It really was. Lem made a good point about how most scifi treats aliens either as humanoid versions of ourselves, or creatures from our nightmares. After Star T

It really was. Lem made a good point about how most scifi treats aliens either as humanoid versions of ourselves, or creatures from our nightmares. After Star Trek Next Generation introduced the Borg, they found they needed to humanize them by having a Borg Queen individual. The 2002 movie version had Gibarian's recording say that our enthusiasm for exploration is a sham. We're looking for mirrors. The point of Solaris was that the alien was not at all like us, and therefore humans couldn't understand it, because we're too busy projecting onto it. And Solaris used that to create disturbing human analogs, because it didn't understand either.