Finished 2025: Solaris by Stanisław Lem 📚

It has been close to 20 years since I’ve seen the Tarkovsky or Soderbergh film adaptations. I figured that it was finally time to catch up with Lem’s original. And I’m glad I did.

Solaris is a bleak book. It is emotional horror. It is a cry of hopeless yearning for hope from a convinced atheist. It is among the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read.

That said, I’m not sure that the 1st person narrative voice of Kelvin works throughout the entire novel. In Moby-Dick, I believe Ishmael as a narrator/author who gets lost in his own narrating. Kelvin’s alternating from describing the plot on Solaris to describing his reading of the scientific history of Solaris seems less true to how this character in this situation would tell the story and just seems like a convenient way for Lem to do a whole lot of infodumping.