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Science fiction is called an "idea-driven" genre, but the ideas driving it are often the sterile reductionisms of popular science or (in film) the pious sentimentalities of Steven Spielberg. Stanislaw Lem is different. In the best of his novels and short stories—the Swiftian Star Diaries (1971); the "Fables for Robots" collected in Mortal Engines (1981); the late works, in which a lengthening shadow of pessimism covers his earlier setpieces and characters—the Polish writer plays ideas as though they were musical instruments, again and again inventing impossibilities that amuse and astound us both by their plausibility—their quality of sounding like real science—and by their tall-tale ridiculousness. Like Borges, he is a magician, and comedian, of the theoretical. To read the best parts of the Star Diaries is to experience one of art's greater pleasures—that of being in the hand of a genius who can seemingly do anything.
Thus the boring part of most sci-fi stories—the pseudo-science—is the best part of Lem's. No one really enjoys reading about the mechanics of "onboard anti-grav machines," but readers of Lem's most popular novel, Solaris (1961), often cite the chapter-length history of "Solaristics" as a highlight of Lem's oeuvre. None of the contents of that chapter appear in Steven Soderbergh's recent film version of Solaris, a fact that highlights the difficulties awaiting any filmmaker who would seek to adapt a writer as cerebral as Lem. That Soderbergh, like the great Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky before him, manages to parlay all this Lemmish theorizing into a reasonably compelling film testifies both to his skills and to the basic power of the story Lem developed.
That story, in a nutshell, runs like this: at the edge of known space sits the mysterious planet Solaris, which may be a giant brain, or may be something even more incomprehensible to us. What we do know is that the astronauts sent to investigate it aren't returning our phone calls. In response to an urgent video message from one such astronaut, psychiatrist Chris Kelvin (played in the movie by George Clooney) departs for the Solaris-orbiting space station Prometheus, only to find the station deserted, his friend, Dr. Gibarian, dead, and the other crew (Gordon, played by Viola Davis, and Snow, played by Jeremy Davies) insane. Gordon won't leave her room, though she recites Kelvin a long list of self-diagnosed psychiatric disorders from behind the door, while Snow looks and talks like a gentle Charles Manson, dismissing Kelvin's questions with Zen koans: "I could tell you what's happening here, but I don't know if that would really tell you what's happening here." Kelvin, somewhat huffy and not a little spooked, decides to take a nap. He awakens to the touch of his dead wife Rheya's hand.
These "visitors," as Dr. Snow calls them, are not human—the planet itself creates them from a combination of neutrinos and the crew members' memories—but they feel and act like humans. Kelvin at first backs away from this version of Rheya (Natascha McElhone) and from the dilemmas she poses, sending her off in an escape pod; when the planet, whether for inscrutable reasons of its own or by a random natural process, sends another, he tries, against all logic, to rebuild his marriage. ("Wonder if they can get pregnant," sneers Snow.) But Neo-Rheya paradoxically grows in independence the longer she stays near Kelvin, feeding off his memories. She eventually becomes aware that she's a simulacrum, and hates what she is.
Agonizingly serious philosophical issues obviously pervade a story like this. What do you do with the doubles? They're not human, but if you prick them, do they not bleed? Behind this theme is the larger one of human knowledge itself, which Lem tragicomically emphasizes in the novel Solaris as he does in Fiasco (1987) and in some of the later Star Diaries. Can humanity, Lem asks, truly see anything "out there" besides its own shadow? In his 1972 film of Solaris, which he intended as a rebuke to the Kubrickian coldness of 2001 (1968), Tarkovsky softened Lem's question: can or should humans attempt to penetrate the mystery of space when as great a mystery lies inside them? Soderbergh has attempted to chart a middle course between Tarkovsky's weighty mysticism and Lem's mordant skepticism, focusing on the love story between Kelvin and pseudo-Rheya. His additions and changes to the source material reflect this humanist emphasis.
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