"Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem; 7/10

Well this is a really hard book to review. I guess I had been getting lucky with a run of easy ones there for a while. Books that were fairly straightforward about which I had fairly straightforward feelings. Nothing straightforward going on with "Solaris" or Stanislaw Lem.

On its face this book is about a possibly-living, possibly-sentient quasi-ocean on a distant planet, and the experiences of a man who is dispatched to join the team studying it.  Did you follow that? Cool, so that is really only a fraction of what this book is about.

Lem, like Philip Dick, is a philosopher trapped in a science fiction writer's body.  The parallels to Dick don't end there either, as you'll see if you read the works of both in near proximity.  In fact, Lem, who was probably the most famous SF writer behind the Iron Curtain (he was Polish), attempted to correspond with PKD, with whom he felt a great kinship.  It will help you in understanding the work of Philip Dick to know that he thought the letters he was receiving from Stanislaw Lem were from the KGB, that he was the target of a secret intelligence operation of some kind, and that he reported the matter to the FBI.

But I digress.  Solaris really works as a criticism of humanity and of science thinkers and science fiction thinkers themselves.  Really I got fewer answers from this book than I got questions, the foremost of which was, "how are we ever going to understand an alien race with all of the variations and differences that are probably between them and us when we barely even understand ourselves?" 

The plot cuts, the characters are well-written, and the only reason I give it a 7, which feels like a slight, is that it was dense, difficult to follow at times, and hard to understand.  It shared this with "Neuromancer" and "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?," along with the fact that most of my understanding of it has come in subsequent meditation on its meaning rather than instant comprehension as I read it, though this one was a bit more tedious, especially in the early parts.  I will read all three again someday, and I predict that I will enjoy them more the second time.

This one is especially recommended for the ponderers and thinkers of deep thoughts out there. It isn't shallowly profound like some of the other things I read at the time- it is deeply profound. The movie, a landmark of Russian cinema directed by Tarkovsky, is pretty crazy, deep, trippy, relentlessly tedious, and still interesting too, and I think I will never watch it again, but I couldn't say for sure. I haven't seen the Soderberg remake with George Clooney yet.