I gave up reading science fiction in general, because I was unable to "digest" it - mostly because of its total lack of cognitive values. Authors do not seem to be interested in them, since all they want is sell their novels. Being a fool I wasted a lot of time writing and explaining - particularly in America - for which I was only sworn at. I once quite justly wrote to an Australian comforter that "I simply had to leave" - after having played the role of a missionary in a brothel for a few years and "trying to convert fallen women".

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I do not engage in interpretation of my books - I leave this task to the reader. And I never sat down at my writing desk with a complete plan of the entire book. The last chapter of Solaris was written after a year's break. I had to put away that book, since I did not know what to do with my hero. Today I cannot even recall why I was unable to finish it for such a long time... I recall only that the first part was written in one spurt, fluently and with ease, while the second was finished after a long time on some lucky day.

The thing is that I do not possess a finished picture of the whole piece. When I led Kelvin to the Solaris station and made him see the frightened, drunken Snaut, I did not know myself what made him so anxious. I had no idea why Snaut was so afraid of a totally innocent stranger. At that time I didn't know - but soon I was to find out, because I kept on writing.

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I was using humour for various reasons. First, some topics were unsuitable for serious treatment, such as questions of genetics. All those sketches of weird skeletons I drew in the "Star Diaries" were intended to make this subject less horrible. When I was writing that, there were no punks, nobody had a Mohawk haircut, young men did not paint their faces. Nevertheless I had such a feeling, that when mankind will attain control over human genetics, wild things of that kind will happen. Human irresponsibility will lead us to crazy situations. In order to present those crazy situations, I had to create a pattern of levity.

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Literary realism, for me, is literature's way of dealing with the real problems of a dual (at least) type. The first kind is the sort of problem that already exists or is coming into existence. The second kind is the sort that appears to be lying on the path of humanity's future. Any attempt to differentiate "possible problems" from "fictional", or "probable situations (albeit seeming outrageous today)" from "unlikely", is probably too polarizing to be successful. In this field, it's every man for himself, as long as the particular reasons for claiming the status of expert on dichotomies like the ones cited above are more or less respectable. Thus, anyone can be a selfmade authority on this subject, and so I am one.

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