Thanks for that, anything in particular by Lem that you recommend getting started with?

I find we get very little exposure to Russian / slavic authors in North America, and when I do occasionally get to read one (including the classics but also some paperbacks) I suspect how much we must be missing by not having more of them readily available and marketed.

"Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" punches above its weight for Lem. Solaris is good too. I find Lem interesting but only sporadically enjoyable.

The Strugatskys have gone from being "Roadside Picnic" + a largely unobtainable back catalogue - I expensively amused myself by putting together a collection of pretty much everything they published in English a few years back. They have been celebrated (arguably, over-celebrated) by SF Masterworks and other recent publications so almost everything is back in print.

I enjoyed the new mix-up of "Lame Fate / Ugly Swans" (Ugly Swans was previously published as a standalone book, but is now intertwined with a book about the hassles of dealing with an AI-based evaluator of book quality, the book in question being Ugly Swans). The Doomed City was the original candidate for that, but was too long to fit - that's also available on SF Masterworks.

If you want to see where Iain M Banks extracted a good quarter of his ideas for the Culture, "Hard to be a God" is a decent read.

Lem is pretty accessible, a good place to start might be the Cyberiad collection of short stories. The futurological congress is also a fun read. You can't really go wrong with him, he had a great sense of humour.

I mean… Solaris is amazing and was made into a film at least twice. The book is about the difficulties communicating with an alien in the vein of Arrival, but it predates Arrival by many years and is a better book, in my humble opinion.

The book is much more detailed than the films. For example, in the book they go down to the “surface” of the alien and visit it… more than once as I recall. That’s not in the films.

The great thing about this book is that it's as much about the difficulty of trying to contact an alien as it is about the problems with the scientific process and academia.

Really a fantastic read with so many angles to interpret it from.

I would say Solaris is as much about dealing with regrets, a dull pain from deep wounds that follows us through our lives as it is about the things you mentioned.

I read it more than ten years ago, but still remember the emotional experience it brought.

Solaris is worth a read for sure.