SOURCE: “Resisting Monsters: Notes on Solaris,” in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 21, Pt. 2, July, 1994, pp. 173–90.

In the following essay, Weinstone discusses the characterization of monsters in Western literature. Weinstone examines Mary Shelley's character, Frankenstein, and Lem's character, Rheya, in Solaris as notable departures from this tradition.

Our monsters have always resisted us, and until recently, resistance was futile.¹ Beginning with the earliest Greek texts, the Western narrative encounter between man and monster has done the work of reinforcing the political and cultural hegemony of propertied males. In the Greco-Roman canon, man fought against monsters so that he might return home, reanointed as lord over property, women, and armies. Ontologically, these stories placed the beast outside of the social, heterosexual domestic and human modes of production. Monsters were made, like men, by gods. They lived, geographically, at a distance from human society; the hero had to leave home to do battle...