“Among the stars we shall face the unknown.” The pathos of Lem’s prose was what people do when they face something they can’t understand. He saw that as civilization advances, these moments would come more and more often. In this, he was right. It turns out that humankind didn’t even need to go deep into outer space to meet alien intelligence it can’t fully comprehend. In fact, you’re probably holding it in your hand right now.  

Solaris is arguably Stanisław Lem’s best known and most influential work, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s film version obviously played a significant part in its popularity, in spite of the fact that Lem was notoriously dissatisfied with the script. To reiterate common knowledge, the Polish writer disagreed with the Russian director’s focus on human characters, their back stories, and interactions (“Crime and Punishment in outer space”), and felt that not enough attention was given to the main hero, the mindful ocean with superpowers: what exactly it was, what precisely it was doing, and why? These questions aren’t easy. Solaris could be seen as a metaphor of God, who is, for a change, there and even answers prayers. If he believed it possible, wouldn’t this be what Kris would be praying for: to have Harey back? But I’m probably too godless to fully comprehend all the religious subtext of the book – and the beauty of Solaris is that it can be discussed in perfectly materialistic terms.  

There is no doubt that it exists. People can observe and perceive its activity in the physical world, even though some of the things it can do, such as adjusting time and space to fix the orbit of its planet and bring people back from the dead (or, at least, create