Please visit https://fashabooks.com/aff/fashabooks/1459 to download full audiobooks of your choice for free. Title: Solaris Subtitle: The Definitive Edition Author: Stanislaw Lem, Bill Johnston (translator) Narrator: Alessandro Juliani Format: Unabridged Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins Language: English Release date: 06-07-11 Publisher: Audible Studios Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 3335 votes Genres: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Sci-Fi: Classic Publisher's Summary: At last, one of the worlds greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it. To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation - complete for the first time, and the first ever directly from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani (Battlestar Galactica), Lems provocative novel comes alive for a new generation. In Solaris, Kris Kelvin arrives on an orbiting research station to study the remarkable ocean that covers the planets surface. But his fellow scientists appear to be losing their grip on reality, plagued by physical manifestations of their repressed memories. When Kelvins long-dead wife suddenly reappears, he is forced to confront the pain of his past - while living a future that never was. Can Kelvin unlock the mystery of Solaris? Does he even want to? Editorial Reviews: This fine, new, direct-to-English translation of Solaris allows listeners a new opportunity to marvel at the way Stanisaw Lem managed to pack so much into such a compact story. As well as being a gripping sci-fi mystery, his novel stands as a profound meditation on the limitations of knowledge and the impossibility of love, of truly knowing another: how a vast, cold galaxy can exist between two people. In how many relationships does the other turn out to be a projected hologram? At the book's heart is the dark and mysterious planet of Solaris: working out what it means is half the fun of the book. One thing is clear: the possibility it offers of alien contact represents "the hope for redemption", a Schopenhauerian longing to be rid of the endless cycle of want, need, and loss. In one passage, the main character notes with a touch of envy that, "automats that do not share mankind's original sin, and are so innocent that they carry out any command, to the point of destroying themselves". The motivating forces that have traditionally sustained mankind - love, relationships, belonging - are exposed as so much space debris. In a book that contains one of the most tragic love stories in modern literature, the idea of a love more powerful than death is "a lie, not ridiculous but futile". Critic Reviews: "Few are [Lem's] peers in poetic expression, in word play, and in imaginative and sophisticated sympathy." (Kurt Vonnegut) "[Lem was] a giant of mid-20th-century science fiction, in a league with Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick." (The New York Times) "Juliani transmits Kelvins awe at Solariss red and blue dawns and makes his confusion palpable when he awakens one morning to find his long-dead wife seated across the room. Julianis performance is top-notch." (AudioFile)
