Solaris

Solaris, a very interesting novel. It’s only 172 pages long, yet it takes forever to read.
It’s one of those novels that are really hard to get into. When I first started reading it, it seemed really boring. And I didn’t even know what was going on.
After a while though, when the plot starts to unravel it gets more interesting.

In the first quarter of the book it seemed that this story was going to lean more towards a horror sci-fi novel. It really scared the crap out of me. You have the main character, Kelvin, who goes to this planet, Solaris. And the first thing he notices that one of his co- workers committed suicide on the station. The way everything is described just gave the story a really creepy setting. Then you get the unknown visitors, that come out of nowhere and you don’t even know who or what they are.
Then on top of that, when Kelvin reads the books about Solaris and it talks about all the strange appearances in the ocean.

After Kelvin’s stranger “Rheya” tries to commit suicide the story turns into that of musing on human nature, and life itself. The fact that “Rheya” who is technically an alien being, acts and thinks like a human, she is also convinced she’s a human, but has some inhuman characteristics. The book gives some hints of this when it seems she killed herself, but her body healed all the way. And when she rips of a locked metal door off its hinges to get to Kelvin. It raises some questions like what really makes us human?

The only downside of the book was all the scientific language when Kelvin was researching Solaris. I had no clue what was being talked about. And towards the end I just skipped some of it. I just couldn’t get through it because my vocabulary isn’t that broad.

For the rest though, Solaris is a good book, even though it was hard to read, I didn’t want to stop reading it because it was so interesting.