Solaris

A spacecraft has been in orbit above the planet Solaris for decades. The planet’s ocean is an entity of some kind — no one can agree on whether it is alive, whether it is intelligent, whether it communicates. What it does is produce: from the subconscious of the scientists aboard the station, it materialises people they have lost, people they have loved, people they would prefer not to face. For Kris Kelvin, just arrived on the station, it produces his dead wife — a woman who killed herself because of something he did.

Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is the most profound science fiction novel ever written about the impossibility of genuine contact with a genuinely alien intelligence — and about the impossibility of escaping the contents of one’s own mind. Tarkovsky made it into one of the great films of the twentieth century. The novel is even better.

Essential world science fiction. Published by Faber & Faber.