Originally Posted by
MK27
You should see "Solaris", either the original Russian movie (contemporaneous to 2001) or the remake from a few years ago with George Clooney. Stanislaw Lem, the Russian sci-fi writer who wrote the original novel, has written a few neat things that are in translation (besides Solaris): His Master's Voice, in which a mysterious repeating neutrino signal (or whatever) is discovered in background radiation and eventually discovered to pre-date the big bang, or be symptomatic of something which does, and A Perfect Vacuum, which is a collection of "reviews" of fake books, most of them philosophical or scientific, past, present, and future.
His style is old fashioned, kind of, (high->post modern) and he likes protagonists who are scientists, specifically physicists, and with the ways in which they embrace or (more usually) reject the spiritual, mystical, or extra-dimensional and alien implications of their work. Solaris is a great mind game.