Imagine the Ocean Was Blood
On horror, Lem, and the long afterlife of a high school syllabus
“Do you like horror?” my friend Jason asked. “Not really,” I said, honestly. “My daughter does, sometimes.” “Oh, she has to go see Iron Lung!” he enthused. He has seen it three times already.
I texted my daughter. “Jason says you have to see Iron Lung.”
“We saw it!” she messaged back. “Chris wanted to see it for Markiplier. It’s very Solaris, honestly. Imagine if the ocean on Solaris was made of blood, and instead of studying it from space they sent you down in a little submarine.”
“She says it’s like Solaris, but the ocean is blood and you’re in a little submarine,” I said to Jason.
He nodded. “Stanislaw Lem, right? I see it.”
My daughter read Solaris in high school, in a class I designed called Fantastic Fiction, in which I spent an entire year challenging the idea that science fiction and fantasy are unserious literature. We read Shakespeare (The Tempest), Verne, Bradbury, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, Lois McMaster Bujold, Jane Yolen. We watched Star Trek and Apollo 13.
I’d never read Solaris before I assigned it for the class, in a unit I titled “Into the Black,” for which my students also read Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Sentinel,” and watched Apollo 13. If you haven’t read it, it’s a moody, disturbing story of scientists studying an alien planet—and the planet, which may or may not be sentient, seems to also be studying them. The story offers no pat answers and no happy endings.
And of all of the amazing works we read in that class, from “Leaf by Niggle” to “2BOR02B;” from Something Wicked This Way Comes to Brave New World; the book with the most staying power, the work that has become a touchstone for me and for my daughter, is Solaris. A dense, unsettling Polish science fiction novel has become a shared reference point—something she can reach for instinctively to describe a completely different work.
Serious art doesn’t just entertain. It becomes shared language.
It lets you say “very Solaris,” and be understood.
