The Defective God | Solaris

I took a science fiction literature class in college and this was one of the books we studied. The professor said the main point of the book was to portray an alien that truly WAS ALIEN; In other words, defying any traditional human concept of an alien and being utterly incomprehensible by any human standards. Again, a TRUE ALIEN.

Being polish I would like to thank Quinn for this deep analysis of Slanisław Lem's novel. I hope you will analyze more books of this great author. "Fiasko", "Eden" and "Return from the Stars". In fact I grew up with Lem's work. And I love it. Including his philosophical work.

Quinn, hearing a human voice always wins over an AI voice. Your narrator voice is amazing, clear, easy to listen to and follow along with.

Solaris remains, as far as aI know, as the most trascendental piece of science fiction to this day. And Stanisław Lem is for me the greatest writter on the genre, despite how difficult it seems to translate his work into other languages. Both movie adaptations have their own cinematographic and dramatic merits, but they logically lean towards the themes of love and grief while downplaying the "epistemological cosmic horror" aspect of the novel

This is such a small thing but I’m glad you actually used the word suicide. So many times I feel like I’m being talked down to when a YouTuber says “self delete” or some other such thing. I know it’s for monetization but I can’t help but feel like I’m being treated like a child when they say that. It also isn’t helping anybody by making those subjects taboo to the point you can’t even say them.

This novel meant so much to me when I was young. I've always struggled with depression, always straddled the line between loneliness and flat out social avoidance. Never really got good at talking to people, let alone understanding them. Solaris doesn't feel scary or malevolent to me, it feels like me. Trying desperately to understand these beings, to communicate and maybe even try to offer gifts to make friends, but completely incapable of knowing how to do so.

His Master's Voice(1968) is far more rarely mentioned novel by Lem, but it's another case of humanity trying and failing to communicate with alien intelligences and what that tells about humans - and among his best.

Your excerpts were successful in extracting & highlighting from _Solaris_ one of the main themes in Lem's writing: his abject scepticism about the possibility of communication with aliens. In Lem's view, communication is not a simple question of coding, it is only possible on the basis of shared assumptions and ways of thinking. I want to emphasise that in _Solaris_ both the living ocean of Solaris and the humans attempt and fail to communicate. Other novels by Lem that explore this subject at depth are _His Master's Voice_ (my favourite novel), which has a concept that would appear the most boring - humans receive a SETI message but fail to decode it, told in retrospect by one of the scientists involved - but I promise you that just the intro is captivating beyond all expectations. The other I wanted to highlight is _FIasco_ (his last work), which heightens the stakes with weapons.

I have first read Solaris as a teenager, and it forever changed me and my neural pathways. Thank you for covering it Quinn!

The inability of humans to understand an alien lifeform in Solaris reminds me of something similiar in Annihilation