Solaris, by Stanisław Lem
I finished reading this book within the past hour. I've been reading it here and there over the past couple of weeks. Here's what I think about it.
It's a great book. I really enjoyed reading it, especially the first half. It's definitely a sci-fi book and there are of course a bunch of made up terms and concepts. But I don't feel like the 'sciency' side of the book is intended to wow me or to impress me, rather I look at it like I look at the timeline of Looper: it's meant to help me immerse myself in the complicated and poorly understood world of the protagonist, just as the confusion in Looper mimics the confusion felt by its protagonists.
The book is rather philosophical. Its protagonist is faced with an incarnation of a deceased partner, whose existence is bounded by his recollection of her. This alone raises a number of existential questions: what is a person beyond our own perception of them, and what makes anyone human?
The book is also very descriptive in its scenery. Set on a planet which orbits two suns which each cast different colours of light, covered by an ocean of viscous liquid which itself appears to be sentient and which can produce incredible, fractal-like structures from itself, I manage to enjoy the depictions, even though aphantasia makes it impossible for me to try and visualise them.
My only minor disappointment is the end of the book. Most of the book feels like it's taking place at a rapid pace and so is quite exciting, each chapter beginning in the early hours of the following day. But by the third to last chapter, we start by skipping 6 days; by the second to last chapter, we skip 3 weeks. The intensity has vanished. I found it somewhat anticlimactic. Still, I did enjoy the substance of the end.
If you haven't read it already, do read Solaris.