Solaris

Upon reading Solaris, I got an inkling of what might have irked Lem so much about American Science Fiction in general. The entire novel is as inward looking as SF has ever gotten. Its depiction of an alien life form has never been adequately challenged, except for perhaps Mieville's Embassytown. But while Mieville's book is riddled with passages of mind numbing dullness, punctuated by a sudden brilliant exploration of semiotics and semantics here and there, Lem's approach feels a lot more coherent. The info dumps are all there, but they never feel separate from the story at hand. This is probably due to the fact that most of the characters in this novel are scientists. But Lem doesn't use it as an excuse for stunted dialogue. The whole novel is in some ways a repudiation of science fiction, for what Lem seems to be trying to say is the futility of science in the first place in trying to make sense of the universe, or, for that matter, any non-human lifeform. Human beings can never really look beyond themselves. This is science fiction at its most thoughtful, and Lem is honestly up there with Le Guin and Dick as one of the greatest humanist SF writers of the 20th century.