Solaris Two: Tomes in space!

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics. This blog entry relates to a different topic.

My current research interest is the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I will not yet post my overall thesis for the project, but I am learning things along the way which are tangential to my thesis and which I can share.

Today's topic: book volumes with ink on paper.

Lem intersperses the action of the novel with discussions of the background of the planet. In order to add this background, the main character, Kris Kelvin, goes to the library to read up on the history of the exploration of Solaris. In the library, he hefts massive, print book volumes: ink on paper.

This novel was published in the early 1960s, and it features interstellar human space travel, anti-gravity devices, and other technologies that we have not mastered, but the Kindle was unimaginable. Instead, they were hauling bulky volumes across the galaxy. Lem did not anticipate massive storage capacity for electronic media. Even microfilm was available in 1960 and would have made more sense for schlepping a library across the universe. Stan just wasn't thinking.

Now, as a librarian, I for one enjoy using a paper book volume for reading for comprehension and notetaking. But our library downsized our bound periodicals collection by over half in part because many of the articles are full text online. The library on the Solaris station is a reference collection, not a set of books you would read from start to finish. A science fiction story written today about Solaris would have the station storing petabytes of raw data on the state of all parts of the ocean. The literature on the planet would fit on an app on everyone's phones. To the edge of the universe with massive paper books? I don't think so.