Descending from the blackness of interstellar space, Magnus and Gordon explore the strange and wondrous world of Stansilaw Lem’s Solaris, a wonderful short novel from 1961, detailing humanity’s struggle to understand and communicate with a living planetary ocean, which possesses both extraordinary powers and a seemingly unfathomable nature. Scientific detachment wars with the primal motivations of fear, love, suspicion, and guilt when the research staff find they are not alone on Solaris Station….
Alternately tense, romantic, analytical, and incisive, Lem cuts deep into the delusions of both science and science fiction, and poses the tough questions–can mankind ever truly understand anything about Nature or the Universe? Where does our desire to ‘Contact’ alien beings come from, and what drives it? If, as H.P. Lovecraft put it, Mankind’s own nature is “a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity”, how can we ever hope to understand any part of the Universe, when we cannot understand ourselves?
