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Author

Arkady Strugatsky

Arkady Strugatsky

  • The Snail on the Slope takes place in two distinct worlds. One is the Administration, an institution run by a surreal, Kafkaesque bureaucracy whose aim is to govern the forest below. The other is the Forest, a place of fear, weird creatures, primitive people, and violence. Peretz, who works at the Administration, wants to visit the Forest. Candide crashed in the Forest years ago and wants to return to the Administration.

    Their journeys are surprising and strange, and listeners are left to puzzle out the mysteries of these foreign environments. The Strugatskys themselves called The Snail on the Slope “the most perfect and the most valuable of our works.”

  • Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely considered the greatest of Russian science fiction masters, and their most famous work, Roadside Picnic, has enjoyed great popularity worldwide. Yet the novel they worked hardest on, the one that was their own favorite and that readers worldwide have acclaimed as their magnum opus, has never before been published in English. The Doomed City was so politically risky that the Strugatsky brothers kept its existence a complete secret even from their closest friends for sixteen years after its completion in 1972. It was only published in Russia during perestroika in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication. Having been translated into a host of European languages, it now appears in English for the first time in a major new effort by acclaimed translator Andrew Bromfield.

    The Doomed City is set in an experimental city whose sun gets switched on in the morning and switched off at night, a city bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its inhabitants are people who were plucked from twentieth-century history at various times and places and left to govern themselves under conditions established by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable.

    Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer taken from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a die-hard believer in the Experiment, even though his first job in the city is as a garbage collector. As increasingly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, Voronin rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect.

  • Sasha, a young computer programmer from Leningrad, is driving north to meet some friends for a nature vacation. He picks up a couple of hitchhikers, who persuade him to take a job at the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy.

    The adventures Sasha has in the largely dysfunctional institute involve all sorts of magical beings—a wish-granting fish, a tree mermaid, a cat who can remember only the beginnings of stories, a dream-interpreting sofa, a motorcycle that can zoom into the imagined future, a lazy dog-sized mosquito—along with a variety of wizards (including Merlin), vampires, and officers.

    First published in Russia in 1965, Monday Starts on Saturday has become the most popular Strugatsky novel in their homeland. Like the works of Gogol and Kafka, it tackles the nature of institutions—here focusing on one devoted to discovering and perfecting human happiness. By turns wildly imaginative, hilarious, and disturbing, Monday Starts on Saturday is a comic masterpiece by two of the world’s greatest science fiction writers.

  • From the Russian masters of science fiction comes The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, a hilarious spoof on the classic country-house murder mystery.

    When Inspector Peter Glebsky arrives at a remote ski chalet on vacation, the last thing he intends to do is get involved in any police work. He’s there to ski, drink brandy, and loaf around in blissful solitude.

    But he hadn’t counted on the other vacationers, an eccentric bunch, including a famous hypnotist, a physicist with a penchant for gymnastic feats, a sulky teenager of indeterminate gender, and the mysterious Mr. and Mrs. Moses. And as the chalet fills up, strange things start happening—things that seem to indicate the presence of another, unseen guest. Is there a ghost on the premises? A prankster? Something more sinister?

    When an avalanche blocks the mountain pass and traps everyone in the chalet, the corpse is finally discovered. Glebsky’s vacation is over, and he’s embarked on the most unusual investigation he’s ever been involved with. In fact, the further he looks into it, the more Glebsky realizes that the victim may not even be human.

    In this late novel from the legendary Russian sci-fi duo—here in its first-ever English translation—the Strugatskys gleefully upend the plot of many an Hercule Poirot mystery—and the result is much funnier and much stranger than anything Agatha Christie ever wrote.