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I enjoyed Solaris a lot when I read it last year. It reminded me of some Philip K Dick stuff in terms of the style of writing and using science fiction as a genre to explore broader social themes. I read a few of Stanisław Lem's short stories under the title The Three Electroknights which were all very different to Solaris, much more high concept but they were great too.
ltc
@rawmeat
Last book I finished was Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I read the english translation that Lem himself apparently didn't approve of but I can't read Polish so I had to make do. I loved it in spite of the utilitarian translation, one of my favorite sci fi novels now. It uses a sci fi setting to grapple with humanity's general desire to blindly push forward and establish new edens for ourselves, to terraform everything in the universe to conform to our desires. When we are confronted individually with our raw underlying desires (represented by freaky homunculi conjured up by a living psychic ocean), the ones that drive us that we don't want to understand, it's mortifying.
The book occupies the space between Star Trek and Alien, which is a clunky way to describe it but those are points of reference most of us can relate to.