Solaris by Stanislaw Lem #sciencefiction | All Time List

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

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[Psychosis]

I absolutely loved this book. It is one of my favorites

I read it last year and loved it ! One of my favourite hard-SF novels ever ❤️
Keep up the good work

[TomPowers]

I read the book back in 1993 when i was 14 in Finland.. It totally blew away...
Basically the book is about what makes us human or what it is to be human with a question mark. Do we understand ourselves with the complexity that we give ourselves or are we just throwing ourselves out into a void that we possibly cant understand and not evolved for.
What is life and death? Is there a death in the universe as we humans has come to acknowledge?... Do loved ones come back from the dead because an alien life form that we cant comprehend or understand read our minds?... Then what does life mean?... Does religion have any matter?...
Does love As it was written in the book... "I hope that i am

One of the best books i have ever read! A must read!

P.S yes i did see the Andrei Tarkovsky adaptation.

[polishFantasyEN]

Oho, much appreciated, Lem is a great Polish writer who inspired a whole generation of SF and fantasy authors and made Polish speculative fiction to take to such a high level.
Too bad that not much of those works are available in English...
If I were to recommend one book of a similar, albeit more fantasy inclination, that would be: The Lord of The Ice Garden.
If I were to recommend another Polish author similar to Lem, but more modern, that would be Jacek Dukaj.

[SiqueScarface]

I would not put too much emphasis on the love story and on the Soderbergh movie, or as Stanislaw Lem put it in an interview: "The topic of my book was not the sexual problems of humans in space."
(In my understanding of the book, Solaris the ocean is eerily good at reproducing individual traumata of the humans trying to explore it. Kris Kelvin's most important trauma was the suicide of his wife. And while he kills the first reproduction of his wife, the second reproduction, after finally becoming her own personality and not just a memory of his wife, actually commits suicide too - "for science".)

[SaveEarthPlsBeKind]

Andrei Tarkovsky's film based on this book, as you mention, is an excellent film, well worth a watch.

[Morra]

The biggest disappointment was that they changed everything in the movies from the book and made it into a love story which it was not. In the book Kelvin went out to Solaris islands and fiddle with the Ocean like ppl had done before for countless of decades and thought about life and that magic things could still happen. Ending it with a glare of hope.
In the movies they end it with Kelvin is still on Solaris becoming a part of his own fantasy. I did not like that.

But the book is a must read.
Thanks for the review.