Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris follows the strange adventures of psychologist Chris Kelvin on a space station hovering above the surface of the distant planet Solaris. Let’s take a look at some of the different covers of this book, which has been translated and published all over the world.
Stanisław Lem (1921-2006) is one of the most important authors of twentieth-century science fiction. Lem studied medicine but never finished his studies, so he worked as a research assistant, writing stories in his spare time. His first novel, The Astronauts, was published in 1951, followed by a steady stream of works, including Eden (1959), Solaris (1961), and The Cyberiad (1967). He received numerous honors in Poland and abroad, was elected a member of The Polish Academy of Sciences in 1972, and was made an honorary citizen of Krakow in 1977.
In his most famous novel, Solaris, published in 1961, the protagonist, psychologist Chris Kelvin, arrives at a research station to observe the behavior of the intelligent entity, the ‘ocean,’ which covers the surface of the planet Solaris. After decades of human exploration, Solaris is a familiar but still mysterious planet. After an experiment to make contact, the ‘ocean’ begins to trigger memories extracted from the minds of the scientists, driving them to the brink of madness. Far from Earth, in the middle of cosmic space, Kelvin and his colleagues are finally forced to confront themselves: “We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don’t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence.”
The novel was soon translated into numerous languages, and Lem became one of the most widely read non-English science fiction authors in the world. The film version of Solaris, made by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972, and the 2002 American version starring George Clooney, also contributed to its popularity.
The covers of the book depict some form of the cosmos, the planet, the ocean, and occasionally a lonely man facing it. However, while the 1960s and 1970s were characterized by hallucinogenic, sprawling, or more abstract visions, more recent editions have a more streamlined design.
One novel, twenty-one languages, thirty-seven covers. Which is your favorite?
The book+covers series presents the covers of Central and Eastern European literary classics published in countries all over the world.
Cover graphics: Roland Molnár
Translation used for the quotation: 1970, Faber and Faber Ltd. and Walker and Company
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