Science fiction almost always assumed the aliens we meet play some kind of game with us the rules of which we sooner or later may understand (in most cases the "game" was the strategy of warfare). However I wanted to cut all threads leading to the personification of the Creature, i.e. the Solarian Ocean, so that the contact could not follow the human, interpersonal pattern - although it did take place in some strange manner. The method I used in the novel to demonstrate this was the particular outcome of the interest of people, who for over one hundred years have been studying the planet Solaris and the ocean covering its surface.

One should not speak of a "thinking" or a "non-thinking" Ocean, however the Ocean certainly was active, undertook some voluntary actions and was capable of doing things which were entirely alien to the human domain. Eventually, when it got the attention of little ants that struggled above its surface, it did so in a radical way. It penetrated the superficial established manners, conventions and methods of linguistic communication, and entered, in its own way, into minds of the people of the Solaris Station and revealed what was deeply hidden in each of them: a reprehensible guilt, a tragic event from the past suppressed by the memory, a secret and shameful desire. In some cases the reader remains unaware of what has been revealed; what we know is that in each case it was capable of incarnation and physical creation of a being the hidden secret was connected to. Ocean's actions lead one of the scientists to an emotional distress that ended in a suicide, others isolated themselves. When Kris Kelvin initially arrived at the Station he was unable to understand what was going on: all were hiding and in the corridor he encountered one of the phantoms - a giant Black woman in a reed skirt with whom the suicide Gibarian presumably had been conflicted.

Kelvin's recklessness and imprudent behavior in the past had not prevented the suicide of his beloved woman Harey. He buried her on Earth and in a sense he buried her in his mind as well - until the Ocean made her come back at the Solaris Station.

The Ocean appears quite stubborn in his ways: the creatures, a kind of remorse of the Station's scientists, cannot be gotten rid of - even those sent into space come back... Kelvin initially tried to kill Harey; later he accepted her presence and tried to play the role he had to abandon on Earth - of her beloved man.

The vision of the Planet Solaris was very important for me."Why was it important?" The Solarian globe was not just any sphere surrounded by some jelly - it was an active being (although a non-human one). It neither built nor created anything translatable into our language that could have been "explained in translation". Hence a description had to be replaced by analysis - (obviously an impossible task) - of the internal workings of the Ocean's ego. This gave rise to symetriads, asymetriads and mimoids - strange semi-constructions scientists were unable to understand; they could only describe them in a mathematically meticulous manner, and this was the sole purpose of the growing Solarian library - the result of over a hundred years' efforts to enclose in folios what was not human and beyond human comprehension; what could not have been translated into human language - or into anything else.

Summing up, as Solaris' author I shall allow myself to repeat that 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. This is why the book was entitled Solaris and not Love in Outer Space.
    -The Solaris Station (Stanislaw Lem, December 8th, 2002)

"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 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. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us--that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence--then we don't like it any more."

I had listened to him patiently. "But what on earth are you talking about?"