Book-It’s Literary Manager Annika Bennett recently sat down with Director Gus Menary to talk about Solaris and the world that Gus and the artistic team are building on stage.
Annika:
Hi Gus! Thanks so much for speaking with me today about Solaris. I would love to know a little bit about what drew you to program this title for Book-It.
Gus:
Well, my father is a big sci-fi fan, and he got me into science fiction as well. And we both really loved the more classic science fiction of [Isaac] Asimov and [Arthur C.] Clarke and [Robert] Heinlein, but we were also drawn to the more philosophical works, and Solaris is one of the all-time greats. So I read Solaris for the first time when I was in high school and greatly enjoyed it, both because it was frightening to me and because it talked about a lot of philosophical concepts that I had never read about before. It’s a novel that I’ve come back to often throughout my life because so many other different science fiction works are so obviously influenced by it that it always, always warrants a revisit. And I’ve found that it’s a story that’s different every time you look at it, a story that reveals more about where you are, who you are, than it reveals about itself.
Annika:
You said you found it frightening in high school. Does it feel more or less frightening to you when you read it now?
Gus:
Oh, that’s interesting. I think that, yes, it’s become more frightening to me the older I’ve gotten. When I visit Solaris now, it’s about mortality, it’s about loss and grief and the fear of losing someone and what that can mean. And those are fears that I think grow as you get older. And I think it’s important to note that while the book is certainly psychological horror, I don’t know if I would call it a horror book.
Annika:
Right. I read Solaris for the first time this week, and what I found really interesting in it was the way it walks up to the same point that I’m used to walking up to with classic horror writers like [Edgar Allen] Poe and [H.P] Lovecraft and [Robert] Chambers – it has that same creeping horror, that same sustained suspense – but at the point where all of them would just have their characters give up and go mad and lose the thread entirely, Stanislaw Lem says, “No, these are people who wanna push beyond that.” They come to the impossible and they want to go further.
Gus:
How did you feel like that impacted that feeling of horror for you?
Annika:
Maybe, as you say, it’s more about where I am in life than it is Solaris itself, but I found so much optimism in Lem’s read on humanity and what we’re capable of. The horror was there, but it was softened for me, somehow.
Gus:
There’s maybe an urbanity to it. We cross that rubicon into “yeah, things here are strange, things are weird, let’s see what happens if we try to move beyond that.” I don’t know if you can attribute it to the human’s ability to normalize anything, but there is a routine that the scientists orbiting Solaris pick up within this, like, absolutely crazy situation, and there’s both a comfort and a horror within that. I think David [Grieg]’s adaptation hones in on that element and picks up on the horror, and reconfigures Lem’s novel into more of a classic horror story. I’d say his take has a lot more in common with The Turn of the Screw or The Haunting of Hill House than it does with Stranger in a Strange Land or The Martian Chronicles. So that’s raised an interesting question for my team: How much is our focus on scaring people? How much is our focus on making this story more human? And, you know, what’s interesting is that I’ve found that those are actually in many ways the same question. One piece of Solaris lore is that Stanislaw Lem always refused to say what he thought the book was about, other than to tell the people who had opinions that they were wrong. He was very big on being like, “Nope, that’s not what I meant,” but then not really following that up with what he meant. I feel like in its specificity, this adaptation feels to me more empathetic, feels to me more human, than the book I grew up reading. Maybe that’s by virtue of the book coming to us as a translation of a translation.
Annika:
That’s something I wanted to ask you about, yeah. So many of Book-It’s shows are very intent on that idea of preserving authorial language and tone – and here we have this story that has gone from Polish to French to David’s adaptation – and he’s a Scottish playwright, and this adaptation premiered in Melbourne and Edinburgh – and now it’s here in Seattle.
Gus:
Exactly. And it’s not just this adaptation – when you sit down and read the novel Solaris, it’s a translation of Polish into French into English – it’s passed through all these prisms. As an aside, there is now a direct English translation of the novel. Stanislaw Lem did not live to see it, but his wife and son have called it a great translation. Unfortunately, because of some laws – I don’t know exactly what they are – it’s only available in audiobook and Kindle format. Otherwise, you just can’t find it.
Annika:
Obviously the bones of the story are remarkable – if they weren’t, Solaris wouldn’t have been translated so many times! – but what do you think has been lost, or maybe gained, as it’s made its way to our stage?
Gus:
So many misreadings and misrepresentations have happened as a result of the project of translating this novel. People have read Solaris as a metaphor for American and Soviet powers, or an indictment of – or endorsement of – communism. Stanislaw Lem was very public in calling out those takes as ridiculous, but they probably came about from a misinterpretation of the novel’s most famous line: “We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.” And what’s interesting to me is that all of that misreading has somehow created space for a great dramatist like David Grieg to pick Solaris up and sort of futz with it. And it seems like what he came to as a central thesis is the idea of human connection – no, not even human connection, just… connection. Because so much of it is about loneliness and isolation, and that’s true of both the scientists and Solaris itself. David highlights some really interesting themes about colonization as well – what it means to encounter a species that is uncontacted? What does it actually mean to communicate?
Annika:
And all of those themes are also very much in the novel, but in such a cerebral way.
Gus:
Absolutely. I think if we were to ask Stanislaw Lem, “Hey, is this book about colonization?” he would say no. But I think it’s also impossible to read it and not say, well… it certainly is, at least a little bit.
Annika:
I think a lot of readers would say that science fiction is always about colonization and imperialism, right? It can be a really political genre in ways that I sometimes find surprising as someone who hasn’t read as much of the oeuvre. Do you have any recommendations for folks who come away from this show inspired to read – or watch – more sci-fi?
Gus:
Okay, yeah. Michael Crichton wrote a book called Sphere – and people sort of poo-poo Michael Crichton, and I certainly do too, especially when it comes to some of his more pseudoscientific ideas. But if the themes of Solaris speak to you, I’d check out Sphere. His main character is a psychologist whose job is to be on hand for the government when we make contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence – not to actually make the contact, but to help the people who have made that contract not go mad. So that theme of extraterrestrial life beyond our comprehension is front and center in a really interesting way. A lot of my favorite science fiction books – most of which were definitely influenced by Solaris – focus on that idea. Sphere, [Ted Chiang’s] Arrival… even Douglas Adams talks about a life form that’s just a hyper-intelligent shade of blue. I really enjoy the philosophical questions that arise from trying to get outside not just an Americanized or Eurocentric, but almost humanistic way of thinking.
Annika:
There’s a line late in Solaris that I bookmarked: “We are in a situation that is beyond morality.”
Gus:
Yes. Exactly. To assume that very human constructions – like morality – would exist somewhere else is not only naive, but also a very colonial mindset. That kind of thinking is always gonna get you into trouble in sci-fi.
Annika:
One major element of Solaris that we haven’t talked about yet is the fact that it’s a haunted house story set in space. It’s teeming with ghosts.
Gus:
Right. You know, I think we would be shocked and horrified to know what some of us would do to be able to spend more time with our loved ones who have gone on. So there is something really human, but very also spooky about that to me. I think some people would quite genuinely do anything if it could give them just another minute with someone they loved. And other people approach it differently – they know that death is the end of the line. You know that Poe story, where he gets his dead lover back, but she’s…
Annika:
The Monkey’s Paw?
Gus:
Right. He wishes that she was still alive, and then he hears a corpse pounding on his door, and it’s all about being careful what you wish for. That’s in Solaris too. It’s fascinating because it really is a bit of an optical illusion. It’s that old lady, young woman, rabbit, duck… you know what I’m talking about? There is, there is so much in there that it can be about all of these things or it can be about none of them, but I’m always fascinated to see people talk about what they think this book is about. Cuz none of them are wrong… but they couldn’t all possibly be right. You know?
Annika:
I know! You’re talking about nihilism, and I feel like I found this remarkable optimism in these people getting to the edge – of humanity, of life, of the solar system – and still wanting to keep going.
Gus:
And there is hope within the book, I think, and there is hope within the play. What’s really intensely interesting to me is that a book so much about what is not human could also be so much about what it is to be human.
Annika:
Yeah. <laugh>.
I think you’ve answered this in a lot of ways already, but… what would you say to Book-It audience members who might think that sci-fi isn’t for them?
Gus:
I mean… I don’t want to tell them they’re wrong <laugh>, but so many great novels are science fiction that we don’t interpret necessarily as being within that genre. Frankenstein is science fiction, Mrs. Caliban is science fiction, so much of Kurt Vonnegut, so many of our American classics are science fiction without us really realizing it. I love science fiction because it allows us to make analogies. It allows us to play out hypotheticals and variables in a controlled environment and really let our imaginations stretch. I can understand not wanting to encounter space lasers or the little grey men – I’d be right there with you. But this novel in particular has this very beautiful way of talking about humanity as a whole. It allows us to talk about encountering that which we do not understand, it allows us to talk about our responsibilities as denizens of the universe and how we fit into the larger cosmic puzzle. So I would caution people not to dismiss it so easily. If their interest is great literature, then Solaris is very much part of that pantheon. And I think that they’ll really enjoy it, and they’ll be missing out if they don’t see it.
Annika:
I couldn’t agree more.