Barker began writing his Books of Blood stories at the start of the 1980s — bizarrely enough as a relief from the intense work of playwriting (his initial career being as a playwright, actor, and director of the Dog Theatre Company). They were, at first, intended only for himself and his friends, and for the sheer joy of doing something new. But later, realising he might be able to make a go of these things, he had them typed up as a 600-page manuscript and handed it to his theatrical agent, who tried Gollancz (who turned it down), then paperback publisher Sphere Books, under the misapprehension they published Stephen King. Sphere accepted, and took the unusual approach of releasing them in three volumes simultaneously (Barker had thought of the stories as one book, The Book of Blood), and putting this then-unknown author’s name as part of the title. They even used his art for the covers. Clive Barker’s Books of Blood volumes I to III came out in March 1984.

They were something different in the then-booming horror market, very much unlike its leading author, Stephen King. As Douglas Winter puts it in his biography of Barker, The Dark Fantastic:

“His stories exercised an unbridled enthusiasm for the lush and the lurid, pushing at taboos of sex and violence, yet confirmed an unparalleled ambition and audacity.”

King, though, certainly does excess — perhaps more self-consciously than Barker, in whom it feels like a natural mode — but anyway that’s not the real core of what Barker brought to the genre. As well as being explicit in terms of blood, gore, and bodies, Barker was explicit with the more philosophically religious elements in horror fiction: he wasn’t just out to shock, he was after revelation, transformation and transcendence, even if it was of a dark kind. As he’s quoted in Winter’s biography:

“The kind of horror I like drags things into daylight and says, Right. Let’s have a really good look. Does it still scare you? Does it maybe do something different to you now that you can see it more plainly — something that isn’t quite like being scared?”

There’s a strong feeling in these stories of a highly creative talent let loose on an unexplored domain, rushing around and trying all sorts of ideas, approaches, modes and genres, squeezing them to see what juice they’ll produce in his particular hands. There are ensemble pieces and narratives focused on just the one character (even a rare first-person story), there’s realism (the non-supernatural “Dread”, about its protagonist’s philosophical education thanks to a man who believes that the only subject of any “worthwhile philosophy” is “the things we fear, because we don’t understand them”, and goes on to give practical, personalised lessons), there’s fable (“Hell’s Event”, about a once-a-century race that decides who will rule the next hundred years: Heaven or Hell), there’s something close to comedy (“The Yattering and Jack”, about a minor demon’s attempts to break the mind of a stubbornly disbelieving gherkin-importer), and something close to a love story (“Jacqueline Ess—Her Will and Testament”, in which a woman gains the ability to reshape flesh with her mind, but her attempts to learn how to use this new power from the powerful men in her life only show how shallow power is compared to passion, which is so much harder to find).

Some, for me, don’t work so well and perhaps betray the fact that Barker, though highly creative and an obviously gifted writer, was still learning his craft. “Pig Blood Blues”, about an ex-policeman newly hired to teach woodwork at a Remand Centre for Adolescent Offenders, who discovers the whole facility has taken to worshipping a seemingly possessed pig in the centre’s farm, felt to me as though it could have done with a slower pace, a longer build-up. It’s as though Barker, impatient to see where this idea would end (it’s a rare case of one his tales leaving its revelations till the end), hurried through the elements that might have turned this into a novel: character build-up, growing hints about what was happening, and so on.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that “Skins of the Fathers” and “Rawhead Rex” were among the first to be written, as they’re both less satisfying in their overall story structure, while also having some of the rawest laying out of themes that I can imagine were bubbling around in this young male creator’s psyche: themes of monstrous fathers and victimised sons. In Barker’s fiction, though, that word “monstrous” can have a far different meaning to its normal, daylight, usage. In “Skins of the Fathers”, for instance, we have two types of monstrous father. There’s Eugene, who considers it his absolute right to have everything his own way, and to abuse his wife Lucy and son Aaron as much as he likes. He’s clearly monstrous, but in Barker’s world, calling him that would be an abuse of the term, because there are also, in this tale, actual monsters, and these are, it turns out, Aaron’s real fathers: ancient creatures of the desert, a varied mix of weirdly beautiful or downright incomprehensible beings who have come at last to reclaim their son and awaken him to the powers that are his birthright. I can’t help reading this story as, in some ways, a creator’s self-remaking fable, in which he disowns the traditional ideas of (as it’s put in the story) “hand-me-down machismo” (something that might have been especially important to a gay writer like Barker), in favour of something weird, marginalised, secretive and perhaps forbidden, but also magical, transformative and creative.

“Rawhead Rex”, on the other hand, presents us with an outright monstrous father in both meanings of the word: a child-eating monster whose only purpose is to eat, kill, destroy, and dominate, but whose one weakness is the the equally archetypal image of the female as source of life. What Rawhead Rex and the monsters in “Skins of the Fathers” have in common is they’re presented as ancient creatures who father children on human mothers. In “Rawhead Rex” the subsequent pregnancies kill the mothers, but in “Skins of the Fathers” the monsters, rather than men, are women’s natural partners for generating offspring:

“Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men… What an error, what a cataclysmic miscalculation. Within mere eons, the worst rooted out the best; the women were made slaves, the demons killed or driven underground, leaving only a few pockets of survivors.”

“Midnight Meat Train” is another story to feature a root race of non-human (or once-human) fathers. Here, the protagonist escapes becoming a victim of what seems to be one more New York City serial killer, only to find this killer had in fact been working for the city — not the government, but for the “City Fathers”, a race of ancient and perhaps once-human elders who have among them the “Father of Fathers”, the “original American”, who is most certainly not human:

“If it was like anything, it was like a shoal of fish. A thousand snouts all moving in union, budding, blossoming and withering rhythmically. It was iridescent, like mother of pearl…”

But the most general theme that links these stories — and the books Barker would go on to write, too — is the transformative effect of contact with the darkness. That contact, for Barker, is never an end-point, as it so often is in horror; it’s always a door to be opened, a curtain to be lifted, a secret to be brought into the light. From “Midnight Meat Train”:

“You shouldn’t have seen this: it’s not for the likes of you,” he said, taking another step towards Kaufman. “It’s secret.”

Which recalls my favourite line from Barker’s 1987 film Hellraiser, and one I’m sure recurs throughout his work, in many forms: “This is not for your eyes.” It’s not for your eyes, but Barker’s going to show you anyway.

The one story I’ve heard most often singled out in these early Barker stories is “In the Hills, the Cities”, a weird mix of transcendent vision and tragic horror that pretty much defies categorisation. A couple of lovers, Mick and Judd, are on their first — and, they soon realise, last, because they’re just not getting on — holiday together, somewhere in Yugoslavia. Mick, it turns out, is (to Judd) a “political bore”, while Judd keeps wanting to take side-trips to obscure local churches to see their paintings. He’s not religious, he’s only interested in the paintings’ aesthetics, leading Mick to think that the “complexities, the contradictions, even the agonies that made those cultures blossom and wither were just tiresome” to Judd. Then, cutting through their petty squabbles, comes a vision straight off the cover of Hobbes’ Leviathan to not only transcend their politics-versus-aesthetics debate, but blow it out of the water.

Two towns they pass close to have a tradition. Once a year each makes itself into a single, walking giant, a carefully strapped-and-bound-together ambulant city made of people. Some people are the eyes, some are the teeth, some are the fingers, others are the muscles, the heart, the stomach. These two “cities” then do battle. It is a thing that seems to capture a sort of nobility, as one character says:

“It is the body of the state,” said Vaslav, so softly his voice was barely above a whisper, “it is the shape of our lives.”

But it is also rooted in the madness of the mob:

“Mick saw the leg raised; saw the faces of the people in the shin and ankle and foot – they were as big as he was now – all huge men chosen to take the full weight of this great creation. Many were dead. The bottom of the foot, he could see, was a jigsaw of crushed and bloody bodies, pressed to death under the weight of their fellow citizens.”

It — quite literally — embodies politics and aesthetics, transcending both into something incomprehensible, awe-inspiring, deranged and monstrous. It’s a seemingly allegorical image (as the cover of Leviathan was) but it goes so far beyond any allegorical meaning. (It’s surprising to realise that this, perhaps the most powerful image in Barker’s first three Books of Blood is not supernatural.)

I actually think that “In the Hills, the Cities” is perhaps the only example, here, of something that works despite Barker’s philosophy of “having a really good look”. Although nothing, in the end, is hidden, the reason behind all this remains obscure. Is this an image of transcendence, or of derangement? Had Barker included this image in his later fiction — and he’d soon go on to find his natural medium in doorstop-sized novels like Weaveworld — he’d have to explore its meaning, lay it bare somehow. But I think its power here lies in the way it absorbs and transcends both Mick’s politics and Judd’s aesthetics to become so much more than both, while still remaining almost screamingly incomprehensible. It reaches beyond Barker’s images of transcendence — however dark and magical — to the sublime, in all its terror and mystery, insanity and imagination.

A party of modern teenage girls and boys find themselves magically transported into the Celtic world of the sixth century — that’s how I was sold on this 1973 book from Winifred Finlay. But the actual story is slightly different. I’d imagined those modern teens viewing the Celtic past through (1970s) modern eyes, but that’s not what happens.

The novel centres on Bridie, a teenage girl sent to stay in Oban, Argyll with the MacDonalds, the family of a schoolfriend of her mother. Her mother is a stage actress, Jennifer Nicholson, who always insisted on her daughter calling her “Jenny” rather than Mummy, so they would be “more like sisters”. But Bridie is very much in need of a mother at this moment: on her last birthday, her father (“the handsome and popular radio and television personality” Simon Nicholson) came home drunk following an argument with his wife, and took Bridie on a too-fast drive that ended in a crash and his death. At that point the already flawed mother-daughter relationship fractured, as Bridie says:

“I have no mother. That is Jenny Nicholson, the actress. My mother was someone else — old and ugly and screaming at me because I survived the accident when my father was killed.”

Having recovered from her own injuries, Bridie comes to stay with the MacDonalds, who patiently put up with her “moodiness, her constant demands for attention and reassurance”, as well as her frequent fabulations about her glamorous father, which all too often slip into outright lies. Bridie is an imaginative girl, but has been relying a little too much on that facility since her father’s death:

“For over a year now she had moved in and out of an imaginary world, peopled with men and women of her own creation…”

The sensibly down-to-earth MacDonalds have three children, two (Sheena and Kenneth) of around Bridie’s age, while the eldest, John, is studying medicine, and learning to accept that he’s never going to be the world-famous surgeon he once dreamed of being, but will, if he applies himself, manage to make it as a solid local GP.

Bridie starts to have glimpses of three figures in ancient Celtic clothing, one of whom is playing a harp. She can see and hear them as though they are real. Whoever she’s with can’t — until they touch her, when they, too, can see and hear them. But this is subtly done, and nobody suspects they’re seeing actual figures from the past.

Then one night — just after Bridie has begun to feel that her developing relationship with John means she’s perhaps growing up at last — Bridie is drawn into the countryside by the harp music she’s already heard twice before. Kenneth, Sheena and John follow her, independently at first, but all of them come together at a river, where they’re confronted by the Washer at the Ford, a folkloristic figure who offers to give each of them their heart’s desire. But when, to do this, she takes from each of them an item of clothing to wash in the water, it emerges bloody and torn.

Then suddenly we’re in the past. Bridie isn’t modern (1970s) Bridie, but a priestess of the goddess known as the High One. She was sent into the “Unborn Years” (our time) to fetch a healer because, in a recent battle with the Northern Picts, the king was killed and his heir injured beyond the healing skills of local priest Broichan. In this sixth-century world, Kenneth is an Irish Prince, and Sheena is there, too, and none of these three thinks of themselves as modern teens. Only John retains his knowledge of the modern world, and only he and Bridie speak English; but John soon disappears from the narrative, and Bridie never looks at the sixth century world with anything but sixth century eyes (nor does she think at all about the 1970s she visited).

John’s powers as a healer are needed because according to custom the heir to the kingdom, Aidan, can only become king if he is physically perfect, but he has lost several fingers in battle. Broichan, the high priest of the Great White One (the main god of these Celts, currently incarnated as a truculent one-eyed boar in a nearby sacred forest), needs John to heal Aiden, and make him fit to assume the kingship. These are difficult times, because the new God of the Christians is winning over the surrounding tribes, threatening to remove Broichan’s power.

The harsh contrast between the two religions comes out in this description of some carved statues in the forest shrine of the Great White One:

“On either side of the wooden shrine was a semi-circle of massive tree trunks shorn of their leaves and branches and crudely carved to represent some terrible nightmare aspect of the god. One was headless, its glass eyes and leering mouth set in its chest; the head of another was all gaping mouth set with three rows of pointed teeth; a third had monstrous hands which tore apart the limbs of its human victim. Each wooden statue was adorned with human skulls and stained with the blood of victims sacrificed throughout countless years.”

Kenneth, as a sixth-century prince from Ireland, points out the contrast between these savage images and the new God of the Christians:

“The God I worship asks for love, not blood sacrifices, and Columba, our priest, does not expect our king to be perfect.”

At the heart of this book is modern-day Bridie’s need to deal with the trauma of her beloved father’s death and her mother’s coldness. Her dislocation to the past doesn’t play out as a pure psychodrama of this inner turmoil, but contains elements of it, in the presence of a fading Celtic god, and a Celtic goddess who is ugly or beautiful depending on whether she is loved/loving or not. But the savagery and darkness of this past world, its being ruled entirely by fear and irrationality, is too powerful for it to be simply a moral lesson for Bridie’s sake. It’s more like a heightened experience of how harsh and unforgiving the world — then or now — can be, and so of the importance of seeing beyond one’s own mere needs (that “heart’s desire” the Washer at the Ford promises).

There’s also something of a critique, here, of the act of retreating into imagination as a way of not taking responsibility for the difficult aspects of life. As Kenneth muses early on, thinking about the superstitions of the past:

“Now he came to think about it, it was very convenient being able to shuffle off your own mistakes on a natural phenomenon which couldn’t answer back. Perhaps education wasn’t such a good thing after all. Or did he mean civilisation? Well, whichever it was, today you were left with no one to blame but yourself.”

Through understanding the nature of the Celtic goddess she serves — the High One, who can be beautiful to those who love her, but a hag to those who fear or hate her — Bridie does come to understand her mother somewhat (just as Donald Jackson comes to understand his ill father by facing a dragon in William Mayne’s A Game of Dark), it’s a mature rather than a childish understanding of an imperfect woman in an imperfect world:

“…what Jenny really loves is the idea of herself in the role of the loving mother. And that’s exactly what it is, a role, and she just can’t keep it up, month after month, year after year… People think that all women want children, and when they’ve got them, love them. I’ve learned that this isn’t true. Jenny wants fame, money and an adoring husband.”

Beadbonny Ash (a local name for the Mountain Ash, which is said to ward off fairies, witches, and evil influences) fits in with 1970s’ YA melding of rural locations, folkloristic fantasy and real-world teenage problems. But unlike other authors I’ve written about in Mewsings, such as Alan Garner, Penelope Lively, and Louise Lawrence, Winifred Finlay had long been an established author of what were at the time known as adventure novels “for older children” by the time she wrote her entry in the 1970s YA rural fantasy genre. She began writing, in fact, with Children’s Hour radio plays for the BBC in the late 1940s, of the sort where a group of kids solve a mystery whilst on holiday. Jessica Kemball-Cook, writing on Finlay in Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers (1978), says that these usually ended with the mystery being revealed as “not as spectacular as [the children] had thought… the hordes of international crooks and caves stuffed with treasure remain firmly in the children’s imagination”. In the 1970s, though, Finlay broke away from this well-worn template. Kemball-Cook writes:

“In 1970 Winifred Finlay deserted the typical adventure-story for full-blooded fantasy of the Alan Garner kind, where supernatural creatures from the past come alive now. Singing Stones and Beadbonny Ash are magical adventures in Scotland’s Celtic past. They resemble the earlier books in their well-drawn family relationships and historical detail, but they abandon the cynical attitude to mystery for a genuine commitment to the power of the supernatural and the war between Good and Evil…”

(She goes on to note that “Beadbonny Ash is her masterpiece”, which is good to know, as it’s a lot cheaper to acquire than the earlier Singing Stones.)

After this novel, Finlay, who worked under health difficulties in the latter part of her life, moved away from fiction and produced collections of folktales, some in collaboration with her daughter, Gillian Hancock.

Knowing this background in the more escapist adventure stories of the pre-1960s makes Beadbonny Ash’s uncompromising take on a difficult mother-daughter relationship all the more striking, as Finlay was obviously branching away from a type of fiction that seems (though I haven’t read it) to have been of a more comforting kind. It’s also notable how well this older author’s work fits into the mood of early 1970s British YA, which I’d always assumed took the form it did because of a younger generation’s experiences in the socially revolutionary 60s.

Solaris was first published in Poland in 1961, and in English translation in 1970 — though this translation (the one I read), by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, is based not on the original Polish, but a 1964 French translation by Jean-Michel Jasiensko. (It’s only in 2011 that a direct English-from-Polish translation came out, by Bill Johnston, though it’s not yet available as a print edition. I’d have read this one, though, if I had done my research beforehand.)

I was prompted to read Solaris following a vague train of thought about non-horror treatments of the sort of cosmic themes Lovecraft addressed — the human individual set against the immensity of the universe, encounters with the incomprehensible/truly alien, and so on — first in Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Star Maker, and now here. Solaris certainly brushes up against the horrific — I’d say it has a more viscerally distressing moment than anything in Lovecraft’s fiction, simply because it’s magnified by the sort of emotional aspects Lovecraft left out — but though it insists on the same incomprehensibility of the cosmos, Solaris simply doesn’t treat it as horror material.

The novel is narrated by Kris Kelvin, who arrives at a research station hovering above the world-spanning ocean of a distant planet, Solaris, expecting to be greeted by the station’s three inhabitants, but finds nobody around and the place in disarray. He finally locates Snow (Snaut in the original), in as much a state of disarray as the station, who at first reacts in fear. When he’s assured Kelvin is who (and what) he says he is, Snow tells him the station’s leader, Gibarian, took his own life that morning. He then gives a number of obscure but vague warnings before asking to be left alone:

“Keep a hold on yourself. Be prepared to meet — anything. It sounds impossible, I know, but try. It’s the only advice I can give you.”

The planet Solaris was discovered over a century before Kelvin was born. An apparently uninhabited world, it elicited scientific interest when it was realised the planet didn’t follow the expected orbital path around its twin suns. It should have been moving through forbidding extremes of temperature, but instead kept within a narrow range, almost as though some force were acting on it to keep its environment stable, even habitable. Could it be the planet’s “ocean”? Described as “a sort of gigantic entity, a fluid cell, unique and monstrous… surrounding the globe with a colloidal envelope several miles thick in places”, it’s a mysterious, ever-moving substance that sometimes forms itself into vast, solid structures, only to let them lapse. Could it be, scientists began to wonder, that these weren’t random effects but the thought processes of some vast sentient organism, in effect a world-sized liquid brain? And so the scientific field of Solaristics was born.

But in the hundred-plus years since, almost nothing has been definitively learned about this mysterious “gravity-controlling colloid”. Looking through one of the many exhaustive and authoritative books on the subject, Kelvin sees:

“Multicoloured illustrations, picturesque graphs, analytical summaries and spectral diagrams… explaining the type and rhythm of the fundamental transformations [of the ocean] as well as the chemical reactions. Rapidly, infallibly, the thick tome led the reader on to the solid ground of mathematical certitude. One might have assumed that we knew everything there was to be known about this representative of the category Metamorph… In fact, by no means everyone was yet convinced that the ocean was actually a living ‘creature’, and still less… a rational one.”

Every attempt to communicate with this vast thing failed. Some scientists turned bitterly against it and did everything to disprove its potential sentience. Others concluded that, however interesting it was to human observers, the ocean itself simply wasn’t interested in them. At the point where the novel begins, Solaris studies are in a lull, but nobody is quite able to break away from this fascinating yet seemingly impenetrable mystery. But things are about to enter a new phase.

Waking up on his first morning in the station, Kelvin finds a woman in his room. He knows her — she’s Rheya (or Harey in the original, though I can see why the change was made), the woman he was in love with ten years ago. The only thing is, he left her, and as a result she killed herself. This Rheya is the same age as that Rheya, and even has the needle-mark from her fatal injection visible in her arm. Yet the skin of her feet is “soft, like that of a newborn child” and her dress, when she tries to remove it, proves to have no zips, and only ornamental buttons. It’s Rheya, but not Rheya. She’s not human, but she looks and reacts too much like a human being for Kelvin to easily treat her as not human.

She doesn’t remember how she got here, and seems unable to be separated from Kelvin — doing so causes her emotional distress and even physical pain — but Kelvin is at first horrified by her. He realises this is what Snow was trying to warn him about, and learns that the other members of the crew have their own “visitors”, though of different, but equally personal significance. (We never learn what Snow’s or — the other surviving station-member — Sartorius’s “visitor” is, though there are hints that Sartorius’s is a child or, even, a dwarf. Gibarian’s, though, Kelvin does see: a tall black woman, dressed in nothing but a grass skirt, like an exaggerated racial stereotype. Snow hints the “visitors” aren’t necessarily people you once knew, but embodiments of deep, often guilt-ridden, perhaps even perverse, emotional responses, which is one of the reasons the crew members keep themselves and their “visitors” hidden away from one another. They’re like walking advertisements of one’s deepest guilt, shame and vulnerability.)

Although the “visitors” think of themselves as what they appear to be — human beings — they are different at a sub-atomic level. Kelvin, at first refusing to learn from Snow’s cynical-sounding “wisdom”, rids himself of one Rheya only to find a new one there the next morning, oblivious to what he did to her. This is part of what’s putting such pressure on Snow and Sartorius, and what drove Gibarian to take his own life: the “visitors” are a constant reminder of (in Kelvin’s case) the guilt he feels at Rheya’s death, but they cannot be escaped. Worse, the apparently human side of “Rheya” can’t help being aware that something’s wrong with her, that she’s not what she thinks she is. The scientists do their best to discuss these matters in abstract terms, referring to “Phi-creatures”, and not stating things too explicitly, so they don’t distress these “visitors” any more than necessary — while also trying to work out how to rid themselves of them, or at least understand what their purpose might be.

Are they a form of communication from the world-ocean? Are they experiments the world-ocean is performing on its new human inhabitants, or are they attempts to drive those human beings away? Or are they just one more random natural process that surrounds this weird planet of Solaris, devoid of any purpose or meaning?

Ultimately, Solaris is about the essentially unknowable aspect of a truly alien encounter. As Snow says:

“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, for 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…”

Lem says his main idea in Solaris was “to present the problem of an encounter in Space with a form of being that is neither human nor humanoid”:

“I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images.”

In the same piece (written in response to the 2002 Soderbergh film of the novel, which he hadn’t yet seen, but is sure he won’t like), Lem goes on to compare Solaris with Melville’s Moby Dick and “Capitan Ahab’s pernicious quest for the white whale”. His novel certainly has a few chapters that recall the whale-related info-dumps of Moby Dick, as Kelvin reviews the century of Solaris studies, including the classification of the many forms created by the world-ocean, or the trends in how the ocean’s possible intelligence is judged, at length and in hard-science-fictional detail. For me, though, the first comparison to come to mind is with ghost stories, in particular Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, whose hauntings were equally personally tailored and psychologically manipulative of its poor victim, Eleanor.

But there’s also Mythago Wood. In both Holdstock’s and Lem’s novels, a vast natural form (a forest, an ocean) which can be read as a symbol of the unconscious, generates physical embodiments of what dwells in the human psyche, creatures which appear human and can be interacted with as human, but ultimately are not — or, perhaps, reveal our stranger, less-human-seeming innermost depths. As the narrator Kelvin says:

“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilisations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”

Solaris has the rare distinction of being adapted into films by both a Soviet-era Russian (Tarkovsky in 1972) and a big-name Hollywood American (Soderbergh in 2002).

Tarkovsky’s adds a preceding section on Earth (including here some of the material that, in the novel, was in the later info-dump chapters), and adds a somewhat trippy/highly symbolic ending which perhaps contributed to its being seen, at the time, as Russia’s answer to 2001. But it’s certainly engaging with the ideas of Lem’s novel, even if (as it should) it takes them in Tarkovsky’s own direction.

Soderbergh’s, on the other hand, seems far too intent on hitting the emotional highs without laying the necessary groundwork of plot, situation, or character. The early part of the story is dealt with so perfunctorily, it was obvious the filmmakers had no interest in anything till the drama between Rheya and Kelvin could get underway. Solaris, here, isn’t introduced at all, and it was only in a DVD extra that I discovered the filmmakers thought of it not as a planet with a perhaps-conscious ocean, but a planet-sized entity, seemingly made entirely out of energy. Nobody talks about the possibility of contact with this thing, and the mission is purely one to evaluate Solaris for commercial exploitation. (I’m sure there’s a metaphor for Hollywood there, somewhere.) It ends with a handful of twists, some obvious, some interesting, but in the end doesn’t, in my opinion, hit any note with sufficient force to leave much of an impression.

Lem seems to have disliked both adaptions — in the case of the Soderbergh, without even seeing it — but that’s a common enough authorial stance. Certainly, his novel provided a template for some of the more thoughtful alien encounters in SF in subsequent years (Arrival, for instance).

For me, there’s an aesthetic to Solaris — both the novel and the films — of a pristine, almost surgically-clean technological surface, an island of apparent placidity and rationality amidst the bleakness and alienness of space, but one that serves to evoke the deepest human emotions of loss, guilt, and of vulnerability to one’s own undiscovered reaches. But I think this sort of emotional evocation works best with a light, even distanced touch, something the Soderbergh adaptation certainly doesn’t do. In space, no one needs to hear you scream; the vacuum, darkness, and immensity is scream enough.