Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music

when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. Tonight's Nightwaves Landmarks will take you on a journey to the edge of the charted universe and the limits of human knowledge.

This is the latest in our monthly series of programs in which we ask

practitioners to choose a major cultural work that has significance for them, or in this case,

two extraordinary works with the same title. I'm joined by the novelist Will Self and the filmmaker

Mike Hodges to discuss Solaris, the science fiction novel by the Polish author Stanislav Len,

and its film adaptation by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky.

Unusually, both book and film command the status of cultural landmark.

These are a pair of works that seem to haunt everyone who makes contact with them.

So what is Solaris?

That's a mystery that the characters in this story

risk their sanity attempting to solve.

Superficially, it's an easy one to clear up.

Solaris is an alien planet

that won't sit still long enough to be mapped by human explorers.

Its oceans bubble, seeth, calcify and reliquify. Its waves sprout pseudipodia,

which sometimes kill and sometimes want to play. But in both works, the planet carries an

enormous freight of metaphor. It means something, it stands for something, and yet for reader and

viewer, the meaning of Solaris will not yield easily to

interpretation. The hero of the story is Chris Kelvin, an expert on the science of solaristics,

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