Solaris

Solaris was written by Stanislaw Lem in 1961, and published in translation in 1970.  This is an account of an encounter with a sentient ocean on an alien planet.  This "ocean"  has the power to create a different reality for all of the scientists who encounter it, and each encounter is a descent into madness.  The descriptions of the alien world are fascinating; Lem really knows how to write about things that are so alien as to be unknowable.  There is much philosophy, too:


"We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything; for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death.  Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves.  And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham.  We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.  For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin.  We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange.  We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact.  This is another lie.  We are only seeking Man.  We have no need of other worlds.  We need mirrors.  We don't know what to do with other worlds.  A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.  We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own, but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.  At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence.  We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us--the part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence--then we don't like it any more."

Solaris is haunting and beautifully written. 

Saw the Tarkovsky  film; (well 3/4 of it, then the copy from the local library just died), so I hadda go to youtube for the ending... (Spoiler alert) here's the last scene (spoiler):  It's pretty great, but the book is better I.M.H.O.: