Solaris and the Loving Sky

Hari leans over to kiss Kris Kelvin. Screen Capture Mosfilm Fair Use

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by Phil Hall

After Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, Jack London, and H. G. Wells came huge advances in science and two horrifying world wars that exceeded all imagination in technology, horror, and human beastliness. In the post-war crop of speculative science fiction writers, especially in the USA, however, the work was more comic strip than cosmic.

Those of us who grew up reading science fiction understood that, while the ideas of Golden and Silver Age American science fiction were often brilliant, they usually only seemed that way to an adolescent boy. The literary establishment turned up its nose at most science fiction, and rightly so.

After long exposure to the philosophy underpinning the books of many of these writers, and in particular exposure to the philosophy of that great regurgitator and annotator, Isaac Asimov, many of us came to understand we had been had. It was a genre of fiction that was deeply flawed: misogynistic, full of every kind of stereotype, and ignorant to the core of the lived reality of almost every other society on Earth.

Reading Asimov, Harry Harrison, Robert Heinlein, and Poul Anderson was like reading Enid Blyton for grown-ups: Five Go to Mystery Moor. Blyton enticed children into her xenophobic, gendered, class-conscious world with post-war promises of plenty: sandwiches and sponge cake, ginger beer, friendship and fun. American science fiction was high-sugar-content, megalomaniacal big-idea wish-fulfilment, and full to the brim with toxic McCarthyite tropes. The worst of the worst were the books of L. Ron Hubbard. Ray Bradbury was an exception, and an exceptional writer.

The situation improved later on with the use of mind-expanding drugs. The hippy-fied generation of the 1960s were almost idealists: Philip José Farmer, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Anton Wilson, Ursula K. Le Guin. But even when American authors produced stronger work, they were still products of that process of ideological winnowing that takes place in commercial publishing. These writers were the ones allowed to remain after sharper, more radical socialist visions had been filtered out.

After this brief period of flourishing, US science fiction returned like a dog to its reactionary sick with writers like Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven (both involved in Reagan’s Star Wars as ideas men), David Brin, and writers like Orson Scott Card, the intelligent if homophobic Mormon. Where are the American socialist science fiction books now? They are there, but not necessarily for mass consumption, hiding in self-publishing, in the catalogues of indie publishers, in old boxes in garages everywhere. I have yet to read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Perhaps when the USA in its current imperial configuration falls apart, other better writers and books will surface.

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In the late 1950s, the 60s, 70s, and 80s, many students in the USA were forced to read Animal Farm and watch the Halas and Batchelor animated version of Orwell’s parable. They were told that Animal Farm was socialism: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” In Texas, the school curriculum still pairs the study of Animal Farm with the study of the history of the Soviet Union in 2026.

It takes a bullet from ICE to the face and the release of three million pages describing the perversions of the current Neo-Caligula and his court and the shenanigans of the whole of the Epstein Class before some Estadounidenses realise that something (heaven knows what) is not quite right with the established set-up in their country.

By contrast, if British science fiction was less exciting, it came from a slightly more mature tradition (as ripe as vintage cheddar). Usually, British SF was better written, and marginally more progressive, responsible, honest, and thoughtful. If America was like a New Rhodesia with its army as the bloody Selous Scouts, then the ruling class in Britain had become slightly more restrained and retained some sense of the responsibility of governing well and not just pillage. By then the British were ancillary to the future.

Of course, with the passing of the imperial baton to the USA, British visions of the future presented to the reading public became slightly less convincing and a little more depressing. John Wyndham was excellent. From H. G. Wells to George Orwell, to Olaf Stapledon, Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, Doris Lessing, C. S. Lewis, J. G. Ballard, and Iain M. Banks, British science fiction was thoughtful, less addled and addicted, more dystopian, though the quality dipped significantly with the insertion of badly aging techno-babble, dishwater thin fantasy, nihilistic superciliousness and snake-eyed commercial mindedness.

What really became a turning point for teenagers reading science fiction for its mind-blowing cosmic insights in the late 70s and 80s was the work of Soviet and Polish science fiction in translation: notably the work of the Strugatsky brothers and Stanisław Lem. The film versions of Roadside Picnic (Stalker) and Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky were a first introduction. Stanisław Lem, above all other science fiction writers, was the great visionary; undeniably one of the major cultural figures who reached escape velocity and emerged from the Soviet sphere.

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Whenever someone from the communist sphere achieved real global stature, they were almost inevitably reframed in the West as ‘dissidents’ bravely criticising socialism. Shostakovich, Akhmatova, all of them (so the story goes) were anti-Soviet. But criticising the Soviet Union as these people did from a humanist point of view, from an artist’s perspective, from inside the system and as products of that system – with certain values of that system embedded into them, is not quite the same thing as attacking the USSR from the vantage point of a hostile, predatory outsider.

Soviet culture was a shared cultural space across time zones and borders. After 1989, when ersatz nation-building kicked off, suddenly the factory that produced toilet paper for the entire Soviet Union ‘belonged’ to one newly independent country; the cosmodrome that launched rockets into space for all the USSR ‘belonged’ to another fiefdom carved out along new borders by opportunistic, criminal political gangs seizing the moment.

Whatever existed inside that shared cultural space of the USSR and the Eastern European countries was subsequently aggressively claimed, tagged, and geographically delineated within one nationality or another in order to build up a sense of national identity. Where people had been agnostics, now they became true believers in religious orthodoxy. If anyone had a certain surname with national connotations, that’s who he or she now was.

Stanisław Lem was definitely Polish, yet he also carried a genuine socialist spirit and wrote for the whole socialist sphere at the time. That concept is quite alien (almost mythical) to Westerners. Many of the more opportunistic, lumpen, nationalist hooligans of the post-Soviet era, the most reactionary and vile elements of those societies (half of them proudly claiming descent from Nazi collaborators) called writers like Lem their own.

Russian culture has been part of European culture for so many centuries. Yet the ongoing confrontation with the Russian Federation pushed by the military-industrial-media-security ruling class of the United States has resulted in an artificial cultural divorce, or else.

In the West, the people behind the money and the policy-making, in their pursuit of regime change in the Russian Federation, are busy telling fibs about Ukrainian art, architecture, literature, music, and traditions, when so many of these were shared. Who would deprive us of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Tchaikovsky? Those people should be horsewhipped!

By sixteen, I had already seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, a story of a dead sky full of monolithic AI. Star Wars was just silly: a future imagined as Dune fan fiction. It began in a desert, added cowboy tropes, borrowed mythmaking techniques from Joseph Campbell, and spun fairy tales. Star Wars was a shitty, unoriginal regurgitation with one or two special effects, full of cringeworthy dialogue and aliens as caricatures of relatable racial types in rubberised masks. The hero is a blond American. 

E.T. and Close Encounters, a little cleverer, were still products of American technophilia; of rootless, floating small-town alienation, fragmentation, and a divorce culture. The flipside of which is a bunch of hobos wandering the all-too-bright streets of Las Vegas.

Talking Heads music is playing, Tarantino films are showing, Zimmerman ponders ‘the humiliation’ of Vietnam, David Lynch puts Dennis Hopper in an Oxygen mask, Elvis imitates Little Richard, white rock is followed by white rap. Junk food imitates real food: In Big Rhodesia, the USA.

2001: A Space Odyssey was a British film made in Britain, based on the book by the cold-eyed prophet and author, Arthur C. Clarke. It was directed by a genuine genius, Stanley Kubrick, who thought the film through philosophically to an unconvincing end: the Starchild. The Starchild idea was also borrowed from A. C. Clarke and his Nietzschean Childhood’s End. Interstellar is a narcissistic riff on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Clarke had already imagined satellites, monoliths, interstellar artefacts. The monolith in 2001 was not Jesus; you can’t fall in love with an AI monolith. But you could fall in love with the stormy mind of the planet Solaris.

In Tarkovsky’s film, Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, is sent to a space station circling a planet that orbits another star. The cosmonauts have been reluctant to communicate with Earth. Snaut, one of the cosmonauts on the station, is cagey about the reason why this is the case. But he says Kris will soon understand the situation. Gibarian, kelvin’s friend and associate, has committed suicide.

From Solaris, Gibarian received the flesh and blood figure of the first love of his life. He cannot get rid of this being. Repelled by his remembered feelings, filled with remorse, eventually Gibarian kills himself. After the cosmonaut has killed himself, the girl-creature walks through the space station, bells on her wrists tinkling. She stays with the body of Gibarian in the freezer where his corpse has been deposited.

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The research scientist on board, is the xenobiologist Sartorius, a surgeon. As people have pointed out, it takes a particular kind of person to cut living flesh open with steel. A surgeon must have a ruthless streak. Solaris, therefore, sends Sartorius grotesque humanoid creatures for him to dissect; and he does dissect them. That is how Solaris communicates with the scientist; by allowing itself to be vivisected.

Kris Kelvin was, we learn, was once deeply in love with a certain woman called Hari who later killed herself after he left her. Solaris recreates Hari and tries to connect with Kelvin this way through a woman-creature. At first, Kelvin destroys the Hari creature by firing her off into space on a rocket, understanding that she is not Hari but a production of the planet. However, eventually, Kelvin accepts the situation, embraces Hari, and incorporates her in his life on board the space station. He sleeps with her. They stay together until she becomes highly disturbed, realising she is not the original Hari, and she leaves.

The planet finally understands that part of him that is tied to Hari, and she does not reappear. Only then does Kelvin decide to descend to the surface of Solaris where he will confront his resurrected father and try to sort out their complicated relationship. Because of time dilation in space travel, in reality Kelvin’s father is long dead by then.

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Solaris presents a highly intimate and disturbingly responsive picture of the universe. I see it as comforting. The genius of Stanisław Lem and Andrei Tarkovsky together is that they do not merely give us a living sky, but a complex, loving sky that understands us all too well.

We can engage fully with Solaris at every level of our being, because such a vision of a great living intelligence easily encompasses us and makes us feel understood. There is a deep sense of religiosity here in this attitude towards the Cosmos, and there is also a kind of brake placed on human beings and a commandment to love what we discover, but may not fully understand. Solaris embodiments cause us to be reluctant to assume too much, to disrespect the unknown. This is not arrogance of the coloniser at all. One cannot (should not) exploit what one loves and respects.

Finally, we come to the understanding that Solaris is in fact also a metaphor for Earth: Earth as Gaia, the place that we should wholeheartedly love, that has nurtured us and brought us all into existence. If that is not love, then what is? The Earth, as all Africans always say, over and over again, is our mother. We see this same love in Tarkovsky’s cosmic philosophy of toska and longing, in the cinematography of Vadim Ivanovich Yusov, who takes long, lingering shots that float over waving grass in water, grass that looks like long hair. The Earth, still, is our node in a cosmic nexus, an infinite cosmic nexus of sentience. All of this offers a highly intimate picture of the universe. When we look up at the sky now, we are not looking at a dead sky. We are looking at a living sky, a loving sky.

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The colonisers, those rapine despoilers of entire continents, were the same ruling classes who sent children down mines, who kept their own working class and agricultural labourers and small farmers in near absolute poverty, who robbed from, killed, and exploited their own people. European colonialists saw Australia and the Americas as colonisable empty land, and when they found people there, they removed them or killed them, just as the Israelis have done. The colonisers and settlers conceded no humanity or autonomy to the people they found.

But if there was the remotest possibility that they did perceive the humanity of other peoples, if those Quakers and Mormons had seen the Americas and Australia and their peoples with warmer and more loving eyes, rather than with colder, more calculating settler ones, perhaps these religious migrants would not have been such usurpers. If they had followed their own professed codes they might have done more to stop the killing and starvation, the destruction of the natural environment, and the displacement and replacement of indigenous peoples. It is a sick irony that the neo-fascist right in the USA now cry, with absolutely no historical memory or sense of irony: They will not replace us!

The genius of Stanisław Lem was not simply that he gave us a loving sky but, with that, the he and Tarkovsky reinforced the commandment to love and do no harm. The Earth is a cosmic nexus in a web of infinite living sentience, it is not just our real god, it is our connection to the Good God of Everything.

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Born into an exiled ANC family, Phil Hall spent his childhood in East Africa and India before settling in the UK. After a global education in languages, politics, and economics, he lived and worked across Europe, the USSR, Mexico, and the Middle East. Returning to the UK during the pandemic, he co-founded Ars Notoria Magazine and AN Editions, a publishing venture dedicated to Humane Socialist literature.