I like the Solaristics info dumping, it makes the book serious and thorough. It makes me think about papers and peer reviews, it completes the description of Solaris which the movies can't do.
You might be right about this. In fact, one of the things I loved about the book was the level of detail in terms of learning about the planet and the experiments the scientists did. You get so much more than you do in the film. Thanks for watching! :)
Wonderfull review, I gotta buy this book now, it kinda reminds me of The Expense by James S.A Corey (there is a TV series by now), not the plot but the idea of the unknown being something that we can't comprehend. Thanks for the video.
I think Solaris was sort of taunting the humans with their regrets to drive them mad so that they’d leave and stop studying it … such an amazing book, great summary as well good sir 👍🫡
I think that the planet just plays and is curious, but the psychological consequences for humans which are confronted by the results of that play are mind breaking. It is a great way to show how limited we humans are. So Lem almost becomes superhuman himself by creating the unthinkable. It is such a brilliant pscyhological thriller.
This is a good review. Solaris is probably the best sci fi book because it transcends the genre barrier and it goes deep into psychological and philosophical core of the human mind. The themes in Solaris are almost the same as in all the rest of his books - the inability to achieve the first contact. or, maybe better said, the inability to understand someone so different from us, which is probably, if we ever meet alien life how it is going to be. The proof of this is almost 8 million life forms on earth, and there is more and more evidence almost by the day, that a lot of species we share this planet with are intelligent only not in the way we think of intelligence. I mean we are teaching dolphins a sign language - dolphins don't have arms!" Anyway, I think that's were Lem was coming from, and of course from the inability to understand each other, which is maybe even worse now than it was during Lem's time, during the cold war era.
Totally agree! Unfortunately I also agree with your last point, although in our case I think this inability to understand one another has a lot to do with how we communicate now (e.g. social media, text, slack channels). Thanks for watching. :)
I'm so suprised that in english translation the name of Kelvin's wife is Rhea while in polish original it is Harey. Absolutely no idea why they changed it
Yeah, I have two copies. One, the older translation, has Harey, and the other, a newer translation has Rheya or Rhea, I forget how it's spelled. Totally strange to change it, I agree
The original English translation is an abridged re-translation of the Polish->French translation, so it is possibly a phonetic adaptation made in French, retained in the English.
I read the book last week and was aptly stunned. A rare experience of being grabbed by the throat and hit repeatedly on the head till breathlessness. Wow!
I wanted to read this book for a long time and I finally did recently. It's an exceptional short novel that I'd recommend to any psychological sci fi fan. This book hade some great tense moments bordering on psychological horror. I was slightly disappointed when the planet turned out to be rather somewhat wholesome. I am a big fan of the Silent Hill 2 game, it's actually my favorite story and after reading Solaris I'm 100% sure that it was the core source material for the world of Silent Hill and especially for the tragic love story of Silent Hill 2. It's basically the same story but going even deeper into the feelings of regret and punishment.
That's a great point about the planet turning out to be rather wholesome. That rather dampens the horror, indeed. I'll have to check out Silent Hill. My wife's a bigger gamer than I am, though I dabble. Cheers!
As to the translator of S. Lem books I would recommend to choose those by Michael Kandel. He has been sending his translations to Lem to verify/ approve his suggestions. Beside M. Kandel is slavist and they talked to each other in Polish/English
@@iWizard The pre-Kandel translations tend to be problematic. After Kandel, there are modern re-translations of several of the early works by other translaters. Kandel was probably blocked by Faber who held the English language rights. Other full direct translations were made but blocked by Faber, so the English speaking world had a flawed translation for half a century.
I think it's kind of amazing that all the action actually happens only at the station, and yet it's delightful and interesting so for me it's even an advantage, greetings from Poland 🇵🇱
Lem after seeing newer movie version, supposedly said something along the lines of "wow, and I thought the older one was bad.." He met with Tarkovsky before shooting, and that meeting was described as not very pleasant, in the end he gave up and told him to just make the movie as he wish. He wasnt found of adding the story before arriving to station and certainly was against going back to earth in the end. If I remember he compared Tarkovsky movie to being more like "crime and punishment" that what was his own vision in the book. Also many years later he said when talking about the movie(but I forgot which version he meant then) that he never intended to write "love story in space". btw. who do you think the other phantoms were? I think I could have missed some hints about them (except obviously the one described as huge black girl) , one of them was probably a child but it was never explained. It's maybe not that important to the story but I keep thinking abut it.
Wow, I'd never heard any of this. Apparently I'm not the only person who found the Tarkovsky version unwatchable, much as it's celebrated in the world of film. Thanks very much. Cheers!
Clooney was great in that dapper way in O Brother Where Art Thou? Literally Dapper Dan. Perhaps you could try the Tarkovsky Solaris again. It's quite an experience.
I'm sure I'll get around to watching it again sometime soon. I think I discarded it because I was trying to find a film version to show my high school students and that version was so long and low-budget that I decided against it. I think I was judging it through that lens. Thanks for watching!
An older video but I am just finding it. I stopped listening around 14 minutes in, just because I'm so intrigued by this whole concept. I vaguely remember the title of the Clooney movie, but that's all. I know I watched a different review of this book a while back as well, but I didn't remember details. It sounds very creepy and cool. If I ever get my head out of Dune, I will check it out. And then I'll likely watch this whole video again. Thanks!
Great review, thanks. First time I tried to read it during my college years I abandoned it just after a few pages I guess, it was too difficult. Then I came back to the book after the 2002 movie made some news here in Poland and decided to push forward through it despite that heavy ambience that permeates the whole book. I never read anything so strangely unsettling, maybe except Lovecraft's stories, and definitely this novel is outstanding in that you can't easily tell how it creates its really spooky atmosphere. Maybe there are some other examples of such 'spooky' novels, idk, i never was too much into sf. Also the psycho-philosophical layer of this and many other Lem's novels doesn't make me very fond of this kind of literature, i must admit. However I can understand the importance of different problems which the book tries to convey be it epistemological or other, my reading of its perhaps unintended message is probably slightly different than that of most readers and critics. For me it seems that the main hidden idea may be that of intelligent Universe as a whole. You know, there're so many videos about so-called "cosmic web" and its uncanny similarity to the human brain's structure and so on. Maybe such an interpretation will also some day be included in such excellent reviews like Yours, who knows :)
I agree that the book is spooky and you’re right, it definitely creates a spooky atmosphere. I don’t know much about the so-called “cosmic web,” but it definitely feels familiar and evocative, in terms of how it relates to Solaris. Cheers!
A real in depth analysis implies going from the beginning to the end (spoilers are inevitable) of the entire plot. Anyway it is a very interesting video, clear, clever and educated; it touches the very ontological issiue of the book but, I dare say, with your knowledge you could have been much more exhaustive non caring about "spoilers". Thank You.
I would love to see Solaris point of view I don't think Solaris is forcing anything Just like the humans probing into Solaris and trying to understand it by using X rays I believe Solaris is just doing it's own probing and not actually knowing what is happening from the humans point of view Like I don't think Solaris is aware that it has made all these weird interactions by simply looking to the humans Just as when humans are doing their research, they can't see what Solaris is feeling or what damages they are doing to its plane of existence I believe Solaris is just being inquisitive... Interacting... Researching... Inside the minds of men And has no clue that it's causing external effects to humans living in an entirely different way (Sorry, I'm not genius - struggling to explain myself) Just like when we take x-rays it captures images from within and projects them So too, is Solaris doing And in this case... The minds of men are being projected externally
I disagree about the "info dumps" as a bad thing. This book is very Kantian; we can only know the phenomenon, not the noumenon. So sitting in the station library and reading about Solaris is perfect. We don't get history, we get historiography. We don't experience the planet directly because we cannot, beyond our interpretations.
I loved those info dumpster. Also, scientists are religious too... I thinks that's incorrect. Scientists are humans too, but much more less likely of being religious. Thanks for the review, mate, loved it. An loved the masterpiece of Solaris. I finally know the writer of Sphere! And Reynolds works... Damn man, now I have to go back to him!
Thanks so much for watching, Alfio! I suppose I must have overstated a few things, tbh. Glad you enjoyed the video. Also, yes. Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorite SF writers. Love his brand of hard SF so much!
I've read the novel twice and watched both the Tarkovsky and Soderbergh. I found Tarkovsky a little tedious but not unwatchable. Violations of scientific verisimilitude make me cringe in sci-fi movies; I was spoiled as a kid by 2001 and I loathe Star Wars. There were some cringey moments, but Hari's (Rheya's) character was well-played and well-developed in Tarkovsky. I'd personally call it a more faithful adaptation than the Soderbergh, if only because Lem would reject it less on a molecular level. Soderbergh hit all the marks for a high-concept Hollywood movie but I thought the ending was beyond appalling. Solaris is reduced to a deus ex machina (in an orgy of religious iconography) to allow Chris a do-over with the wife whose death he facilitated. Turning Solaris into the stale Hollywood trope of a redemption story so we can have a happy ending with mega-star George Clooney and his beautiful wife does massive violence to the novel, IMHO. Your reading of the book's last line I think makes that clear.
Why you all reading the worst book of Lem bibliography. There is MUCH MUCH better from Lem. Solaris was the easiest to put on big screen, this is why 2 times was adapted and get the most popular.
![Солярис. О романе Станислава Лема и его экранизациях (Это фантастика) [RocketMan]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kFX75YSI1w0/mqdefault.jpg)
![The 15 Best Sci-Fi Books I've Ever Read [Updated]](/img/n.gif)
I like the Solaristics info dumping, it makes the book serious and thorough. It makes me think about papers and peer reviews, it completes the description of Solaris which the movies can't do.
You might be right about this. In fact, one of the things I loved about the book was the level of detail in terms of learning about the planet and the experiments the scientists did. You get so much more than you do in the film. Thanks for watching! :)
My translation ends with "cruel miracles", which I love
Wonderfull review, I gotta buy this book now, it kinda reminds me of The Expense by James S.A Corey (there is a TV series by now), not the plot but the idea of the unknown being something that we can't comprehend. Thanks for the video.
Thank you so much for watching!
I think Solaris was sort of taunting the humans with their regrets to drive them mad so that they’d leave and stop studying it … such an amazing book, great summary as well good sir 👍🫡
I think that the planet just plays and is curious, but the psychological consequences for humans which are confronted by the results of that play are mind breaking. It is a great way to show how limited we humans are. So Lem almost becomes superhuman himself by creating the unthinkable. It is such a brilliant pscyhological thriller.
Excellent observations. I'm tempted to agree!
This is a good review. Solaris is probably the best sci fi book because it transcends the genre barrier and it goes deep into psychological and philosophical core of the human mind. The themes in Solaris are almost the same as in all the rest of his books - the inability to achieve the first contact. or, maybe better said, the inability to understand someone so different from us, which is probably, if we ever meet alien life how it is going to be. The proof of this is almost 8 million life forms on earth, and there is more and more evidence almost by the day, that a lot of species we share this planet with are intelligent only not in the way we think of intelligence. I mean we are teaching dolphins a sign language - dolphins don't have arms!" Anyway, I think that's were Lem was coming from, and of course from the inability to understand each other, which is maybe even worse now than it was during Lem's time, during the cold war era.
Totally agree! Unfortunately I also agree with your last point, although in our case I think this inability to understand one another has a lot to do with how we communicate now (e.g. social media, text, slack channels). Thanks for watching. :)
I'm so suprised that in english translation the name of Kelvin's wife is Rhea while in polish original it is Harey. Absolutely no idea why they changed it
Anyway, great review!
Yeah, I have two copies. One, the older translation, has Harey, and the other, a newer translation has Rheya or Rhea, I forget how it's spelled. Totally strange to change it, I agree
@@MateuszZ1 Thanks!
The original English translation is an abridged re-translation of the Polish->French translation, so it is possibly a phonetic adaptation made in French, retained in the English.
It's Hari in the English book I read
I read the book last week and was aptly stunned. A rare experience of being grabbed by the throat and hit repeatedly on the head till breathlessness. Wow!
It's an absolutely amazing book, so philosophically and psychologically rich. Thanks for watching!
I wanted to read this book for a long time and I finally did recently. It's an exceptional short novel that I'd recommend to any psychological sci fi fan. This book hade some great tense moments bordering on psychological horror. I was slightly disappointed when the planet turned out to be rather somewhat wholesome. I am a big fan of the Silent Hill 2 game, it's actually my favorite story and after reading Solaris I'm 100% sure that it was the core source material for the world of Silent Hill and especially for the tragic love story of Silent Hill 2. It's basically the same story but going even deeper into the feelings of regret and punishment.
That's a great point about the planet turning out to be rather wholesome. That rather dampens the horror, indeed. I'll have to check out Silent Hill. My wife's a bigger gamer than I am, though I dabble. Cheers!
As to the translator of S. Lem books I would recommend to choose those by Michael Kandel. He has been sending his translations to Lem to verify/ approve his suggestions. Beside M. Kandel is slavist and they talked to each other in Polish/English
Thanks for the suggestion! Has he done a translation of Solaris yet?
@@iWizard unfortunately not.
@@iWizard The pre-Kandel translations tend to be problematic. After Kandel, there are modern re-translations of several of the early works by other translaters. Kandel was probably blocked by Faber who held the English language rights. Other full direct translations were made but blocked by Faber, so the English speaking world had a flawed translation for half a century.
Fantastic and engaging introspect into this enigmatic book and it\s legacy. Thank you @IWizard.
Thank you so much for watching, and thanks for the kind words. It's now one of my favorite SF books.
Lem is one of my top favorites.
I think You convinced many people to read this book. Kudos.
At this point I’ve only read Solaris, but I’m hoping to read more Lem as soon as I can fit it into my schedule. Thanks for watching!
I think it's kind of amazing that all the action actually happens only at the station, and yet it's delightful and interesting
so for me it's even an advantage, greetings from Poland 🇵🇱
An excellent point. Thanks for watching. Cheers from the US!
Sorry half the comments here are rude. Great effort and book review. I think I will read it now!
Lem after seeing newer movie version, supposedly said something along the lines of "wow, and I thought the older one was bad.." He met with Tarkovsky before shooting, and that meeting was described as not very pleasant, in the end he gave up and told him to just make the movie as he wish. He wasnt found of adding the story before arriving to station and certainly was against going back to earth in the end. If I remember he compared Tarkovsky movie to being more like "crime and punishment" that what was his own vision in the book. Also many years later he said when talking about the movie(but I forgot which version he meant then) that he never intended to write "love story in space".
btw. who do you think the other phantoms were? I think I could have missed some hints about them (except obviously the one described as huge black girl) , one of them was probably a child but it was never explained. It's maybe not that important to the story but I keep thinking abut it.
Wow, I'd never heard any of this. Apparently I'm not the only person who found the Tarkovsky version unwatchable, much as it's celebrated in the world of film. Thanks very much. Cheers!
Clooney was great in that dapper way in O Brother Where Art Thou? Literally Dapper Dan.
Perhaps you could try the Tarkovsky Solaris again. It's quite an experience.
I'm sure I'll get around to watching it again sometime soon. I think I discarded it because I was trying to find a film version to show my high school students and that version was so long and low-budget that I decided against it. I think I was judging it through that lens. Thanks for watching!
Yeah Alistair Reynolds! I never saw the connection to Solaris before!
Thank you!!
brilliant review and discussion- thanks for posting
An older video but I am just finding it. I stopped listening around 14 minutes in, just because I'm so intrigued by this whole concept. I vaguely remember the title of the Clooney movie, but that's all. I know I watched a different review of this book a while back as well, but I didn't remember details. It sounds very creepy and cool. If I ever get my head out of Dune, I will check it out. And then I'll likely watch this whole video again. Thanks!
Great review, thanks. First time I tried to read it during my college years I abandoned it just after a few pages I guess, it was too difficult. Then I came back to the book after the 2002 movie made some news here in Poland and decided to push forward through it despite that heavy ambience that permeates the whole book. I never read anything so strangely unsettling, maybe except Lovecraft's stories, and definitely this novel is outstanding in that you can't easily tell how it creates its really spooky atmosphere. Maybe there are some other examples of such 'spooky' novels, idk, i never was too much into sf. Also the psycho-philosophical layer of this and many other Lem's novels doesn't make me very fond of this kind of literature, i must admit. However I can understand the importance of different problems which the book tries to convey be it epistemological or other, my reading of its perhaps unintended message is probably slightly different than that of most readers and critics.
For me it seems that the main hidden idea may be that of intelligent Universe as a whole. You know, there're so many videos about so-called "cosmic web" and its uncanny similarity to the human brain's structure and so on. Maybe such an interpretation will also some day be included in such excellent reviews like Yours, who knows :)
I agree that the book is spooky and you’re right, it definitely creates a spooky atmosphere. I don’t know much about the so-called “cosmic web,” but it definitely feels familiar and evocative, in terms of how it relates to Solaris. Cheers!
A real in depth analysis implies going from the beginning to the end (spoilers are inevitable) of the entire plot. Anyway it is a very interesting video, clear, clever and educated; it touches the very ontological issiue of the book but, I dare say, with your knowledge you could have been much more exhaustive non caring about "spoilers". Thank You.
Thanks so much for watching, Marco! Cheers to you. :)
In other words, are human beings "fungible"?
I would love to see Solaris point of view
I don't think Solaris is forcing anything
Just like the humans probing into Solaris and trying to understand it by using X rays
I believe Solaris is just doing it's own probing and not actually knowing what is happening from the humans point of view
Like I don't think Solaris is aware that it has made all these weird interactions by simply looking to the humans
Just as when humans are doing their research, they can't see what Solaris is feeling or what damages they are doing to its plane of existence
I believe Solaris is just being inquisitive... Interacting... Researching... Inside the minds of men And has no clue that it's causing external effects to humans living in an entirely different way
(Sorry, I'm not genius - struggling to explain myself)
Just like when we take x-rays it captures images from within and projects them
So too, is Solaris doing
And in this case... The minds of men are being projected externally
I completely agree with this.
Good!
I disagree about the "info dumps" as a bad thing. This book is very Kantian; we can only know the phenomenon, not the noumenon. So sitting in the station library and reading about Solaris is perfect. We don't get history, we get historiography. We don't experience the planet directly because we cannot, beyond our interpretations.
I totally agree with this. I hadn't thought of it as a Kantian novel, but now that you mention it I can totally see where you're coming from.
I loved those info dumpster. Also, scientists are religious too... I thinks that's incorrect. Scientists are humans too, but much more less likely of being religious. Thanks for the review, mate, loved it. An loved the masterpiece of Solaris. I finally know the writer of Sphere! And Reynolds works... Damn man, now I have to go back to him!
Thanks so much for watching, Alfio! I suppose I must have overstated a few things, tbh. Glad you enjoyed the video. Also, yes. Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorite SF writers. Love his brand of hard SF so much!
After reading just 30 pages you realize chricton ripped off Solaris in his novel sphere
Pretty much, yeah. Thanks for watching!
Since over the brilliant works of Stanislav Lem, stupid filmmakers scoffed at little.
I've read the novel twice and watched both the Tarkovsky and Soderbergh. I found Tarkovsky a little tedious but not unwatchable. Violations of scientific verisimilitude make me cringe in sci-fi movies; I was spoiled as a kid by 2001 and I loathe Star Wars. There were some cringey moments, but Hari's (Rheya's) character was well-played and well-developed in Tarkovsky. I'd personally call it a more faithful adaptation than the Soderbergh, if only because Lem would reject it less on a molecular level.
Soderbergh hit all the marks for a high-concept Hollywood movie but I thought the ending was beyond appalling. Solaris is reduced to a deus ex machina (in an orgy of religious iconography) to allow Chris a do-over with the wife whose death he facilitated. Turning Solaris into the stale Hollywood trope of a redemption story so we can have a happy ending with mega-star George Clooney and his beautiful wife does massive violence to the novel, IMHO. Your reading of the book's last line I think makes that clear.
Well said. Cheers, and thanks for watching! :)
Great review, but i admit i watched at 1.75 speed. ;)
Thanks so much for watching, Rafal. :)
I wish you could read this book in original language
Me too, brother. Me too.
@@iWizard so many nuances, so many different meanings
@@iWizard and the ending upon everything, devastating
Heads up: It's pronounced Soe-Din-Berg not Saw-Din-Berg....I kept cringing the 10 time u said it.
Thanks for the correction. I appreciate it.
Why you all reading the worst book of Lem bibliography. There is MUCH MUCH better from Lem. Solaris was the easiest to put on big screen, this is why 2 times was adapted and get the most popular.
Hey, man. I'm totally excited to read more Lem. What else from his catalogue would you recommend?
no
@@iWizard Fiasco - similar to Solaris; Futurological congres
@@mado9560 omg Fiasco is so devastating! I never felt like this after reading a book EVER
@@iWizard Master’s Voice