Solaris is Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel about a planet covered by an ocean that seems to think, and the Solaris book is still the way most English-language readers first meet him. Its narrator, the psychologist Kris Kelvin, comes down to the one station still hovering over that ocean, finds its three scientists either dead, hiding or half out of their minds, and the next morning wakes to find a woman in his cabin who died on Earth years before. Nobody on the station brought her. The ocean, it seems, has read his memory and sent her.
It’s a short novel, a little over two hundred pages, and it runs three stories at once. There’s a haunting, there’s a romance, and there’s a dry, dense and often funny history of an imaginary science that has spent a century failing to understand its subject. Andrei Tarkovsky filmed it in 1972 and Steven Soderbergh in 2002, and Lem wasn’t happy with either, because both kept the love story and let the ocean drift into the background.
Below: the premise and the first turns of the plot (nothing past them), the cast under both sets of English names, the ocean and its imaginary science, the novel’s shape and origins, its argument, its reception, Lem’s other contact novels, its neighbors on the shelf, the films, operas and stage versions, the two English translations side by side, a few companions, and a set of questions.
Lem’s other first-contact novels, The Cyberiad, the Tichy voyages and the rest, with their translators sorted, are all on my Stanisław Lem books guide.
Fiction by René Rehn
What Solaris Is About
Solaris is a planet orbiting two suns, one red and one blue, and almost all of its surface is covered by an ocean. It isn’t water. It’s a vast, gelatinous, living mass, and humans have been studying it for about a hundred years, since the first expeditions noticed that the planet’s orbit, which by all the laws of mechanics should be unstable, is being held steady. The ocean is doing it. Something down there is alive, active and, perhaps, intelligent, and generations of scientists have built a whole discipline, Solaristics, around the effort to understand it.
The effort has failed. By the time the novel opens, Solaristics is a crowded, quarrelsome science that has produced libraries of description and no answers, and interest on Earth is fading. A single research station hovers over the ocean with a skeleton crew.
Kelvin lands there, expecting to join his old teacher Gibarian, and finds the station in chaos. Gibarian is dead. Snow, the cyberneticist who meets him, is frightened, drinking and evasive, and warns him about something without saying what. Sartorius, the physicist, won’t come out of his laboratory. Kelvin glimpses a figure in a corridor who shouldn’t be there. Before his arrival, it emerges, the scientists had tried an unauthorized experiment, bombarding the ocean with X-rays, and the ocean has since begun to answer.
The answer comes to Kelvin on his first night. When he wakes, Rheya is sitting in his room: the young woman he loved on Earth, who died ten years earlier and whose death he has never stopped blaming himself for. She’s warm, she breathes, she’s pleased to see him, and she has no idea where she’s come from. Every scientist on the station has a visitor of his own, drawn from somewhere deep and private in his memory, and none of them wants to talk about his.
What follows is a novel about what Kelvin does with Rheya, and what she does once she begins to understand her own situation, set against the ocean’s indifference and the station’s long library of failed theories. How it ends is left to the book.
Who’s Who in Solaris
The 1970 translation changed two of the Polish names, and Bill Johnston’s translation of 2011 changed them back, so readers of the two versions meet slightly different casts.
- Kris Kelvin: the narrator, a psychologist and a Solarist, newly arrived from Earth. The same name in every version.
- Rheya (Harey in the Polish and in Johnston’s translation): the visitor who appears in Kelvin’s room, the exact image of the young woman he loved, who died ten years before. The 1970 translators made her name an anagram of the original.
- Snow (Snaut in the Polish and in Johnston’s translation): the cyberneticist, Gibarian’s deputy and the first person Kelvin meets on the station, frightened and drinking.
- Sartorius: a physicist, cold, proud and determined, who locks himself in his laboratory.
- Gibarian: the head of the station and Kelvin’s former teacher, who has died just before Kelvin’s arrival.
- Berton: a pilot on an early expedition, whose report of what he saw on the ocean’s surface was dismissed as a hallucination and still haunts the science.
- Giese: the founding father of Solaristics, author of the classic study of the ocean’s forms, long dead and still quoted.
- Moddard: the officer on the ship that brings Kelvin to Solaris, who sends him down in the capsule in the first chapter.
Kelvin, Snow and Sartorius each have a visitor, and the novel is careful to show the reader only Rheya up close.
The Ocean and the Science of Solaristics
The ocean is the real subject of the novel, and Lem gives it as much space as the human story. It never speaks and it never acts in a way anyone can read. Instead it builds. Across its surface, for days at a time, it throws up enormous structures that the scientists have named and cataloged. Mimoids imitate the shapes of objects near them, including human objects, as if out of mockery or curiosity. Symmetriads are vast and perfectly symmetrical formations that rise, change and collapse like cathedrals made of fluid. Asymmetriads follow no rules the observers can find. Explorers who go down among these forms come back with descriptions no one can use.
Solaristics is Lem’s parody and his portrait of science. Kelvin reads its history in the station library, and the novel gives it to the reader as he reads it: the founding work of Giese, the rival schools, the theories that the ocean is a brain, or a dead mechanism, or a god in its infancy, the quarrels over terminology, the heroic expeditions and their empty results. By the time of the story the discipline has sunk to observing, recording and cataloging. The scientists have measured everything and understood nothing, and the more they write, the further the ocean seems to recede.
Berton’s report is the document that haunts the book. Decades earlier, flying low over the ocean in fog, Berton saw something on the surface that his superiors dismissed and that Kelvin, reading the transcript on the station, begins to see in a new light. The report is given at length, and it’s one of the passages readers remember.
An ocean was a deliberate choice: nobody can picture it with a face. The novel’s joke, which gets less funny as it goes on, is that the only things the ocean seems to understand about humans are the things they’ve buried deepest.
How Solaris Is Built
Solaris is told in the first person by Kelvin, in fourteen short chapters, and it moves between two kinds of writing. The chapters on the station are close, claustrophobic and full of dread, and they read like a ghost story in a small house: corridors, locked doors, footsteps, a figure glimpsed where nobody should be. The library chapters open out into the history of Solaristics, summaries of books, theories, expeditions and controversies, written in the dry voice of a scholarly review.
Readers new to Lem sometimes find the library chapters a trial, since they slow the plot right down. But they’re the heart of the book, not a detour from it. Without them Rheya would be only a ghost. With them she’s a message that nobody can read.
The novel is short. The first Polish edition ran to 204 pages, and the standard US paperback of the English translation is about the same length. Most readers finish it in three or four sittings, and many go back to the library chapters on a second reading.
Where Solaris Came From
Lem wrote Solaris in a very productive stretch of his career. After the political thaw of 1956 he published seventeen books in twelve years, and 1961 alone brought three novels: Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Return from the Stars and Solaris. It was published in Poland by MON, the Ministry of National Defense’s publishing house, in 1961.
The timing mattered. In the years after October 1956, when Władysław Gomułka came to power and the Polish censorship loosened, writers who had spent the early 1950s producing the required optimism about the communist future were suddenly free to write about doubt. Lem’s own early novels, The Astronauts (1951) and The Magellanic Cloud (1955), had imagined the confident, collective, scientific humanity of a communist future. Solaris turns that picture upside down. Its scientists are divided, frightened and compromised, their science has stalled, and the universe they came to understand doesn’t care about them. Nothing in the book is set in Poland. But it’s hard to imagine it being written in 1951.
Lem said he didn’t plan Solaris in advance. On his official site he recalled: “When I led Kelvin to the Solaris station and made him see the frightened, drunken Snaut, I did not know myself what made him so anxious.” He found out, he explained, by carrying on writing. He was also unusually satisfied with the result. “I think I managed to express what I intended,” he wrote. “This work seems quite satisfactory in my eyes.”
What Solaris Is Arguing
The book is about the limits of knowledge. Lem thought that humans could only understand what they could compare to themselves, and the ocean is built to defeat that habit. It isn’t hostile, and it isn’t friendly. It may not even know that the station is there, or it may be responding in the only language it has found, which is human memory. The scientists, who came to make contact, find that all they can study is themselves.
Snow makes the point in a speech readers often quote. Humans, he tells Kelvin, don’t want to conquer the cosmos. They want to extend Earth to its edges, and they go out into space looking for mirrors, not for other worlds. It’s the argument of the whole book in a paragraph, and Lem makes it bitterly comic.
Readers have found much more in the novel. There are psychoanalytic readings, readings of the station as a colonial outpost, and readings of the whole book as a coded attack on Marxist certainty, and each has its defenders. Lem himself had little patience with the Freudian one. On his website he noted that “One American reviewer made a fatal mistake in that he was unaware of the fact that the idioms of the Polish original are different,” which is to say that the reviewer’s psychoanalysis rested on phrases that were the translators’ and not Lem’s.
The love story is real, though, and it’s what most readers carry away. Kelvin is offered something no human has ever been offered, the return of the person he lost, in a form he knows can’t be her. The novel asks what he owes this copy, and whether love for a memory is love at all.
How Solaris Was Received
Solaris spread quickly through the Eastern bloc and beyond. Lem’s official site lists editions in Slovak (1964), Armenian and Bulgarian (1965), Romanian (1967) and Hungarian (1968), and in 1970 a Brazilian, a Japanese and a Latvian edition, along with the first American one, from Walker and Company. The French translation by Jean-Michel Jasiensko, published in 1964, became the basis of the English text.
In English the novel became Lem’s best-known book, and it has been reprinted steadily ever since. Tarkovsky’s film made the title famous far beyond science-fiction readers, and film lovers who pick up the book tend to be surprised by how much of it is about the ocean.
The name has traveled. The Solaris synchrotron at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Lem’s city, takes its name from the novel, and in 2019 a star was officially named Solaris and its planet Pirx, after Lem’s other hero.
Solaris and Lem’s Other Contact Novels
Solaris is the second of five novels in which Lem sent humans to meet something truly alien, and each of the five tests the hope of understanding in a different way. Readers who finish Solaris and want more of the same should know how the others relate to it.
Eden (1959) came first. Six men stranded on an unknown planet try to make sense of the society they find there, and they keep reading it through their own assumptions. It’s the closest of the five to a straight adventure story, with an argument inside it, and it still leaves room for the hope that humans might understand an alien culture if they tried hard enough.
The Invincible (1964) goes to the other extreme from Solaris. Where the ocean may be a mind too large to grasp, the machine swarms of Regis III have no mind at all, only behavior, the result of a long evolution among self-copying machines, and the crew of a warship has to decide whether something without intentions can be an enemy.
His Master’s Voice (1968) is Solaristics in miniature, set on Earth. A signal arrives from the stars, a team of scientists spends years on it, and the theories they produce say more about them than about whoever sent it. Readers who loved the library chapters of Solaris tend to love this one.
Fiasco (1986), the last, brings the sequence to its end. A starship crew reaches a planet whose inhabitants won’t answer, and the novel tracks, step by reasoned step, how a peaceful mission turns into something else.
Taken in order from Solaris on, the four books let a reader watch Lem’s pessimism deepen over a quarter of a century. Solaris is the one built around a love story.
Solaris, Roadside Picnic and 2001
Lem’s Solaris is often read beside two other works of the same years that refused the easy version of contact. One is Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Tarkovsky was openly critical of Kubrick’s film, and Solaris is often described as his reply to it, a space film about conscience and memory rather than technology. Lem’s novel came seven years before Kubrick’s film, and its ocean, which neither speaks nor explains, invites comparison with Clarke and Kubrick’s silent monolith.
The other is the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1972). In the Strugatskys’ novel, visitors from elsewhere come to Earth, stay two days and leave, and what they leave behind is incomprehensible junk that men risk their lives to steal. Lem’s ocean is present and unreachable. The Strugatskys’ visitors are simply gone, and may never have registered humanity at all. The German edition carried an afterword by Lem, and Tarkovsky filmed it as Stalker in 1979, seven years after Solaris. The two films, and the two novels, are often paired, and readers who like one tend to go on to the other.
The Strugatskys’ Zone, the other alien visit Tarkovsky filmed, and which translation of it to read are covered on my Roadside Picnic page.
Solaris on Screen, Stage and Radio
The first screen Solaris was a Soviet television play directed by Boris Nirenburg in 1968, which follows the novel’s plot closely and keeps the emphasis on the planet.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) is the famous one. Tarkovsky wrote the screenplay with Friedrich Gorenstein, and the film, made at Mosfilm, runs 166 minutes. Donatas Banionis plays Kelvin, Natalya Bondarchuk plays Hari, Jüri Järvet is Snaut, Anatoly Solonitsyn is Sartorius, and Vladislav Dvorzhetsky plays Berton. Tarkovsky added a long opening on Earth, at the house of Kelvin’s father, and made Kelvin’s family and his guilt the center of the story, with an ending of his own that isn’t in the book. The score sets Bach’s chorale prelude “Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” against Eduard Artemyev’s electronic music. At the 1972 Cannes festival it took the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury.
Lem and Tarkovsky argued over the script, and Lem never came round. “I never really liked Tarkovsky’s version of Solaris,” he wrote later. He also complained that the director had made Crime and Punishment rather than Solaris, a film about guilt and conscience, when the novel was about the limits of human cognition.
Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002), produced by James Cameron and Jon Landau, stars George Clooney as Chris Kelvin, Natascha McElhone as Rheya, Jeremy Davies as Snow and Viola Davis as Gordon, a character who takes the place of Sartorius, with Ulrich Tukur as Gibarian. At 99 minutes it’s a much shorter film. Soderbergh said he wasn’t remaking Tarkovsky but making a new version of Lem’s novel, and he stripped it down to the love story, with a score by Cliff Martinez. Reviews were mixed. Lem’s verdict was that his book had not been about the erotic problems of people in space, which is why it was called Solaris and not Love in Outer Space.
Polish Radio dramatized the novel in 1963 and again in 1975, and BBC Radio 4 broadcast a two-hour dramatization in 2007. It has also become an opera several times over: Michael Obst’s Solaris was premiered at the Munich Biennale in 1996, Detlev Glanert’s at the Bregenz Festival in 2012, and Dai Fujikura’s, staged by the choreographer Saburo Teshigawara, in 2015.
On stage, David Greig’s adaptation (2019), a co-production of Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre with British partners, made Kelvin a woman and gave the station a mixed crew. The newest version, Solaris 2, a Croatian-language theater project by Borut Šeparović that premiered at the Istrian National Theater in Pula in January 2026, moves both the novel and Tarkovsky’s film into the age of generative artificial intelligence, with the faces of the performers and of the film’s actors generated live on screens.
Which Translation of Solaris to Read
English readers have a choice of two versions, and here the choice changes the book.
The first, by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, was published in 1970 by Walker and Company in New York and in 1971 by Faber and Faber in London. It wasn’t made from Lem’s Polish. It was made from Jean-Michel Jasiensko’s French translation of 1964, so every sentence passed through two languages and two sets of choices before it reached English. Lem read English fluently and said more than once that he was unhappy with the result.
The second, by Bill Johnston, went straight from the Polish into English and appeared in 2011. For years it was available only as an audiobook and later as an ebook, while the rights to an English print edition went unresolved. Johnston, who teaches comparative literature at Indiana University, said he was shocked by the number of places where the 1970 version had omitted, added or changed text.
Johnston’s opening is quoted in his entry below, from the extract on Lem’s official site, and readers who want to compare the two can set the first page of any Harvest or Faber paperback beside it.
| Translator | Year | Made from | Publisher and format | Names used | Status in print |
| Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox | 1970 | Jasiensko’s French translation (1964) | Walker (US, 1970), Faber and Faber (UK, 1971), Harvest paperback (2002) | Rheya, Snow | The standard paperback in the US and UK |
| Bill Johnston | 2011 | The Polish original | Audible audiobook (2011, read by Alessandro Juliani), MP3 CD (Brilliance, 2016), ebook, Conversation Tree Press limited edition (2025) | Harey, Snaut | Ebook and audiobook, plus a limited fine-press edition |
Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (Walker and Faber, 1970-71)
The translation almost every English-language reader has met. It’s the one most bookshops stock, in the Harvest paperback in the US, first issued in 2002 when Soderbergh’s film came out, and in Faber’s paperback in the UK, and it’s the text the English critical tradition on Solaris was written about. Some printings carry an afterword by the critic Darko Suvin.
It reads smoothly, and for most readers it does its job. The story, the ocean and the library chapters are all there. What the relay through French cost is harder to see from the English side: the texture of Lem’s Polish, the particular words his characters use, and, in places, sentences and passages that Johnston found missing or altered when he compared it with the original. It also renames two characters, Harey as Rheya and Snaut as Snow, and those names went into the English criticism and then into Soderbergh’s film.
The practical case for it is availability. It’s cheap, easy to find new or secondhand, and it’s the version that book clubs and courses are likely to be using. Readers who start here and love the book often go on to Johnston’s version later.
Bill Johnston (2011, Audiobook and Ebook, Print 2025)
The translation to read if it can be had. Johnston worked directly from Lem’s Polish, and his version has the approval of Lem’s family: his widow and son said they were very content with it and that it seemed to have captured the spirit of the original. It restores the Polish names, Harey and Snaut, and the passages the relay through French had lost.
Its opening, as printed on Lem’s official site, gives a sense of the voice: “At nineteen hundred hours ship’s time I climbed down the metal ladder past the bays on either side into the capsule. Inside, there was just enough room to raise my elbows.” It’s plain, precise and physical, and the library chapters in particular read more lightly than in the 1970 version.
The catch is format. Johnston’s Solaris came out in 2011 as an Audible audiobook, read by Alessandro Juliani, and then as an ebook. Listeners who want a physical copy can look for the MP3 CD issued by Audible Studios through Brilliance Audio in July 2016 (ISBN 9781522697466), which booksellers list as Juliani’s reading of the Johnston text. The first print edition, a small collectors’ printing by Conversation Tree Press illustrated by Matt Murphy, with an afterword by the Polish critic Jerzy Jarzębski, was published in 2025 in 626 copies. That’s a collector’s object rather than a reading copy, so the ebook remains the practical way to read Johnston’s version.
Companions and Study Guides
These four studies take readers further into Lem and the novel:
- Peter Swirski, ed., The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). Essays on Lem by critics and scholars, with a good deal on Solaris.
- Peter Swirski, A Stanislaw Lem Reader (Northwestern University Press, 1997). Two long written interviews with Lem, from 1992 and 1994, on his fiction and his ideas, with his essay “30 Years Later.”
- Peter Swirski, Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future (Liverpool University Press, 2015). A study of Lem’s thought across the novels.
- Agnieszka Gajewska, Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in the Prose of Stanisław Lem, translated by Katarzyna Gucio (Routledge, 2021). A reading of Lem’s science fiction, Solaris included, against his wartime years in Lwów.
Plot and theme summaries are easy to find in the free study guides online.
Questions About Solaris
Is the Solaris Book Hard to Read?
The station chapters are gripping and quick. The library chapters, which describe the history of Solaristics, are dense and slow, and some first-time readers skim them. They’re worth reading closely, because the book’s argument is in them.
How Long Is Solaris?
Just over two hundred pages. The first Polish edition had 204 pages, and the US paperback is a little over two hundred.
Which Translation of Solaris Is Better?
Bill Johnston’s, made from the Polish, if the ebook or audiobook suits. Otherwise Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox’s 1970 translation, made from the French, which is the paperback in print. The translation section above explains the difference.
Why Is She Called Rheya in Some Versions and Harey in Others?
Rheya is the name the 1970 translators gave her, an anagram of Lem’s Harey. Johnston’s translation and Tarkovsky’s film (as Hari) use the Polish name. Soderbergh’s film uses Rheya.
Is the Book Different From the Films?
Very. Both films center on Kelvin and his lost love. The novel gives just as much space to the ocean and the science that has failed to understand it, and Lem said neither film understood what the book was about. Tarkovsky also added scenes on Earth and a different ending.
Is Solaris a Horror Novel?
Not by Lem’s intention, but its early chapters work very much like a haunted-house story, with the frightened survivors, the locked rooms and the dead who come back. Readers who come for that find it, and then find a novel of ideas around it.
Book First, or Tarkovsky’s Film First?
The book. Tarkovsky’s film is widely admired in its own right, but it tells a different story, centered on Kelvin’s family and conscience, and it gives away the novel’s turns in its own way. Reading Lem first means meeting the ocean as he imagined it, and the film then plays as a strong variation.
What Is Solaristics?
The imaginary science devoted to the planet’s ocean. Lem gives it a century of history, a founding father (Giese), rival schools, heroic expeditions, a famous controversy over Berton’s report and a vast library, and he describes it in the style of a real scholarly field. It’s his portrait, part affectionate and part savage, of what science does when its subject won’t cooperate.
Is Solaris Part of a Series?
No. It stands alone, although it belongs to a loose group of Lem’s novels about first contact, with Eden, The Invincible, His Master’s Voice and Fiasco.
Where to Go Next
Lem’s novel sits on a shelf with the other books that imagined an alien intelligence as truly alien, from Wells to the Strugatskys and Liu Cixin.
The science-fiction shelf Solaris belongs on, classics and modern novels together, is my best science fiction books list.
