When a genre piece transcends the boundaries of its own niche, that's how you know you're dealing with a good book. Solaris is not only exceedingly spooky and hitting all the right sci-fi buttons, but also includes deep reflections on man's inevitably futile search of truth through science, which is masterfully mirrored with a study on the disservice we do to the ones we love by defining and imposing our own image upon them. What keeps the reading experience a bit tiresome are the endless encyclopedic entries of fictional scholarly debates and lavish descriptions of abstract oceanic formations which disrupt the reading flow, take out the tension, and are too self-indulgent.