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4* - I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this - sci-fi isn't a favourite genre for me, but this does such a beautiful job of keeping at it's core a human story. But it must be more than that because there is plenty of science / world building, none of which bored more (other than maybe a short section about the Soloaricists (sp? I listed to this in audio so spellings are unknown!) where I fazed in and out.

The language is great, and it's amazing to me this is translated.

The audio production was excellent, really top notch. Highly recommended.

3*

I love sci-fi, but I struggled a bit with this one. I think I would like to try it again in a different translation. The one I read was translated to Norwegian in 1974, via the German translation, and the language was cumbersome and old fashioned. There were also some strange translation choices made in the dialogue that baffled me. Add to this the oddity of people reading heavy paper books on a space station and speaking of neutrinos like they could possibly do a huge amount of damage when annihilated and can't be detected by scientific equipment. Basically it all felt very dated. It kept reminding me of those old black and white news reels that are narrated at high speed in a somewhat pompous male voice.

Then again, sci-fi is often not about the science or futuristic vision. It is a tool for exploring human nature, society, and possibility. At its core this is about human solipsism, how we are a priori primed not just to see things formed by time and space but as relatable to ourselves. We have a tendency to place all life on a scale of more or less developed than ourselves. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that an alien life form would conform to our scales. Lem was a satirist as well as sci-fi writer, and while Solaris is not a satire, it does show the folly of taking humanity as all things' measure. Both because we are not, and because if there is other sentient life out there we will not be the only ones doing the measuring.

My second time of reading this book. A science fiction work by Polish author Stanislaw Lem written in 1961. I have a quite long review for me on this book but I am not going to put that all here. Kris Kelvin is coming to Solaris to work with another scientist on the planet Solaris. Solaris is an ocean without atmosphere. The question is whether Solaris is a sentient being. When Kelvin arrives he finds that the scientist he was going to work with has committed suicide. The other two are holed up in their rooms and will barely leave for short periods of time. Something is not right about the space station. Soon Kelvin finds out what the others already know. This is also a philosophical work that explores human memory and communication with non human. I read the audio and want to add that this was narrated by Alessandro Juliani who does such a superb job of making each voice unique. He even does an excellent female voice. (2016)

This is a scifi classic, with good reason. I have previously seen both the Polish and the later US films of it, and liked them both. I think I would like to read another Lem novel sometime, possibly The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy or His Master's Voice .

My highlight passages from Solaris:

Solaris was widely regarded as a planet endowed with life—but with only a single inhabitant�

...or that the ocean was in fact a neoplasmic glioma which, having come into existence within the bodies of former inhabitants of the planet, had consumed them all and swallowed them up, fusing the remains together in the form of an everlasting, self-rejuvenating, supracellular element.

I’d not even been a whole hour at the Station and I was already starting to understand why incidents of paranoia had occurred here.

There was a time we tormented one another with excessive honesty in the naive belief it would save us.

A gathering roar rises from the unseen depths; air, expelled as if in death throes and rubbing against the narrowing channels, wheezing and thundering in the passageways, stimulates the collapsing ceilings to a wail as if from lifeless vocal cords or monstrous throats overgrown with stalactites of slime, and despite the furious movement that has been unleashed—it is, after all, the movement of destruction—the spectator is immediately overcome by a sense of utter deadness. [Wow, what an evocative sentence]

A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn’t create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he’s born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside.

What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea, as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.

George P. wrote: "This is a scifi classic, with good reason. I have previously seen both the Polish and the later US films of it, and liked them both. I think I would like to read another Lem novel sometime, possibl..."
I read The Star Diaries and really liked it. I think Lem is a great author with a sense of humor.

Kris Kelvin arrives on the planet Solaris where three men have been studying a possibly sentient ocean, to find one of the men dead and the other two behaving very strangely. Soon a ghost from Kelvin's past appears as if conjured from his memories, and refuses to leave.

I liked some aspects of this, but not others. The menacing atmosphere is brilliantly done at the start, but after the halfway point I thought it was diluted by pages of fake science, and the story started to seem farcically like the Stepford Wives in space. (view spoiler)[Kris is obviously much more taken with the fake Rheya than he ever was with the real one, and I found his attraction to her childlike submissiveness creepy. (hide spoiler)]

I did enjoy the philosophical aspects and the idea of something that doesn't fit into our categories of living/inanimate or sentient/non-sentient.

Kristel wrote: "George P. wrote: "...I think I would like to read another Lem novel..." I read The Star Diaries and really liked it. I think Lem is a great author with a sense of humor

I just saw your comment nine mos later when I read Rosemary's new comment. The county and city library systems here don't have that one though they have several of his others. The university library does have it so I may pick it up there or may read his The Futurological Congress which the nearer city lib has.

Pre-2016 review:

****

I would have to say this is one of my favourite sci-fi story, because of rather plausible way it was developed and for the multiple ethical, moral and philosophical questions that it generates. Who knows if other worlds (provided they exist) function just as our own microcosm...

If you have the opportunity to watch a movie version of this book, please, please, please don't watch the Hollywood crap that Soderbergh did with Clooney, but rather aim to find a copy of the masterpiece produced by Tarkovsky in the 70s: it really immerses you into the Solaris world and its slow pace allows you to think and think about what is currently happening and how it could make sense.