One of the amazing things abut Lem's "Solaris" is how invested humanity became in Solaris, the planet that housed the being they chanced upon. In the story, all of science basically revolved around Solaristics - the study of Solaris. By the time the events in the book take place, Solaristics had existed for over a hundred years. In one scene somewhere in the middle of the book, the protagonist actually sits in a library and starts to describe the key works of the field, but in an indirect way of course. Lem depicts humanity's obsession with the being perfectly, yet never actually spoon feeds the reader. Even so, the reader ends up investing himself/herself into humanity's struggle of understanding the being. I was simply amazed at how he was able to achieve this using only words. I've read a good amount of sci-fi, yet no author, not even the great Asimov, was able to execute such a thing so flawlessly. I'll be sure to read more of Lem's work as soon as I can.
I think Solaristics is basically a metaphor for religion or God. How people would be able to communicate with God or a super-being if we get the chance to experience it directly. Solaris keeps cloning the psychic/memories of the visiting scientists. It can’t communicate with people, but it digs through memories to understand, what are the most important thing to each scientist. But this is freaking them out. Memories are the DNA of the individuality. Without memories people would like a bulb of collective consciousness, like Solaris itself. I think Tarkovsky avoided the religion subplot because the Soviet Union's restriction to discuss religoin. Highly recommended read or watch.
funny note: it seems no one reads posted articles on hacker news... people just talk about other stuff related to the topic of the article..
The struggle of science to study Solaris is actually the point of the book, something which was discarded by the movie adaptations. People who know the story solely through the movie adaptations know that Solaris is manifesting people; but that is arguably the least interesting aspect of the story.
If you like Lem's description of fictitious scholarly research, I strongly recommend Jorge Luis Borges' short stories ("The Library of Babel", "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and "Funes the Memorious" come to mind). The collection Labyrinths has some of the best ones.
You might also like "A Perfect Vacuum", it is a collection of reviews of nonexistent books, it has a similar feeling of a deep invented world behind the text of the book.
