History Literature / Solaris

* WritingByTheSeatOfYourPants: When Lem started the book describing Kelvin arriving to the station, he had no idea what's this book going to be about and had no plan whatsoever.

The novel was adapted to film twice, by Creator/AndreiTarkovsky in [[Film/{{Solaris 1972}} 1972]], and by StevenSoderbergh in [[Film/{{Solaris 2002}} 2002]]. The first film is considered a classic. Lem [[DisownedAdaptation disliked both versions]], claiming that they focus on the humans too much, and miss the actual theme of his novel.

* CosmicHorror: One possible interpretation of the planet, though it's important to note that we can't know if it is malicious or simply so alien in its workings that it becomes terrifying. It's sentient, but its thoughts and motives are beyond comprehension, as are its physics: somehow, it can affect the workings of the universe on an astronomical scale, but no one knows how. At the time of the novel, humanity has been studying Solaris for a century with barely any progress, and many attempts to communicate directly with Solaris have... [[DrivenToMadness unpleasant results]].

The novel was adapted to film twice, by Creator/AndreiTarkovsky in 1972, and by StevenSoderbergh in 2002. The first film is considered a classic. Lem [[DisownedAdaptation disliked both versions]], claiming that they focus on the humans too much, and miss the actual theme of his novel.

Not to be confused with various characters named Solaris, such as the villain from ''AllStarSuperman'' and the original form of the villain from the infamous ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog2006'', or TheEmpire from ''VideoGame/{{Xenogears}}''.

The title refers to a distant planet, which is covered with an ocean of plasma. More than a century before the events of the novel, Earth scientists discovered, that the entire ocean is one living, intelligent organism; however, every attempt to establish communication with it was futile.

* DrivenToSuicide: The original Rheya and Gibarian. The second replica of Rheya also tries to kill herself, by drinking liquid oxygen, when she learns what she is, but she survives due to her healing factor. Eventually, [[spoiler: Sartorius and Snow destroy her with a device that disrupts her sub-atomic structure at her request]].

Not to be confused with various characters named Solaris, such as the villain from ''AllStarSuperman'' and the original form of the villain from the infamous ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog2006'', or TheEmpire from ''{{Xenogears}}''.

The novel was adapted to film twice, by AndreiTarkovsky in 1972, and by StevenSoderbergh in 2002. The first film is considered a classic. Lem [[DisownedAdaptation disliked both versions]], claiming that they focus on the humans too much, and miss the actual theme of his novel.

Not to be confused with various characters named Solaris, such as the villain from ''AllStarSuperman'' and the original form of the villain from the infamous ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog2006''.

** [[invoked]] The visitors definitely count, such as the protagonist's girlfriend's dress having buttons but lacking any seams or even a way for it to be put on or removed. There are also biological formations out in the ocean, made out of a calcified substance, that mimic the appearance any number of things from human-looking buildings and trees to people and dogs. They don't last long and are eventually reabsorbed into the "water."

* WritingByTheSeatOfYourPants: when Lem started the book describing Kelvin arriving to the station, he had no idea what's this book going to be about and had no plan whatsoever.

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!!The 1972 film contains examples of the following tropes:
* ArcWords
* BusCrash: Hari dies/goes away/something off camera.
* CasualInterstellarTravel
* ContemplateOurNavels: There's a scene on the DVD called "The Meaning of Life" for god's sake...
** The entire film is this.
* DespairEventHorizon: Hari, although it's a blink and you'll miss it sort of thing. She goes from being mildly unsure of her identity to drinking liquid oxygen.
* DrivenToSuicide: Hari again, although it happens almost completely out of the blue.
* DullSurprise: To say that this movie is emotionally flat would be drastically overstating the amount of energy displayed by the actors.
* DrivenToSuicide: Hari, also Gilbarian.
* EldritchAbomination: Solaris.
* FetusTerrible: One idea about Solaris.
* FuturisticSuperhighway: Sort of subverted. The highways Burton drives through are actually the completely undisguised central expressways of contemporary Tokyo, filmed to make up for the missed opportunity to film something more futuristic that AkiraKurosawa had been hoping to set Tarkovsky's crew up with. But it still works even if you know what it is ... and just imagine what it might have looked like to Soviet audiences at the time, who had almost no such roads to drive (if they had cars, that is).
* GainaxEnding: Whoa boy, big time. Pretty much everything is LeftHanging and the main character decide to return home. We think he's on Earth, but then the camera pans up and it is revealed that he is on an island on Solaris. Or he ''did'' leave, and this is just a copy of him and his home that Solaris made.
* GeniusLoci: Solaris, or at least its ocean could very well be a massive intelligent organism.
* HumanoidAbomination: The visitors. They look just like ordinary people, but they are unimaginably strong and they are pretty much impossible to kill.
* IdiotBall: Too many examples to name.
* JerkAss: Sartorius
* KilledOffForReal: [[spoiler: Gibarian, Hari]]
* LeaveBehindAPistol: Gilbarian did this literally.
* LeaveTheCameraRunning: Welcome to AndreiTarkovsky, and this is one of his more kinetic movies.
* MadeOfIron: The Visitors. [[TakeOurWordForIt According to what we're told by Snow]], they can survive being shot, overdosed on narcotics, and other injuries which humans would find painful is not mortal.
* MindScrew: All the freaking time, especially the GainaxEnding.
* MysteriousWaif: Subverted with Hari. The main character knows her as his ex wife who kills herself, but nobody knows why or how she shows up.
* NietzscheWannabe: Sartorius talks about existentialism, the lack of greater meaning, and the ultimate futility of life.
* NotSoAboveItAll: Satorius
* OddlySmallOrganization: For such a prestigious and open field of science, the fact that they only had a space station crew of three is rather odd.
* OverlyLongScream
* PleaseDontLeaveMe: Hari to Chris. Later on, Chris to Hari.
* QuestForIdentity
* RealityIsUnrealistic: Becomes AnAesop of all things.
* SanitySlippage: Possibly everyone, even the audience
* SmashCut: A particularly brutal one cutting from the "30 seconds of weightlessness" to [[spoiler: Hari's attempted suicide by liquid oxygen]]
* StarfishAliens: The ocean is supposed to be some sort of alien, as are the visitors such as Hari.
* SuperStrength: The Visitors
* TheStinger: The very last scene.
* UglyGuyHotWife: Kris and Hari. Kris is a sweaty, balding middle age man while Hari is defintiely very beautiful and looks about nineteen.
* UnusualEuphemism: The Visitors are people conjured out of peoples' memories.
* VanishingVillage: Overlaps with MindScrew and GeckoEnding.
* WellDoneSonGuy: Implicated at the end that this is one of the things Kris wanted all along
* WhatDoYouMeanItsNotSymbolic?
* WhatIsThisThingYouCallLove?
* UsedFuture
* Yandere: Ultimtately Hari.
* {{Zeerust}}: Most of the facility save for the obviously industrial areas.
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!!The 2002 adaptation

[[quoteright:350:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/solaris1_1018.jpeg]]
[[caption-width-right:350: If you think that there is a solution, you'll die here.]]
->'''Chris :''' Am I alive, or dead?
->'''Rheya :''' We don't have to think like that any more. We're together now. Everything we've done is forgiven. Everything.

->'''Snaut''': We don't want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly. We don't want other worlds. We want a mirror.

The American adaptation was written/directed by StevenSoderbergh was produced by JamesCameron, and starred GeorgeClooney.

Chris Kelvin is a future psychiatrist on Earth, where he is eking out an existence after the death of his significant other, Rheya. Out of the blue he gets a call from an old friend/coworker of his, Gibarian. The crew of the station Solaris doesn't seem to want to come home, and they have lost contact with the security team they sent. Gibarian puts a good word in for Chris with the crew, and the latter goes to Solaris to try and fix things. Weirdness ensues.
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!!The remake contains examples of the following tropes:
* AllJustADream: Towards the end of the film, a sequence occurs with Chris that is revealed as this, then reverts to the original position in time.
* DrivenToSuicide: Rheya and [[spoiler: Gibarian]].
** [[spoiler: Rheya ''several times''.]]
* GenderFlip / RaceLift: Sartorius is replaced by a completely different character, a black woman named Gordon.
* GeniusLoci: The planet orbited by Solaris [[spoiler: is actually a single, living being--or at least the ocean that covers it is.]] It also [[spoiler: responds to the memories of humans]].
* JerkAss: Gordon, though she comes off a lot more sympathetically than her counterpart in the 1972 movie, Sartorius.
* IronicEcho: "And death shall have no dominion."
* LivingEmotionalCrutch: Rheya needs Chris as one of these.
* SoullessShell: An interesting case. Rheya's manifestation claims that that's all she is. Gordon agrees. Kevin thinks so at first, but as the film goes on he seems to reject this hypothesis. [[spoiler: copy Snow acts like he agrees with Gordon, but is one of these manifestations himself.]]
* SpellMyNameWithAnS: In the original film, Chris is "Kris", Rheya's name is "Hari", Snow is "Snaut" and Gordon is "Sartorius". Translations of the novel seem to cycle through the two sets, but "Sartorius" remains fairly consistently NOT Gordon.
* StartsWithASuicide: Though it's intimated in the flashbacks instead of at the beginning.
* WhyDontYaJustShootHim: Discussed, with respect to the manifestations aboard the Station. Gordon does construct a machine that does the job. Chris objects at the idea of using it on Rheya.

The title refers to a distant planet, which is covered with an ocean of plasma. More than a century before the events of the novel, Earth scientists discovered, that the entire ocean is one, living, intelligent organism; however, every attempt to establish communication with it was futile.

* AlienGeometries: The symmetrids, and asymmetrids, are giant formations consisting of a bizarre keratin-like substance. They appear from the black ocean, exist for a period of time, and then collapse back into the sea. Symmetrids are perfectly symmetrical down to the molecule, and asymmetrids are chaotic, unstable and only exist for a fraction of the time of the former. They're described as performing some sort of computer-like calculation process within their own machine-like bio-structure, but towards no understandable or observable purpose.

* StarfishAliens: An entire ocean of sentient plasma.

* UncannyValley: [[invoked]] The visitors definitely count, such as the protagonist's girlfriend's dress having buttons but lacking any seams or even a way for it to be put on or removed. There are also biological formations out in the ocean, made out of a calcified substance, that mimic the appearance any number of things from human-looking buildings and trees to people and dogs. They don't last long and are eventually reabsorbed into the "water."

''Solaris'' is an 1961 {{science fiction}} novel by Polish author, StanislawLem. The main theme is the impossibility of communication between humans and a truly alien intelligence.

Not to be confused with various characters named Solaris, such as the villain from ''AllStarSuperman'' and the original form of the villain from the infamous ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog2006''.

* GodIsInept: At the end, Kelvin theorizes about a god "whose imperfection represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that lead to horror." Snow suggests that the ocean might be the first phase of such a god.

* ContemplateOurNavels: There's a scene on the DVD called "The Meaning of Life" for god's sake...

* NietzscheWannabe: Sartorius talks about existentialism, the lack of greater meaning, and the ultimate futility of life.

->'''Chris :''' Am I alive, or dead?

* GeniusLoci: The planet orbited by Solaris [[spoiler: is actually a single, living being--or at least the ocean that covers it is.]] It also [[spoiler: responds to the memories of humans]].

* SpellMyNameWithAnS: In the original film, Chris is "Kris", Rheya's name is "Hari", Snow is "Snaut" and Gordon is "Sartorius". Translations of the novel seem to cycle through the two sets, but "Sartorius" remains fairly consistently NOT Gordon.

At the beginning of the novel, psychologist Kris Kelvin (the narrator of the story) arrives to Station Solaris, a scientific research station hovering near the surface of the planet. He discovers that the leader of the research team, Gibarian killed himself, and the other two members, Snow (Snaut in Polish) and Sartorius are acting strangely. He soon realizes why, when a {{doppelganger}} of his dead wife, Rheya (Hari in Polish) appears in his room. Turns out, that the ocean sent such replicas (called "visitors") to every member of the team, for unknown reasons. Those "visitors" presumably represent their greatest failures; Rheya killed herself when Kelvin left her, and he still feels guilty about that. Kelvin first lures the Rheya visitor in a shuttle, and launches it into outer space, but she soon reappears, with no memory of the incident. A conflict appears between the members of the team; Kelvin wants to live with Rheya, while Snow and Sartorius want to get rid of the visitors for good.

* GenderFlip / RaceLift: Sartorius is replaced by a completely different character, Gordon.

* GenderFlipped: "The Pope is a wonderful woman!"

At the beginning of the novel, psychologist Kris Kelvin (the narrator of the story) arrives to Station Solaris, a scientific research station hovering near the surface of the planet. He discovers that the leader of the research team, Gibarian killed himself, and the other two members, Snow (Snaut in Polish) and Sartorius are acting strangely. He soon realizes why, when a {{doppelganger}} of his dead wife, Rheya (Harey in Polish) appears in his room. Turns out, that the ocean sent such replicas (called "visitors") to every member of the team, for unknown reasons. Those "visitors" presumambly represent their greatest failures; Rheya killed herself when Kelvin left her, and he still feels guilty about that. Kelvin first lures the Rheya visitor in a shuttle, and launches it into outer space, but she soon reappears, with no memory of the incident. A conflict appears between the members of the team; Kelvin wants to live with Rheya, while Snow and Sartorius want to get rid of the visitors for good.

* GeniusLoci: The planet orbited by Solaris [[spoiler: is actually a single, living being- or at least the ocean that covers it is.]] It also [[spoiler: responds to the memories of humans]].
* JerkAss: Gordon.

* LivingEmotionalCrutch: Rheya needs Chris as one of these

* StartsWithASuicide: Though it's intimated in the flashbacks instead of at the beginning

''Solaris'' is an 1961 science fiction novel by Polish author, StanislawLem. The main theme is the impossibility of communication between humans and a truly alien intelligence.