Solaris Themes

Science fiction is often about exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilization, and all that space jazz. This is sort of the case in Solaris, too; Kelvin goes out to a new s...

Sci-fi stories are filled with freaky foreign others—think: logical Vulcans with pointy ears, toothy drooling monsters exploding from your stomach, invading Martians blasting puny earthlings with...

Identity can mean who you are, your self, but it can also mean an identity—two things that are the same. So identity is both one and two—or more than that on Solaris, where people keep appearin...

The characters in Solaris get a lot of alone time. The scientists all stay away from each other on the station, closeted with their visitors. And since their visitors are their own dreams, that mea...

If ghosts are memories of the dead, then Rheya is a ghost in Solaris; she's Kelvin's grief made flesh. She's a nightmare of guilt: He feels responsible for her suicide, so he hideously kills her, o...

Solaris is supposedly science fiction, but since it isn't really interested in explaining any of the science very clearly, much of it can also be interpreted as mystical, or even religious. You hav...

You'd think someone writing science fiction would like science. But not Lem. In Solaris, science instead often seems to be a joke. Scientists have theories about Solaris, and then the theories are...

In Solaris, dreams become reality, and the contents of the characters' heads crawl out of their brains and become real. This is upsetting. It also calls into question what is "real" in the first pl...