I am not sci-fi/fantasy reader, but this shit is seriously cool. Basically shits on normie sci-fi and fantasy where every non-human race is still humanoid but in different color. The alien life form in Solaris is completely alien to us - a fricking gigantic sentient ocean.
Star Trek is full of those types too, it’s just easier to relate to the humanoid once for space opera purposes
The opera part kind of contradicts sci-fi genre then. Since it puts emotions/relating to the aliens over actual science of how would alien form actually look like/what are we more likely to meet. I think there is no scientifical/evolutionary logic behind look of Spock people in Star Trek.
Solaris has alien alien, but Lem still uses it to tell story about humans (about grief/moving on), to think about human problems and the "science" is there to make it believable/coherent.
>I think there is no scientifical/evolutionary logic behind look of Spock people in Star Trek.
why not? convergent evolution producing humanoid intelligent species is as probable and logical as evolution randomly producing a sentient ocean. Also in Star Trek there are so many humanoid species because there was an ancient species that spread it's seed across the galaxy so most humanoids have the same distant ancestors.
I believe from evolutionary pov, they would look just like humans, not like humans with knife ears.
Agreed. That's what I am missing in sci-fi/fantasy, they all want to be grand adventures, great battles, big history and miss the personal, introspective, small narative.
Even in movies Alien is one of best sci-fis and it is very small scale and similar to Solaris. Regular humans come into contact with alien life form - but in Alien it's wild beast which seems to have evolved in perfect killer. It's not about the alien, but about the humans (and the viewer) reacting to it, their relationships , psyche and social structures being tested.
Another case is Red Dwarf, it has episodic nature, but the adventures and jokes are actually about the boys from the Dwarf. Case in point: the most famous episodes are Better than life and Polymorph.
I already explained to you why in canon most alien species in Star Trek are just humana with pointy ears or different ridge patterns in their forehead, the reality is that Star Trek was for the most part a low budget show so they had to find cheap ways to create a variety of different alien species for every other episode.
A great sci fi novel, but I think the long reflective passages on the exploration of Solaris would filter a lot of people here.
Is there anything similar to this? Is some other Lem book as good? Solaris is in high school curiculum here.
As stupid as it sounds, Solaris reminds me of Bloodborne. Instead of living moon, there is living ocean. Both of which frick with human mind.
Hmm, he also wrote "Fiasco", another novel about the difficulty in communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence. Haven't read it, so don't know how similar they are. You could also check out "Roadside Picnic" or Lovecraft.
Nothing but respect for Lem, but Fiasco is not very good. I'd recommend Sturgeon's More than Human
Interesting take. I thought that the prologue of Fiasco was pointless (except for possibly killing off a loved protagonist) and the religious portions half-baked, but still liked the main thrust of the novel. More Than Human was interesting, but felt very dated to me. It seemed like an obvious fix-up that probably could've used more editing.
The weirdly ambiguous prologue was exactly what turned me off (if there was some thematic significance, it was lost on me), and the book never really redeemed itself. Maybe something is lost in translation. Your criticisms of More than Human are on-point. It's a flawed book. I still think it's worth reading, hits many of the same notes as Solaris. And for sci-fi prose there's Sturgeon and Vonnegut near the top, then a pretty big gap before you hit the next-best.
>And for sci-fi prose there's Sturgeon and Vonnegut near the top, then a pretty big gap before you hit the next-best.
Vonnegut, Orwell, Huxley, PKD, Lem, Strugatskys, Brian Aldiss, Ursula Le Guin are sci-fi writers I consider prescient
>if there was some thematic significance, it was lost on me
Protagonist of prologue is a recurring character in Lem's short stories, already familiar to his readers since Fiasco was his last sci fi work. Constant ambiguity is maintained regarding if he perished or not (there are even tiny references to previous works), and never resolved.
>Is some other Lem book as good?
The Futurological Congress. Seriously. It's basically cynical, Polish-israeli sci-fi dark humor, mostly a reaction against the foolishness of the communist system in which Stanislaw Lem was forced to live in as a liberal individual, and to conform to. In a way, it's like the Brave New World or the Sleeper Awakes, but with a completely ironic and lighthearted post-modern approach
Great Polish literature (he ultimately considered himself a Pole, not a israelite, he was assimilated)
It's actually an awesome idea for a film adaptation to make today a'la Tarkovsky but less boring and totally amusing and intellectually stimulating at the same time! The dude had serious wit, he wasn't just a dry slog like Arthur C. Clarke! That's the beauty of good sci-fi imo, only the Strugatsky brothers, PKD and Aldous Huxley understood the purpose of sci-fi truly. That's why they're the most interesting sci-fi writers. Also, Brian Aldiss and his Helliconia series, really intellectually stimulating stuff and also amusing!
>That's the beauty of good sci-fi imo, only the Strugatsky brothers, PKD and Aldous Huxley understood the purpose of sci-fi truly.
and of course also Lem. also, PKD's schizophrenia and antisemitism caused him to hate Lem haha. he thought Lem was just an acronym LEM of some Polish communist/Soviet security agency and had an ulterior agenda to push
Dick was one of the few western sci-fi authors Lem liked, or at least thought had potential. This may be because Dick and Lem got to a lot of the same places. They were rather like an archaeologist who spends years pouring over clues to the location of some ancient temple finally deducing it's location through meticulous logic and reasoning, and arrives there to begin work, only to have someone who went looking for it after having a hallucinogen induced vision and set off in a rented Datsun with a gas-station map and three bottles of coke, roll up a few days later.
Here's Lem's essay "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans"
https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
Bruce Sterling once described this essay as like "A ballet master analyzing James Brown"; and the comparison is apt.
Also, re-reading it holy shit was Lem on point:
>Whatever defers to current tastes becomes an entertainment which achieves success immediately or not at all, for there is no such thing as a stage-magic exhibition or a football game which, unrecognized today, will become famous a hundred years from now. Literature is another matter: it is created by a process of natural selection of values, which takes place in society and which does not necessarily relegate works to obscurity if they are also entertainment, but which consigns them to oblivion if they are only entertainment. Why is this so? Much could be said about this. If the concept of the human being as an individual who desires of society and of the world something more than immediate satisfactions were abolished, then the difference between literature and entertainment would likewise disappear.
Just to add to this, TFC features Ijon Tichy, from Lem's The Star Diaries which is a superlative collection of short stories
i picked up 'The Star Diaries' last month and have been hesitant to start, is it worth reading?
It's probably his best book. His short stories are what make him great. The fact that you have to ask this after having already bought the book is proof that this board is pure and utter shit.
Here's hoping you choke on a turd and die. Also it's worth reading.
I always found it similar to Borges' The Immortal.
Cyberiad
Futurological Congress
His Master's Voice
those are all good starting points if you want to dig more into Lem's mind
That's one of the things I liked about Solaris, I got the impression that the living ocean was having as much trouble communicating with the humans as the humans were having with it.
Like maybe it assumed that the people on the station were some kind of message from something else like it. So it tries to learn to reply in kind, the same way you might try to learn a language, by picking out "words" and repeating them. Imagine how crushing the disappointment was when they beamed the brainwave into the ocean.
I'd also recommend "The Invincible" and "Peace on Earth"; the former is a fairly early novel the latter a fairly late one, they both deal with encountering inorganic evolution and the difficulty of understanding or communicating.
Try playing Alpha Centauri if you like 4X games. Another one that's surprisingly deep (seriously, give it a chance and look past the surface) is Star Control 2 (skip the first one, it's more of an arcade game), re-released for free as The Ur-Quan Masters. SC2 has a few humanoid aliens but they comment on how strange the similarity is and for the most part the Sentient Milieu (one of the galactic societies) is extremely heterogeneous. Incredible ambitious game.
The book The Forever War is also an excellent depiction of truly alien aliens and fricked up first contact that is nearly impossible because of the differences.
I thought Tin Man was one of the rareish Trek episodes to show an alien alien. The Crystalline Entity was also pretty good in how it was handled.
>I think there is no scientifical/evolutionary logic behind look of Spock people in Star Trek.
They do explain it in a disappointing way and never refer to it again, in a big episode where it's revealed there were original humanoid precursors who gene-seeded the galaxy or something.
Personally I think it's easier to explain with some kind of mystical metaphysical substratum that causes similar patterns to emerge. When I was younger and more materialistic I tended more toward the "WHY DOES EVERY ALIEN HAVE TO BE HUMANOID YOU UNIMAGINATIVE FRICKS" because I saw life as just a computational/organizational pattern emerging, so why not have great diversity in the possible combinatorics? But now I am more metaphysically inclined and I think it's even more fascinating that "outer" space itself may be just the surface of an "inner" space that is much richer and vaster.
I have only seen the tarkovsky movie, does the book have the same vibe?
Nah, it has a different vibe. Less ethereal, told from the perspective of a psychologist trained in scientific reasoning
Haven't seen the movie, but the book has got great fricking vibe. Clash of science and something that our science is not able to describe. The descriptions of the ocean are insane. But it also has dark murder mystery vibes - solving murder + solving the secrets of the ocean.
Read sphere and stars my destination
muh homie, completely irrelevant to this thread, but Bester is Bestest
I don't know if it was the translation (I read the Polish –> French –> English translation from the 1970s) but I thought the book was beautifully tragic. Not just because of the plot, but the language, too. I can defo say I was much more engaged by the story between the MC & his ghost girlfriend, and the imagery of the planet served to augment that. I really liked it though the long, descriptive parts are kinda off putting. 5/5 book.
This one left a pretty strong impression on me I'm writing a song influenced by it
Always wanted to read lem but his stuff is hard to find in English. Even the Strugatskys have been getting steady reissues so why not Lem
Not anymore. His books having been getting a load of releases. Penguin and MIT press.
I think novelists underestimate the potential of a 'small enclosed space' setting with small cast of characters. It forces them to concentrate on the characters and world building. At least I know few novels that do this.
>Basically shits on normie sci-fi and fantasy where every non-human race is still humanoid but in different color. The alien life form in Solaris is completely alien to us - a fricking gigantic sentient ocean.
Sounds boring as shit, indeed.