In case of Stanislaw Lem I would say that when things are hard to understand, they are usually also hard to understand for the main character. Who is intelligent and tries to make sense of things in first-person narration. E.g. Ijon Tichy in Wizja Lokalna (Observation on the Spot), Kris Kelvin in Solaris, or the fictional author of the "Memoirs Found in the Bathtub". In cyberpunk the characters themselves understand the world they are living in, and they are usually not encountering any hard to understand events. The narrator just doesn't try to simplify or explain things to the reader when…
Ok, well since I got downvoted I may as well offer this: If you're looking for something to add to your reading list I strongly recommend Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. The thing that makes that book brilliant is how effectively it captures the futility of any attempt to understand non-human sentience. The two movies don't do justice to that theme, or at best they do it only in the most glancing of ways before rushing back to a standard deus-ex-machina in the end. In each case, the film makers seem to have lost their nerve, as if the idea of presenting that enigma to the audience in a more direct…
I actually rate Solaris last among the Lem works I've read. Below things like Hospital of the Transfiguration, which are pretty far off the beaten track for Lem. I actually stayed away from Lem for years because the (2002) Solaris movie made me think he's just waffling and hasn't any SF ideas worth looking at. Hardly could have been more misleading. A Perfect Vacuum is I think the pinnacle of Lem's achievement. Why write a book and leave others to criticise what you did, when you can imagine the finished book and write a critique of _that_ yourself? Imaginary Magnitude is a similar idea, and…
It's amazing that until just a few years ago, there wasn't a direct translation of Solaris available in English. The English-language version, by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, was a translation of the French edition, which was know to be less than great. The first direct translation came out in 2011, by Bill Johnston, a professor of comparative literature.
I was a little underwhelmed by Tarkovsky's take on Solaris; the book was written with a lot more evocative prose, especially with respect to color, which made the film seem just so plain. But I really liked Stalker - then again I hadn't read Roadside Picnic. My understanding is that Tarkovsky's adaptations are usually quite different from the source material.
Watching Stalker may forever alter your taste in cinematography, it's so beautiful. Solaris is also good (watching it back to back with the Clooney remake is an interesting experience); Lem pretty much hated all three adaptations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)), an adaptation that reflects the alienness that he wanted to underline would be an interesting movie. You might want to think about what repressed personification would confront you if you had traveled to Solaris.
I have only watched "Solyaris", but I believe I can say that Tarkovsky is one of the greatest directors who ever lived. I read the novel after watching the film, and while the film missed a few of the core themes of Lem's masterful piece of sci-fi, it still was able to capture the essence of the planetary being that is Solaris. Stalker has been on my watch-list for quite some time now, but I haven't got around to watching it. Maybe tonight?
With regards to the planets themselves, Solaris is covered in an ocean (spoiler rot13: na bprna bs try gung vf erirnyrq gb or n fvatyr, cynarg-rapbzcnffvat ragvgl), whereas Tatooine is a desert planet. The systems are different in that Tatooine (as far as I remember) orbits around a pair of stars. Solaris is orbiting between the two stars in an orbit that should be highly unstable but for reasons unknown the planet appears to be stabilizing itself.
The way I get out of that conundrum is to ask what would happen if the Earth were destroyed in some cataclysmic event and there were no humans left. I mean do you agree that the universe would still exist? Do you think some other life in the universe might have consciousness, even if it's organized in a way that would be unrecognizable to us? How would you go about examining that question? Carl Sagan spent a lot of time looking for ways to pose that question in ways that make it possible to "do science" about it and not just trail off into ideas that are beyond discussion, beyond…
If you enjoy pondering this question you should definitely check out the works of Stanislaw Lem. One of the main themes of his work is that alien life would be fundamentally different from life as we know it and that human consciousness, bound by the concepts that we use to understand our own world, would be unable to comprehend it. His novels contain a lot of imaginative examples of that kind of alien life, the most famous perhaps being the planet in Solaris.