Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (2 stars)

A classic, but I'm not sure why. I haven't seen any of the movies. The premise is amazing, original, loved it: a huge planet-scale intelligence that's doing it's own thing and doesn't seem to know or care about humans. 

Spoilers ahead.

When humans build a habitat on the ocean the planet creates a replica of the human they have most injured in their lifetime. This part was amazing, the suspense was great, the tension of what the other men were dealing with was incredible, the killing and rebirth sequences were amazing. The narrator is terrified, not knowing the consequences for not playing along. Here we have outstanding structure for a rollicking horror story, amazing stuff.

But he blows it, completely.

We get these extensive detailed descriptions about the structures made and destroyed by the planet:

the hardened planes on which the layers of ductile matter rising from below have accumulated, while at the same time the deep-ocean geysers mentioned above condense and transform into mobile tentacle-like columns; clusters of them reach toward loci of construction that are strictly determined by the dynamics of the whole, recalling some sort of immense gills of an embryo growing a thousand times faster than normal, and streaming with pinkish blood and a green water so dark it’s almost black.

 delivered in the most boring way possible: the narrator reading scientific summaries in the habitat library. Why not first-person? I don't want to read a book about someone reading scientific papers. This is boring AF:

Its extensors and mimoids were seen as tumorous growths; the processes that moved its huge fluid body were examined for indications of chaos and anarchy, to the point that this orientation became an obsession, and the entire scientific literature of the following seven or eight years, though of course free of expressions explicitly indicating the feelings of its authors, nevertheless was like one long barrage of insults—revenge taken by the gray leaderless masses of solaricists upon the unchangingly indifferent object of their intensified research, which continued to pay no attention to them whatsoever.

yawn. OK but eventually he has to get back to the creepy mimics, right? And reveal what the mimics were for the other men?....OK more boring papers, nothing happening. OK the mimics are gone. The end. Flips table.

2 stars.