Since my initial post on the SOLARIS dream, I have re-read the novel and watched the two major film versions.

I first read Lem's novel around 1973, This was the Kilmartin-Cox translation from French. From Polish to French to English left a trail of incongruities. For example, the Freudian interpretation of the novel is based on the English text, but, as Lem noted, the Polish idioms in no way support these interpretations. Lem rejected most criticism of his novel, just as he rejected most science fiction which he considered drivel. Ultimately, Lem was banished from the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1976, following the withering criticism of Lem’s work by Philip K. Dick, accusing Lem of being at best a functionary of the Communist Party, while conjecturing the book no doubt was written by a committee. Dick was in the midst of his own "alien" encounters, being in a psychotic process at the time.

My most recent reading of the book (in Kindle format) is in the translation from Polish by Bill Johnston, which has been lauded by Lem's family. I saw the Tarkovsky film adaptation most likely in 1973, following the film’s winning the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1972. By then I knew that Tarkovsky was a great director, but I was not taken with the film. To my mind, he missed the essentials of Lem's novel (the utter alienness of Solaris), and focused instead on the human relationships of the characters, and did so in dramatic ways (his genius at work to be sure) that further backgrounded the main intention of the novel.

 I saw the 2002 film version, directed by Steven Soderbergh in 2003. Although Soderbergh later commented (2010) that he intended a fresh version of the novel, one closer to Lem, and not a remake of Tarkovsky, I was disappointed in the film. To me, Soderbergh missed the main point even more than Tarkovsky, and made a film amounting to a Hollywood cliché. In response, Lem said: "...[Solaris] cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images. This is why the book is entitled "Solaris" and not "Love in Outer Space."

I have been a science fiction fan since the mid-forties when I first read "Out of the Silent Planet" by C.S. Lewis. I read this in 1945 when I was nearly 7 years old. I was working on a project to read literature in different forms published in my birth year (1938). I was a very serious, avid-reading kid, already driving my teachers a bit mad.

The above amounts to little more than ephemera, but all related to a point I want to articulate about having my present attention drawn to Solaris by the dream voice. I could not help but feel that my attention was called to Solaris in the context of writing about climate change and human extinction. The essential theme of Lem’s novel is the complete failure of human beings to understand extraterrestrial intelligence—if for no other reason than that it is humans who impose the requirement that all such things be understood only in human terms. This amounts to a kind of hubris—a hubris that might prove fatal in actual encounters with aliens of whatever form. What has this to do with the focus of my writing at present? Well, it suggests that humans may be incapable of understanding their own extinction. Even among those direst in their warnings about this, tend to mitigate their warnings with various intensities of hope, in the form of redemption, regeneration, or rebirth. These factors seem almost hard-wired into the human view of any future. It is as if the final extinction simply cannot be. My earlier dream of celebrating the final Ragnarök is more in line with Solaris. The dream source “gets it.”

Celebrating extinction. Imagine that!