SOLARIS by Stanislaw Lem

Solaris is a somewhat Creepy, definitely Unsettling book about people on another (definitely Living, possibly Thinking) planet far far away. The fact that it made me Uneasy probably means it's a really good book, and well worth reading. Stanislaw Lem wrote it in 1960 or thereabouts. It was translated from Polish to French to English, which may have added to the creepiness that came out of it into my head. I enjoyed it. It's short. If I were to write about what it was about, I'd be ruining the suspense of it all, so I won't. I wish the copy I'd gotten had this cover; instead the only one I could find was a cheesy freeze-frame of a guy and gal kissing from a major motion picture that was recently made out of it, so every time I picked up the book I felt like I was about to delve back into As The World Turns (or maybe Guiding Light--with its occasional forays into the Paranormal--would be a more appropriate association).

I read a bit about Mr. Lem, on his own website and elsewhere. Apparently he thought Philip K. Dick was the only American sci-fi writer worth much of anything. The respect was not Mutual. Amusingly (to me, at least), Philip K. Dick thought that Stanislaw Lem was a "composite committee, not an individual," working for the Soviets, and wrote the FBI a letter about it.