It's with a bit of trepidation, then, that I look forward to the American movie adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, a dense and thoughtful science fiction novel that couldn't be anything but a science fiction novel, because Lem writes not of the familiar, but the alien. Lem's novels pit rational men and their rational models against a universe that does not always yield to their self-serving analyses; in Lem's universe, world x is not just like an Amazonian rain forest, world y is not just like the Sahara desert, and there are no ewoks to be found, not even a thought of them.

In Solaris, Lem writes of a godlike, sentient ocean on a planet (named... Solaris) orbiting two stars, an ocean that becomes the object of obsessive but fruitless study by human scientists, giving rise to the curious discipline of Solaristics: Lem parades fictional theories of Solaris before the reader in exquisite, Borges-like detail, parodies of academic scholarship (Lem would go on to write an entire book of fictional literary criticism) intended to reveal more about their fictional authors than the alien ocean. There is a plot, though. Shortly after the novel begins, we find that Solaris has populated an orbiting space station with spectres plucked from its students' memories, perhaps mocking them, perhaps studying them in turn. One such ghost turns out to be the protagonist's dead wife, and thus the novel is given an element of tragic romance, and perhaps an element of horror, but the novel cannot be reduced to either. Truthfully, it's difficult for me to express the appeal of Solaris; at times, it reminds me of Borges, Asimov, Clarke, Kafka, and, as it closes, even Sartre. Though it may not be quite worthy of such comparisons, this is a book that is dear to me.

So now it's a movie (again), but what kind? The trailer hints at horror; the posters and "now a major motion picture" book covers promise a love story. Opens November 27th. God, don't let it suck.

It's actually the latest manifestation of an old and hallowed computing tradition. Back in the 80s, some computer games included a feature called the boss key. If the boss happened to walk up on an employee who was slacking off with a game of Leisure Suit Larry or Leather Goddesses of Phobos, the worker could hit a special key combination to instantly bring up a screenshot of a spreadsheet or database, leaving the boss none the wiser.

Me, I'm too much of the anxious sort to comfortably play videogames while at the office. If the boss happens to stroll into my cube while I'm posting cat photos or stealing music, though, I simply rest my forehead against the edge of my desk and begin to sob violently. A decidedly low-tech bit of fakery, but an effective one, and like all good lies, it works because only half of it is acting.