Solaris Analysis

Solaris is set on a space station hovering near the surface ocean of the planet Solaris. Solaris the planet is mostly ocean, and the ocean is maybe sort of sentient—scientists think it's a kind o...

Kris Kelvin is the guy who's telling you the story, and he's also the main character. You can't get out of his head—which is a central theme in the story. Solaris is about being confronted with t...

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, des...

Distant: That's Lem's attitude towards his novel. It sometimes seems like he's writing from the other room, with a blindfold over his eyes and humming loudly so you can tell he's not involved. Yep,...

Part of the distance of tone is achieved by the matter-of-fact prose. Lem describes the most impossible, miraculous, or terrifying situations in the same flat voice. Check it out:But the spasms res...

The title of the book—Solaris—is the name of the mysterious planet where dreams creepily come true. Easy, right? But if you've poked around this learning guide a bit, then you probably have a h...

At the end of Solaris we have Kelvin futzing about at the ocean and thinking vaguely spiritual thoughts about hope's renewal. So, water = rebirth. Again. Thanks, Lem. How many times have we seen th...

Solaris is short, and the language and sentence structure is straightforward. Which is good, because there's a lot of dry technical mumbo jumbo, and the plot is vague and drifty and suggestive rath...

Boy Meets PlanetKelvin, our somewhat uninspiring hero, goes to Solaris station and finds everything higgledy-piggledy: Gibarian dead, Sartorius locked in his room, Snow snowing unpleasantly, and a...

Okay, so Solaris is fairly plot-less in a lot of important respects, so it doesn't fit super well into any of Booker's plot analyses, since Booker was all about the plot, and Lem is all about the...

Before we break Solaris down into a sort of beginning-middle-end framework, we'd like to be clear that Lem went to great lengths to refuse this framework with Solaris. A big part of what this book...

Lem thought science fiction writing had a "total lack of cognitive values." That is, he thought it was dumb. (Source.) Stanislaw Lem loved the work of American sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. However...

You might think that if your dead ex-wife showed up miraculously, and/or if you were in contact with an alien intelligence who made your secret wishes come true, some steaminess might ensue. But no...

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