Solaris

Author: Stanislaw Lem

One of the few modern science fiction writers whose work has been consistently translated into English has been Stanislaw Lem. In fact, his work has been so successful in English that he is recognised as one of the great genre writers (at one point it was claimed that he was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world).His work was richly varied, including satires, comedies, reviews of non-existent books, straight forward space adventures and more. But his most persistent themes concerned the nature of intelligence, and the impossibility of communication with a truly alien being. This was at the heart of his most famous novel, Solaris, in which scientists studying the ocean world of Solaris are themselves being studied and manipulated by the sentient ocean.Why it's on the listNever afraid of controversy, Lem always insisted that American science fiction (with the exception of Philip K. Dick) was poorly written and poorly constructed. But the original translation of Solaris wasn't up to the standard of the translations of his later works, so it was only when a revised translation appeared that the quality of his own work was apparent.