Stanisław Lem – Solaris

Ez most rendhagyó módon angolul lesz, mert a goodreadsen írtam hozzá kritikát, és csak ugyanezt tudnám megírni magyarul is.

This book.. Was this bad? Yes, very.

After Ringworld I expected similar, classical SF. Not that I'm a fan of that, but it's bearable. I thought knowing the classics is a good thing. Well, I can say that Solaris is neither science fiction, nor a good book.

The book switches around 3 types of texts:
- There are the action scenes, where stuff actually happens (this is rare though). These are so badly written, they are unimaginable to happen. Lem seems to have no idea about how people, humans behave, act and speak.
- Then we have the pseudo-philosophic monologues (sometimes inner), which (i guess) would give the body, the meaning of the book. They fail miserably. It's more like an angsty teenager writing 2deep4you shit with an added layer of arbitrary, illogical hypotheses poured on top of it. The protagonist is very confident in stuff he should not be.
- At last we have the huge walls of text of really uninteresting stuff. I guess Lem thought writing dozens of pages of shit he made up just because will make the book science fiction, and I'm sad I can't tell him it won't. Reading the Ringworld I had these same thoughts, but Niven at least tried to be consistent with known physics, making guesses on consequences. Lem just makes shit up on the fly, which have almost 0 effect on the story or even on the deeper message of the book. I seriously had to shuffle through ~10% of the book near the middle. First I realized I'm reading bullshit half a page through it, pressed the "next page" book. He was still ranting on about some stuff. I turned a couple pages, and still. In the end I basically had to skip from 51% to 59%, because he went so detailed into symmetriads and asymmetriads and mimoids and all the other stuff.

The book is supposedly about making contact with really alien beings. While that could be a very interesting aspect, it just doesn't happen. The book only concentrates on the human aspect, just like any "normal" alien sci-fi, where the aliens basically reflect some human aspect the writer wants to examine.

All in all, the book reads like an old-school SF (which is bad in itself with the "i'm gonna teach you stuff" style, dragging writing and logical leaps), but without the science part.