Science Fiction; Parody
Science fiction, or sci-fi, is a story that draws on imagined scientific advances for its themes and plot. Think: Star Wars, Star Trek, and some other thing that starts with star. With Solaris, despite not having star in its title, we're definitely in science fiction land because it features space travel, distant planets, alien life, and psychic whozits. Whozits and whatzits = science fiction, kids. Well, that or Dr. Seuss.
The thing is, though, Solaris isn't just sci-fi. It's also—kind of, sneakily, around the edges—a parody of sci-fi. Sci-fi is often about going out there into the new world with tricky gadgets and knowing more new cool stuff. Even dystopias are like that; Orwell's 1984 is a bad place to live, but that's because in the future they're better at being bad, thanks to fancy surveillance equipment and figuring out how to break people better than we've figured out how to break people.
Solaris, though, is all about how, in the future, we know less instead of more. Oh sure, they have clunky spaceships and they've discovered a new planet. But the more they study it, the more they know they can't know. As one Solaris specialist bleakly concludes, "there neither was, nor could be, any question of 'contact' between mankind and any nonhuman civilization" (11.61). Rather than finding new stuff, then—as is usually the case in the sci-fi genre—we find nothing. Go us.
The disputes in Solaris seem more like religious arguments than like science. The future isn't the future; it's just like the stupid past, where humans haven't figured anything out and aren't going to: "That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox…" (14.68). Sci-fi writers, the book seems to suggest, are just writing the same stories as everyone else—only dumber. Bummer for Lem.