June 2023 Book Club: Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

  

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Sci-fi, Mystery
Content: Clean

 

When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he finds a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the living physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others examining the planet, Kelvin learns, are plagued with their own repressed and newly corporeal memories. The Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories, though its purpose in doing so is unknown, forcing the scientists to shift the focus of their quest and wonder if they can truly understand the universe without first understanding what lies within their hearts.

 

Years ago I had seen the movie trailer for the 2002 movie version of this book, and thought it looked like a combination of romance and suspense in space. That was the extent of my knowledge of this book. So, I ended up being a little wrong about the suspense part. There was an air of mystery about everything, but the suspense level ended up being low.

In the beginning I liked this, and I was intrigued by the mysterious happenings. I kept waiting for something hair-raising to happen because I got some slightly creepy vibes from the sudden appearance of the main character's dead ex-wife. It really does feel like a psychological thriller in the beginning and I really wanted there to be a sinister element to things. But that's not the direction this story goes. 

Ultimately I ended up liking the first half of the book better than the second half. It ended up getting bogged down with info dumps halfway through and never really recovered, at least not for me. Still, this was an interesting book about a first contact that goes awry. Also, I think this book aged pretty well. Oftentimes, when I read a classic sci-fi, there are outdated technologies, but with this one I thought there wasn't much of that at all. None of the tech was described in detail and that helped it to age well. I also enjoyed the concept of the alien ocean that covered the planet they are studying. 

 

For dessert for book club, we decided to make the ocean into a pie. Unfortunately, we didn't get any pictures of it, but we used pudding and blue and green dye swirled together with some sparkly silver sprinkles all over the top.