Summary Of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris?

Contact, whether with those around us or those out in space, involves an image in one’s mind of the other being different. What Stanislaw Lem states in Solaris is that contact between humans and extra-terrestrial life is impossible until we change not only that mentality, but our reluctance to accept differences in one another.

One thing Solaris suggests is that it is human’s inherent racism and judgmental nature that holds us back from understanding extra-terrestrial intelligence. This is shown no clearer than in Chapter 3 – The Visitors – when Kris Kelvin meets his first visitor on the station:

“I caught a gleam from the whites of her eyes and heard the soft slapping of her bare feet. She was wearing nothing but a yellow skirt of plaited

Stanislaw Lem also makes a connection in Solaris between communicating with aliens and religion, directly comparing making contact with extra-terrestrial life to the concept of reaching heaven. This is done in Chapter 11, when Kelvin states that,

“Over the years, Contact has become sanctified. It has become the heaven of eternity.” (Lem 11.168)

However, the scientists on Solaris were just as far from understanding the ocean, which is arguably the most important alien life form on Solaris, as we are to understanding God. Most of the scientific texts in Solaris are read by Kelvin, in which he will elaborate on the text stating that this Solarist thought this, and another thought something else, but in the end, these Solarists always determine that they are wrong and they admit that they don’t have a definitive understanding of Solaris at all. At the end of the novel, Kelvin suggests that the ocean may be some sort of ‘imperfect God’, but we don’t know enough about it to make a definitive statement about whether or not its intentions are malicious or