isn’t working, and to try something else.
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