Patrick L. McGuire The Strugatskys’ Traditional Science Fiction Revisited, Part 1

The present article was never intended as a book review. Nonetheless, it was inspired by a book. In 2012, a volume on the Strugatsky brothers appeared in the prestigious Russian biography series Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh lyudey (Lives of Notable People). The series has been publishing continually since 1933, and it considers itself to be the successor to a predecessor of the same name that ran from 1890 to 1907. If I am correctly deciphering its numbering, the Strugatsky volume is number 1531 of the combined series and 1331 in the new series.

The volume in question, Brat’ya Strugatskiye (The Strugatsky Brothers) by Dmiriy Volodikhin and Gennadiy Prashkevich, has a number of quirks. Some relate to its intended readership. Considering the series in which it was issued and the general fame of the Strugatskys, one would expect the volume to be addressed to the general reader, but instead it presumes considerable familiarity with the sf genre. It uses fanspeak without definition: konvent (“con,” “sf convention”), fehn (“sf fan”), meynstrim and obshchiy potok (respectively a borrowing and a loan translation of “mainstream”). It expects the mere surname “Campbell” to be recognized as a reference to John W. Campbell, Jr. (264). In places, at least to American ears, the word choice even suggests that the target audience consists of comic-book fans: understandably needing synonyms for the phrase “the Strugatsky brothers,” what Volodikhin and Prashkevich come up with are zvezdnyy duet and zvezdnyy tandem (“the stellar duo” and “the stellar tandem”).

Even more curiously, the volume is not really much of a biography. By page 36, it has arrived at the late 1950s when the brothers started writing seriously (and soon thereafter, being regularly published), and for the next 300-plus pages, it devotes itself primarily to literary history and analysis. It manages even to ignore the publicly known fact that Arkady Strugatsky’s daughter, Mariya, had been married since the mid-1980s to the Russian economic reformer and sometime politician Yegor Gaydar (1956–2009). This is a bit as if Robyn Asimov had married, say, Newt Gingrich during Isaac’s lifetime, and an Isaac Asimov biography failed to mention the marriage. On the other hand, the lack of biographical detail may mean that the book was published in an inappropriate series rather than that there is anything inherently wrong with the work’s structure. It is scarcely unprecedented to hang a literary analysis of a given author’s work on a rudimentary biographical framework. Ant Skalandis’s earlier 2008 study of the brothers says that Boris Strugatsky, the surviving brother, told Skalandis frankly that his projected book would have to concentrate on the brothers’ work, not on the details of their lives, because Boris did not intend to be overgenerous in providing personal information and because he thought personal details in any case were usually irrelevant to the brothers’ fiction. Presumably Boris’s attitude remained the same toward Volodikhin and Prashkevich’s effort.

I spent a fair amount of time on the Strugatsky brothers from the late 1960s (when I started struggling through Strugatsky works in the original as a supplement to the Russian classes I was taking in college) through the mid-1980s (when I last updated a section on Russian sf for the reference volume Anatomy of Wonder). I made frequent references to the Brothers in my 1977 doctoral dissertation on political aspects of Soviet sf, which in 1985 appeared in somewhat revised form as a book. I translated the Strugatsky story cycle Noon: 22nd Century for Macmillan, then published one article on the Brothers in a minor prozine in 1978 and another one in a 1982 collection of scholarly essays on sf. Even into the early 1990s, I published various short reviews of translations and studies of the Strugatskys. Past that point, however, all I did was to read a bit of their works and perform some casual browsing of Strugatsky-related websites. Long before Arkady Strugatsky’s death in 1991, the brothers had for the most part moved away from science fiction into other genres, chiefly “literary” fantasy or slipstream, and these later works did not speak to my condition. I was aware that after Arkady’s death in 1991 Boris (who died in November 2012) had allowed background material and interview text to be placed onto the Internet, but it seemed like a better idea to use my finite free time to get up to speed on post-Soviet Russian sf than to dig through the material on the Strugatsky brothers, particularly since for decades they have been the objects of considerable academic attention.

However, the 2012 study provided much information and critical discussion in one convenient package. In the course of reading it, I decided to write the present essay. I could not do a book review, if only because, with minor exceptions, the Strugatskys’ fantasy (in contrast to their sf) still does not speak to me, and Volodikhin and Prashkevich devote much of the volume to it, making me unsuited to evaluate the book as a whole. Rather, I regarded the volume as an opportunity for me to reconsider, in the light of the material presented there, that portion of the Strugatskys’ work that does resonate with me, namely their traditional science fiction. What did I get right in what I said about Strugatsky sf in the past? Where was I wrong? What interesting new things can I now say? Contrary to my original intention, I was eventually tempted into reading two additional works in Russian mentioned by Volodikhin and Prashkevich, namely Ant Skalandis’s above-mentioned 2008 study, which may be inaccurate in places but which provides far more actual biography than do Volodikhin and Prashkevich, and Boris Strugatsky’s own very readable Commentary on the Preceding (serialized in the late 1990s, then published in 2000–2001 as part of the brothers’ collected works and in 2003 separately).

Early Years

Previously, I had known only about as much about the Strugatskys’ biography as could be gleaned in the 1970s and 1980s from encyclopedia articles, publishers’ capsule descriptions, and similar sources. (Granted, this was as much as I know about all but a few English-speaking sf writers.) Even the thirty-six pages of real biography in the opening chapter of the 2012 book plus some scattered references further in the main text and the biographical timeline at the book’s end provided me with much additional information, and I eventually supplemented this with other sources, chiefly the Skalandis and Boris Strugatsky works mentioned above.

The brothers were born to a secularized Jewish father and an ethnic Russian mother. Soviet internal passports had a section for ethnicity. Children of mixed marriages were allowed, once they became old enough for their own internal passports, to choose the ethnicity of either parent. As was generally the case in such situations, the Strugatskys chose “Russian.” However, because Russians use patronymics instead of middle names, and Natan was in Russia an obviously Jewish name, their half-Jewish status was clear. (Anti-Semites were unlikely to be impressed by the religious definition that a Jew was either a convert or someone born of a Jewish mother.) In fact, Skalandis indicates that Arkady’s first internal passport from 1942, evidently filled out with an eye to the strong possibility that the Germans might soon occupy Leningrad, falsely gave his patronymic as Nikolayevich and that after the war Boris had used the same false patronymic in elementary school for a while, simply in an effort to fit in.

The brothers’ births were almost eight years apart (Arkady in 1925 and Boris in 1933), so that their childhood experiences were distinct. In particular, their father Natan died in 1942 when Arkady was sixteen but Boris not yet quite nine, so that Natan had more influence on Arkady. Even so, Natan spent much time on Party assignments away from home, so it stands to reason that their mother Aleksandra was the stronger parental influence on both of her sons. However, although her sons clearly loved and respected her, her life was not particularly colorful, and biographers say little about it. She spent most of her life working as a schoolteacher in Russian language and literature. (Sources disagree about whether she retained her maiden name, Litvincheva, as was fairly common at the time.) One must imagine that she encouraged her sons to read, and it is known that the family library included at least sf by Verne and Wells. It also held translations of books by two adventure novelists who wrote some science fiction—Jack London and Louis Boussenard—but it is unclear if the Strugatsky library included their sf. Both brothers devoured everything, including all the science fiction that came their way, but they seem to have shown no strong boyhood preference for that genre over others. Both brothers always read widely, and it is possible that sf was simply the genre with which they had their first breakthrough as authors, so that they stuck with it at least for a while.

The official anti-Semitism of tsarist Russia often tempted secular Jews into radical leftist circles (and thus into fighting evil by evil means). I conclude that probably this had happened with Natan, although his first recorded activism came only after the fall of the Tsar. In early 1917, he dropped out of studies in the faculty of law at Petrograd University and joined the Bolsheviks, who at the time opposed the democratic (if less than competent) Provisional Government. All the sources I examined leave unanswered some obvious questions about Natan: How had he avoided the World War I draft? Why had he started university (law is an undergraduate major in Russia) only at the age of 23 or so in 1915? In any case, after the Bolshevik overthrow of the Provisional Government in late 1917, Natan spent the ensuing Russian Civil War as a political officer in the Red cavalry. During this period he married. Natan’s brother Aron, a Red cavalry commander, was killed in combat. After discharge in 1925, Natan spent the remainder of the decade in various sorts of Communist Party administrative work, frequently being transferred from one job to another, perhaps as a troubleshooter.

He then returned to Leningrad (the former Petrograd, and the once and future St. Petersburg) and worked for the state censorship arm, Glavlit, an organization destined to give much grief to his sons. This job included the perq of free copies of works of fiction published in Leningrad, substantially enlarging the Strugatsky family library. Despite apparently lacking an undergraduate degree, Natan, under Party sponsorship, entered graduate courses in art history and criticism (evidently his first love) at the Institute of Art History in Leningrad. (Skalandis says that while Natan studied he was on educational leave from Glavlit; by contrast, Volodikhin and Prashkevich convey the impression that Natan only studied part time.) After completing his art history studies, Natan briefly worked in that field at the State Russian Museum in Moscow. However, in 1933 he was mobilized for more Party work at which he continued until he was expelled from the Party as part of the 1937 Party purge (nominally for denigrating the abilities of Soviet authors, but per family lore, actually for intolerance of corruption). According to family lore, Natan was subsequently scheduled for arrest in Moscow but was warned just in time and departed immediately for Leningrad. Since the NKVD had merely been filling their Stalin Terror arrest quota in Moscow, they did not pursue Natan, presumably grabbing someone more convenient instead to reach their target number. Natan found a position related to his art education at Leningrad’s Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, and he published several scholarly works from 1938 through 1941. Unlike several other sources, Volodikhin and Prashkevich fail to mention that although Natan escaped the Terror in 1937, his younger brother Aleksandr, director of a windmill factory, was arrested in that year and shot in January 1938. As was frequently the case among the True Believers of the time, the Stalin Terror and even the execution of his last surviving brother failed to shake Natan’s faith in Communism, an outlook he communicated to Arkady.

In 1941, when Stalin’s bungled foreign and military policy had led (as one disaster among many) to the brutal German siege of Leningrad, Arkady and both his parents helped to dig defensive works. Natan then served for a time in the People’s Militia hastily formed to defend the city and was later appointed a company commander in a different paramilitary force but was discharged after a couple of months for ill health, and he returned to the library. During the ensuing starvation from the protracted siege, Natan and Arkady, both ailing, were evacuated ahead of the rest of the family in February 1942. Boris and his mother stayed behind because the family felt that young Boris could not stand the hardship of an evacuation across the frozen Lake Ladoga in deep winter. After fearful cold, truck breakdowns, and a winter journey on foot, Natan died in a field hospital, and Arkady eventually ended up working at a dairy collection point in a remote tiny rural village. Only in August 1942 were his mother and Boris able to join him, being evacuated over Lake Ladoga by boat. A few months afterward in late January 1943, Arkady was drafted. Subsequently, Aleksandra and Boris managed to move back to civilization—first, in November 1943 to relatives in Moscow and in May 1944, with the siege lifted, back to Leningrad. Boris found that Leningrad now looked like the descriptions he had read of ruined London in The War of the Worlds.

For his part, Arkady from this point seems to trace some of the same path already marked out by Robert Heinlein in terms of an aborted military career and a troubled love life. Arkady was first sent to infantry school for mortar training. Partway through, however, an entrance commission for the Military Foreign Language Institute (Russian abbreviation VIIYa) showed up at the infantry school. Arkady displayed promise and, as a high-school graduate, was relatively well educated by the prevailing standards. In May 1943, he was transferred to VIIYa. The rest of Arkady’s mortar class was sent to the fighting around Kursk, and few survived the war.

At the Institute, Arkady was primarily assigned to study Japanese language and culture, but he also picked up English. Like other specialized Soviet officer-training schools, VIIYa offered a multiyear university-level course. Some Soviet officer schools took only three years; five years would have been normal for a civilian university, which educated students somewhat beyond the level of a Western bachelor’s degree. VIIYa’s Japanese program had started out as an accelerated three-year course, but during that time the war ended, and for the sake of a proper peacetime preparation, the program was extended to six years in total. This must have been one of the longest courses of any Soviet military school, which perhaps explains why Arkady was commissioned and even promoted once before graduation. The environment at the institute combined what an American would regard as normal features of a military academy with those of a civilian university. For instance, cadets could live at home if they had family in Moscow. VIIYa had a high washout rate because of the difficulty of the subject matter. Arkady coped fairly easily with the academic side, thanks to a normal amount of effort plus what proved to be a huge talent for foreign languages. However, like Heinlein, he frequently found himself in minor trouble for disciplinary infractions, these partly, as with Heinlein, deriving from girl-chasing and partly (unlike Heinlein) from sloppy military dress and demeanor.

Arkady later stated that at the time he chafed at being required to take courses in things like world literature, Japanese culture, and archaisms in language. Decades later he realized that these had been the most important and interesting parts of his studies. Meanwhile in 1945 Arkady had received a commission as a junior lieutenant (a Soviet rank below lieutenant, later abolished) and in 1946 he spent several months in Kazan interrogating Japanese POWs in preparation for war crimes trials in Tokyo. He did not enjoy his time working on the case preparations with the brutal MVD (the new initials for the former NKVD). He made plain lieutenant in 1948. He graduated in 1949 and married shortly afterward.

In 1949 after graduation, Arkady was sent to the Siberian city of Kansk as an instructor at a school for military interpreters of Far Eastern languages. Volodikhin and Prashkevich repeat with attribution the assertions in Skalandis that the school also prepared illegal agents for operation in Far Eastern countries and that it may have trained GRU (military intelligence) officers. Arkady filled his free time partly by taking up photography as a hobby. (He had this pastime in common with Heinlein, but both authors eventually lost interest.) By early 1951, Arkady had made senior lieutenant. Arkady’s new wife did not accompany him to Kansk, apparently by mutual agreement. Living conditions there were on the primitive side, and besides, she wanted to finish her studies at a teachers institute in Moscow. Absence did not make the heart grow fonder, nor did several visits, and Arkady and his wife broke up in late 1951. They did not, however, immediately divorce. Sources conflict about the reasons, but Arkady’s wife filed for divorce only in the autumn of 1952, and the final decree reached Arkady only in the summer of 1954.

In January 1952, Arkady was expelled from the Komsomol (Young Communist League) for moral backsliding. Accounts differ as to the reason—the biographical timeline at the back of Volodikhin and Prashkevich makes it sound like sexual misconduct (officially frowned upon during a postwar effort to assert “Soviet morality”), whereas Skalandis attributes it to an incident of minor insubordination brought on by a prolonged period of less-than-full sobriety, with the persistent drinking in turn touched off by Arkady’s marital breakup. However, even Skalandis later quotes portions of a letter from Arkady to Boris of March 1953 in which Arkady refers to “the woman that I separated from her husband, for which I paid with my Komsomol card and, to a certain extent, with my career.” Various explanations are possible for the discrepancy. Arkady could have provided his brother with an explanation that covered up his drinking problem, or the prolonged drinking could have been caused not by the marital breakup per se but by his divided feelings for two women. Throughout his life, Arkady remained a heavy drinker, but drinking was an accepted feature of male Russian life in general and military life in particular. Arkady had a remarkable ability to remain functional under a heavy load of alcohol, and only under exceptional circumstances did drinking interfere with his work. The alcohol may even have helped to keep him sane under the many stresses of Soviet life. As with many or most other Soviet males of his generation, the long-term consequences for Arkady’s health were not good. Fortunately, he never drove a car.

In the summer of 1952, Arkady was transferred from Kansk to a post on the still more remote Soviet Pacific coast (which did bring him closer to Japan and so was not necessarily a punishment). There he began or persisted in (sources differ) an affair with Yelena Oshanina, another staff member at the Kansk school and the woman alluded to in Arkady’s above letter. The couple married in December 1955 following Arkady’s discharge into the reserves in June 1955. Arkady and Yelena’s daughter had been born already in April 1955. The delay in marriage was caused by the initial refusal of Yelena’s previous husband to agree to a divorce.

Volodikhin and Prashkevich had me wondering how Arkady had managed a discharge after only six years’ service following graduation and only twelve years since he was first drafted. The usual term of service for a Soviet regular officer was twenty years, and it normally was nearly impossible to get out early except on medical grounds. I eventually learned from Skalandis that Arkady took advantage of a reduction in force. Presumably, Soviet military leaders realized they would have less need for officers expert in Japanese than they had once hoped—the Soviets had fought the Japanese only during the closing days of World War II and had occupied no predominantly Japanese-speaking territory except for the Kurile Islands; moreover, postwar Japan gave no sign of being ready for a Communist revolution any time soon. According to Volodikhin and Prashkevich, in letters of 1954, Arkady debated whether he should stay in the military longer, so evidently the reduction in force gave him the opportunity for an early out rather than forcing him to go. After discharge from active duty, Arkady was nevertheless required for many years subsequently to attend reserve training, sometimes for multiple sessions a year and sometimes for many weeks at a stretch. It is not clear when this obligation ceased—perhaps in the mid-1960s. Up to the 1980s, Arkady seemed to have had restrictions placed on foreign travel, even to other Communist countries, and on meeting Westerners—restrictions that did not apply equally to his brother, despite the fact that Boris was in as much political disfavor as Arkady. These constraints perhaps represented a cooling-off period from what I conjecture to have been his former access to classified information while on active and reserve duty. When I was doing dissertation research in the USSR in academic 1974–75, I was able to meet Boris once but Arkady never, despite the fact that I spent most of the year in Moscow, where Arkady lived. By 1987, Arkady as well as Boris was able to attend the Worldcon in Brighton, U.K. Even then their wives were not allowed to accompany them, but this was a routine Soviet precaution against defection.

In 1955 after discharge from the military, Arkady briefly stopped off in Moscow to see Yelena, his newborn daughter, Mariya, and his de-facto stepdaughter, Nataliya, but quickly moved on to Leningrad, where he evidently remained for over four months. Sources are conflicting and unclear as to what this was all about. Was he looking for a job in Leningrad? Trying to enter graduate school there? Taking steps toward a literary collaboration with Boris? In any case, in November 1955 he moved back to Moscow where job prospects evidently were better, and late in the year he secured civilian work at the Institute of Scientific Information, at least partly writing abstracts (presumably using his skills in Japanese and English). In early 1957, he moved to an editing job in the Oriental Literature department of the State Literary Publishing House (acronym Goslitizdat), also in Moscow, and from that point on his civilian editing and translation work was always literary with the sole exception of a little freelance technical-translation work to help keep bread on the table during the 1970s when the brothers’ fiction was partially blacklisted. (I was therefore at least misleading when, writing much later, I called Arkady a technical translator from Japanese. I no longer remember where I got that mistaken impression, and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction may have picked up that mischaracterization from me.) In 1959, presumably on the basis of his own sf writing (discussed further below) and his editorial experience, Arkady was invited to make an official transfer to the State Children’s Publishing House (Detgiz)—an sf boom was starting and Detgiz probably felt the lack of a specialized editor with background in the field. A transfer involved more red tape than it would have required to resign at the one place and hire on at the other, but it preserved his seniority. At Detgiz Arkady worked as a senior editor for science fiction (plus other nominal responsibilities); he remained until April 1964, juggling his day job both with fiction writing and with freelance literary translation from the Japanese for Goslitizdat.

For a considerable period, Detgiz had been the only book publisher regularly handling sf, although other book publishers also started issuing it in 1958. Children indeed read Detgiz-published sf, and the Strugatskys later made fairly frequent personal appearances at elementary schools and high schools, but the sf published by Detgiz and edited by Arkady was not particularly tailored for children or “young adults.” The youngest important character in the Strugatskys’ first sf novel, which was published by Detgiz, is probably in his thirties. (In 1963, Detgiz changed its official name to the Children’s Literature Publishing House [Izdatel’stvo “Detskaya literatura”], but as in many other cases of Soviet reorganization, the old acronym remained in informal use even after it ceased to correspond to the new name. In 1991, beyond the period of interest to us, the Moscow and St. Petersburg branches of the publisher became separate entities, and since 2002 the St. Petersburg spinoff has used the name Detgiz, while the Moscow entity calls itself Detskaya literatura or Detlit.)

At about the same time that Arkady returned from his military service, Boris graduated from the astronomy department of Leningrad State University, and in June 1955 he began graduate work in stellar astronomy at nearby Pulkovo Observatory. (Like many other Soviet research institutions, Pulkovo had the authority to award graduate degrees.) According to Skalandis, there is reason to believe that, when Boris first applied to the university, being half-Jewish had prevented him from entering his first choice, the physics department and later from entering the graduate program in astronomy at Leningrad, so that he ended up at Pulkovo. Very late in the game, Boris’s dissertation topic at the Observatory went down in flames when Boris himself belatedly discovered that the noted Indian-American astronomer Subramanyan Chandrasekhar had, already in 1943, proven a more general case of the problem Boris was working on. My impression is that if this duplication had happened at an American institution, much of the blame would have fallen on the student’s dissertation adviser for inadequate supervision, and the student probably would have been given more time to develop a new topic. Things evidently worked otherwise in the USSR. Fortunately, Pulkovo Observatory did, in November 1958, offer Boris a job on the support staff, with the title of engineer, working with early computers. He remained until he left the job to write full-time in 1964. Computers frequently figure in the brothers’ work.

Boris, although the more athletic of the two brothers, had a medical draft exemption for reasons unexplained in my sources. Possibly, by peacetime standards, poor eyesight disqualified him for service. (One can see in photographs that both brothers wore eyeglasses with powerful lenses.) Alternatively, there could have been early signs of the heart disease that killed him much later. Boris married in 1958. His wife, the daughter of a general, also worked in machine support at Pulkovo and continued at the job after Boris left to write. (Her name was Adelaida, or for short—appropriately for an early computer professional—Ada.) Skalandis notes that in the ’50s Boris enjoyed listening to Willis Conover’s wildly popular shortwave jazz program on the Voice of America. Conover is famed in American sf circles as a onetime fanzine editor and Lovecraft correspondent who eventually made good in Mundania, but Boris probably did not know of this background. Boris was much more sparing in alcohol use than his brother.

I find that in the present essay, like Volodikhin and Prashkevich, I have little to say about the Strugatskys’ respective personal lives from this point forward. The brothers had formed their initial worldviews and had acquired a stock of experience the time they started writing. Much as Boris told Skalandis, subsequently the brothers’ outlooks seem to have been modified more on the basis of the general evolution of the Soviet intelligentsia than of strictly personal events in the Strugatskys’ lives—particularly during the period through the mid-1980s when they were writing at least some traditional sf. (I do briefly mention their works past the mid-’80s, but I make no serious attempt to analyze those or to relate them to the authors’ life experience.) I recommend that anyone who is looking for more biographical detail and who can read Russian should turn to Skalandis’s biography; Volodikhin and Prashkevich also provide some relevant material. Interesting things did continue to happen in the lives of the brothers, even after they stopped writing traditional sf—including, as already mentioned, the marriage of Arkady’s daughter to social reformer and future public figure Yegor Gaydar, which was followed by frequent conversations between Arkady and his new son-in-law about economics and politics; and also including Boris’s long involvement in publishing ventures and in developing new authors.

First Writing

Arkady was the brother with stronger literary ambitions. He had been toying with story ideas in various genres for years. In 1954, he and journalist Lev Petrov coauthored a short mainstream novel based on the Lucky Dragon tragedy. Physics miscalculations regarding the yield of the U.S. Castle Bravo hydrogen-bomb test on the island of Bikini on March 1, 1954, combined with meteorological miscalculations regarding the fallout propagation led to the contamination of the Japanese tuna-fishing boat Lucky Dragon No. 5, resulting in the almost immediate death of one crewman and the injury of others. The U.S. initially mishandled the aftermath, leading to an international uproar. At Petrov’s suggestion, Arkady and he used this event as the basis for a routinely propagandistic novel, Ashes of Bikini (Pepel Bikini). Arkady presumably contributed at least the scenes set in Japan (which country he had studied but had never visited and indeed never was to visit). Some sources claim Arkady actually wrote the whole novel, in which case Petrov’s role consisted of proposing the idea and presumably providing background and of using his journalistic contacts to help get it published. Petrov died in the mid-1960s, but in several published mentions afterward, Arkady never implied that his coauthor had failed to pull his own weight. The novel proved reasonably successful. It was published in two magazines (in 1956 and 1957) and in 1958 as a book, thus providing Arkady with a track record and paving the way with publishers for their sf. Oddly enough, as far as I recall, the existence of this work came to my attention only recently—one would have thought that I would have run across it decades ago in bibliographies or when looking up Strugatsky works in the card catalogs of major libraries.

Simultaneously with work on the Bikini novel, Arkady, stationed on the Soviet Pacific coast, had already been mulling over some ideas for science fiction and among other things had been pumping his astronomy-student brother by letter for information about Venus. At the time (the early 1950s), Western sf generally displayed a picture of either jungle Venus or ocean Venus. These conceptions had earlier held more astronomical credibility but even in the 1950s were not completely ruled out. At the least, a fairly Earthlike Venus was not generally known to be ruled out, which was good enough for Western sf writers throughout the ’50s and into the ’60s. It is not clear how much familiarity the brothers had at this point with Western sf, but jungle Venus also showed up in a few Soviet works such as Aleksandr Belyayev’s A Leap into Nothing (1933). Arkady, however, was intent on presenting a Venus more consistent with current science. His musings about Venus had so far not jelled into a satisfactory plot.

After Arkady’s discharge from the military or possibly a bit earlier during his visits to his mother and brother when on leave, Arkady began to regard Boris as more than just a source of background information. The brothers had always been unusually close, considering their age difference, but by the mid-1950s Boris was clearly an adult and a peer, not a kid brother to be protected and guided. The brothers started actually collaborating.

The Land of the Crimson Clouds

According to an account by Boris, the motivation to buckle down to serious writing came from a bet made in the summer or autumn of 1954 when Arkady and Yelena were visiting Leningrad. The brothers were criticizing the state of Soviet sf, and Yelena, sick of hearing about it, told them to put up or shut up. They bet her a bottle of champagne that they could indeed write something better than what they were reading. Their attempt became their first novel, The Land of the Crimson Clouds (Strana bagrovykh tuch, 1959; hereafter LCC). I will here devote a fair amount of space to the novel for several reasons: It is untranslated; I myself have somewhat neglected it in earlier writings; and, as the brothers’ first joint novel, it sets some important precedents. Its writing history is also fairly well attested in multiple sources.

Soviet sf had been fairly interesting in the 1920s, but since then had been constrained by narrow censorship guidelines within which it was barely possible, but certainly not easy, to write readable science fiction. It is not clear to what extent the Strugatskys were aware of the constraints within which the sf authors they criticized had been obliged to work. If the Strugatskys were aware, they may have recognized that the death of Stalin and the ensuing Thaw in mainstream literature should also offer expanded possibilities in sf. For unclear reasons, although the mainstream Thaw began in 1954, analogous results did not show up in published Soviet science fiction until 1957, but this was in any case the year when the Strugatskys had at last finished their manuscript.

The novel took a long time to complete. Boris later ascribed this mostly to the fact that the brothers were still experimenting with methods of collaboration. Even with Arkady in Moscow rather than the Soviet Far East, the two still lived hundreds of miles apart. The method they later arrived at was (generally) to work out a preliminary version of the plot, characters, background, etc. by correspondence but not to actually put the words of the text onto paper until they could arrange for both brothers to meet somewhere in person with one of them sitting at the typewriter and to agree orally on every sentence before it was typed. At the time of their first novel, however, the brothers worked variously by each writing different portions of the novel or even competing versions of the same portion, resulting in much duplication of effort and in the need for later harmonization. Even beyond problems of collaboration, other factors in the delay in finishing must have been the sheer size of the novel, which is longer than most of their later sf works, and the fact that they were still feeling their way into the genre.

LCC represented an advance over the Soviet sf of the early 1950s but only a modest one. It is an interplanetary adventure story set in the 1980s or at latest the ’90s. It concerns the first successful expedition to the surface of Venus, intended to pave the way for the exploitation of a valuable ore deposit. Like much Western sf, LCC is decidedly overoptimistic about the amount of technological and social progress to be made in so short a time. Many space stations orbit Earth; there are colonies on Mars; staffed research stations orbit Venus. “Photon-drive rockets” have just been developed. Disarmament has been attained. I was surprised to learn that this last bit was put in at editorial insistence (presumably anticipating the reaction of the censor): The viewpoint character had originally been an army officer detailed to a Venus expedition to handle the tanklike crawler (krauler, one of the many borrowings from English in the Strugatskys’ invented terminology), but the editors decreed that there could be no military people portrayed in space. The Strugatskys instead made him a graduate of the Higher Surface Transport Technical School, “the former Armor School,” and gave him experience in scientific expeditions to the Gobi Desert.

Evidence is conflicting as to whether the Soviet Union has attained full communism by the time of the story. (Per Marxism-Leninism, full communism is a state of society in which “the government of people” has been replaced by “the administration of things” and the principle of economic distribution is “to each according to his need.” By the 1960s, and indeed until its demise, the Soviet Union had officially only attained socialism, under which government was retained and the principle was “to each according to his work.”) Near the novel’s end, our heroes claim a Venusian ore deposit for the whole human race by authority of the Union of Soviet Communist Republics (232), but near the beginning, the text contains several instances of the abbreviation SSSR (= USSR, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), one of them (10) unambiguously contemporary with the story, and no instances of SSKR (= USCR). Clearly there has been an editing error somewhere—perhaps an early draft posited full communism and later revision to remove it missed one occurrence, or, alternatively, a copy editor “corrected” SSKR to SSSR, and the brothers never changed it back, not even in the post-Soviet preferred text approved by Boris. Prior to working on this essay, I had failed to notice that solitary occurrence of “Communist Republics” in LCC, but had noted the “SSSR”s. In my 1982 article on the Strugatsky future history, I had placed (110) the first indication of full communism as being an occurrence of “SSKR” in a later novel, in a news article dated 2021. In any case, elsewhere on Earth, capitalist countries still exist at the time of LCC and for some time afterward.

The word “crawler” is sometimes used for various tracked vehicles even in the real world, and it has appeared frequently in Anglo sf, but I would not be surprised if Arkady Strugatsky had picked the term up from Andre Norton’s Sargasso in Space (published in 1955 under the pseudonym Andrew North). A Russian translation by both Strugatskys appeared in 1968, but Arkady, with his fluent English, could have read Norton’s book much earlier, assuming that a copy somehow came his way. Sargasso also deals with artifacts of the Forerunners, a vanished elder race similar to the Wanderers, whose artifacts start showing up in the Strugatskys’ work in some of the stories making up their later book Noon: 22nd Century.

The Venus portrayed in LCC is not quite the hell-hole soon to be revealed by the probes of the late ’60s and early ’70s, but as compared with the planet portrayed in 1950s Western sf, it is decidedly inhospitable—largely desert, hot (although much cooler than the reality), radioactive, and agitated by constant ferocious windstorms. It does, however, have its own strange life-forms and even a small percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere. Every previous expedition sent there has perished, but planners hope that the more powerful photon rocket will prove a decisive advantage. Besides general scientific knowledge, the lure of Venus resides in a huge uranium deposit detected there from space. One goal of the expedition is to place a radio beacon near the deposit (there is an explanation of why this has to done from the ground) in order to guide future mining expeditions.

Eventually, our heroes discover that this deposit is so rich that it helps create a natural nuclear reactor. (The Strugatskys use the old-fashioned term atomnyy kotel, equivalent to English “atomic pile.”) As far as I know, this was the first occurrence of the natural-reactor idea in sf, although Wikipedia indicates that a physicist had proposed the notion in 1956 so that the brothers might have borrowed the idea rather than independently inventing it. In the real world in 1972, evidence was uncovered that two billion years ago several natural reactors had indeed operated on Earth in the vicinity of present-day Oklo in Gabon. By now, the U-235 content of natural uranium ore has decayed far below the point that would permit a sustained reaction, at least absent the lake of heavy water for a neutron moderator that the Strugatskys posit on Venus.

Although LCC is filled with action, not all of the action advances the plot, leading to a somewhat paradoxical impression of a slow narrative pace. Some incidents seem to be inserted just to increase the Sense of Wonder, and might better have been reserved for their own stories. In fact, in some cases the Strugatskys did later expand on the throwaway ideas. Packing in an overabundance of throwaway ideas is, of course, a phenomenon fairly common in sf novels, especially first novels, even in the West.

One example of a Strugatsky throwaway idea is the space ramjet. In my 1982 article, I stated that the Strugatskys had used the idea of the Bussard engine or “interstellar ramjet” in the same year, 1960, that Robert Bussard had proposed it, thus implying that the Strugatskys had quickly borrowed the idea from the American scientist. While working on this essay, however, I discovered that in point of fact the Strugatskys had already approached the idea in LCC (manuscript completed in 1957 and published in 1959), at least for interplanetary flight, even making the ramjet analogy. Before attempting a landing on Venus, the photon-drive ship Khius makes a trial flight to Venus and back without landing. It gathers, among other scientific data, information on the density of space dust en route. The captain reports, “This data, comrades … allows us to hope for the realization of a ramjet photon engine (pryamotochnyy fotonnyy dvigatel’), at least on flights such as this...” (90). I will jump ahead to note that, still antedating Bussard, the brothers moved on to an actual interstellar ramjet in an otherwise undistinguished short story, “Special Assumptions” (1959): “It captured spaceborne gas, dust, and whatever else there was in space and compressed it in a reactor. It had unlimited range. Its speed was also unlimited—within the limits of the light barrier, of course.” To be sure, it is possible that the interstellar ramjet idea had appeared in speculations among scientists before Bussard presented an elaborated proposal or that the idea appeared in the work of some untraced sf author even before the Strugatskys. The brothers also failed to specify the electromagnetic scoop that was an essential part of Bussard’s proposal—and of course, although the interstellar-ramjet idea was fairly widely adopted in Anglo sf from the 1960s onward, it is still debated whether such a concept would work even theoretically.

Another example of a throwaway Sense of Wonder passage in LCC is the Khius’s penetration, en route during its second trip to Venus, into a mysterious region of space where the laws of radio propagation change such that the photon-drive ship is cut off from outgoing communication with the outside world, but it is able to overhear both sides of an agonizing conversation between the last survivor of a wrecked British spaceship in the asteroid belt and a Chinese vessel near Mars, too far away to effect a rescue before the British survivor runs out of air. The episode is irrelevant to LCC’s plot. It also completely ignores lightspeed lags in communication, as do other radio conversations across interplanetary distances depicted in the novel. It is hard to believe that the Strugatskys fell into this lightspeed trap unawares (Boris was a graduate student in astronomy, and even Arkady had done well in science in high school and had taken an amateur interest subsequently). The authors may, like the authors of many Western sf screenplays—but a mercifully smaller proportion of authors of written sf—have deliberately ignored the problem for the sake of pacing. This explanation, however, seems almost equally unsatisfactory, since the scenes easily could have been rewritten to mention the lightspeed lags or to rationalize their absence, with a clear boost both to verisimilitude and to the science education of Soviet youth.

In LCC, characterization is competent but functional with no character particularly interesting or memorable outside of context. This approach is, of course, widespread in sf and often even necessary: putting unusual personalities in unusual situations is generally overkill. However, even adequate characterization was a step up from the common level of Soviet sf of the period, which in this respect resembled the U.S. sf of the 1920s and 1930s. Despite the then-standard Soviet practice and despite opposition from their editors, the authors also killed off several of the positive characters, believing that portraying deaths in space exploration was both realistic and honest. By increasing the stakes, it probably also heightened interest in the plot.

In execution if not in concept, the brothers’ story stood head and shoulders above what was being published when the brothers made the bet with Yelena but less so by the time it appeared, between the length of time it took to finish (it was completed only in April 1957) and the length of time then to publish it (two years). It was accepted by Detgiz, but matters did not move swiftly. Some of the lag was normal editing delay, and some reflected bureaucratic problems getting the manuscript through censorship, especially since, in addition to Glavlit, the normal censorship agency, the Soviet atomic energy authority also had to sign off on it. In the meantime, other writers had also drawn the conclusion that under the Thaw it should be possible to write more imaginative sf than what Stalin’s regime had permitted. Ivan Yefremov’s far more sweeping Andromeda appeared in 1957 (full version, 1958) to enormous public acclaim and some controversy. It is credited with signaling the renaissance of Soviet sf. The launch of Sputnik in October 1957 reinforced this change, playing much the same role that the first atomic bomb had for Anglophone sf: science fiction, that once scorned and marginalized genre, now looked more like the part of literature that understood modern reality.

Russian biographers say little about the influence of untranslated foreign sf on the Strugatskys’ work. Partly this may be for lack of evidence. Arkady was the main conduit, and he died without providing extensive reminiscences. Boris had some knowledge of English and even collaborated with his brother on a few sf translations but did not routinely read English-language fiction. Arkady read English fluently (eventually translating several sf novels for publication), and with his job at a publisher, he had far easier access to foreign work than the average Soviet citizen. I would bet that he had read Heinlein’s Space Cadet, since there are possible parallels both in LCC (such as the discovery of the wreck of an earlier Venus expedition) and in later Strugatsky works. Arkady might have been reluctant to mention the foreign sources of some of his ideas, particularly if they originated with a known anti-Communist such as Heinlein. As Boris makes clear, the brothers assumed that their letters in the mail and at least later even their diaries at home might be read by the KGB or its predecessors. Skalandis notes that, starting in 1958 (and thus after LCC was handed in), Arkady recorded in his diary his reaction to a large number of Anglo sf works that he read. Skalandis does not list Heinlein among the authors thus recorded, but Arkady could have omitted evidence of reading him out of prudence. Heinlein was, after all, writing World War III into the back history of many of his books at this time. (I briefly discuss published Strugatsky translations from the English and Japanese at the end of this article. Arkady also intermittently worked for a long time on the translation of a Japanese genre-sf novel called 61 Cygni, but evidently he never finished it, possibly because he saw no prospects for publication.)

The brothers did publish a number of short stories in magazines between the time they submitted the LCC manuscript and when it finally appeared. Aside from the technological interest of the interstellar ramjet in “Special Assumptions,” none of these stories is particularly noteworthy in isolation, although some did later get incorporated into more substantial works. Russia did not have any specialized science-fiction magazines until post-Soviet times, so the available magazine slots for sf short stories were few, generally a maximum of one per issue in a few publications directed toward either young people or popular science. It was thus a notable accomplishment to place as many stories as the brothers did.

“Destination: Amalthea”

The brothers’ next longer-form work was the novella “Put’ na Amal’teyu” (1960), literally “The Way to Amalthea,” but translated into English as “Destination: Amaltheia” (sic), with a misspelling throughout of Jupiter’s moon Amalthea. The translation appeared in 1963 as the title story of a Moscow-published English-language anthology of Soviet sf and would have been available in the U.S. at the time only from a few specialized bookstores and in major libraries. The text can now be found free online. The English translation by Leonid Kolesnikov contains a number of errors and awkward renderings of sf-related terminology, but overall it is surprisingly readable.

The story is set about ten years after LCC with some of the same characters. Bykov, the former crawler specialist, has retrained and is now a spaceship captain. The planetologists Dauge and Yurkovsky prove to be qualified not only to find ore deposits on terrestrial planets such as Venus but to study the structure of gas giants. The three are now accompanied by Zhilin, an engineer fresh out of the space academy. The photon ship Takhmasib, named after a dead hero mentioned in LCC, has a mission combining an urgent resupply run with scientific research. The food stock of the research station on Callisto has been contaminated by a local fungus, so that the larger outpost on Amalthea has been forced to share, and all Terrans in the Jovian satellite system are on short rations. The ship is also bringing a French radio astronomer to Amalthea, and the planetologists intend to study Jupiter’s atmosphere from on board the Takhmasib. Instead of Martian flatcats, the ship carries as a mascot a skin-pattern-shifting Martian mimicrodon. (If Arkady had not read Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones, 1952, the brothers could have picked up the “cute-space-mascot” gimmick from various other Western stories or even could have independently reborrowed it from sea stories.) After some light badinage centering on the mimicrodon and the broken Russian spoken by the Frenchman, matters turn serious when the ship is hit by a meteor, damaging the photon reflector and ending up with the disabled ship floating like a balloon in the superdense Jovian atmosphere. Oddly enough, Captain Sir Dominic Flandry had found himself in much the same position in an episode of Poul Anderson’s We Claim These Stars, a novel published in both its magazine and book versions only the year before (1959). The Strugatskys had been toying with the idea of a Jupiter story for some time, but in March 1959, editors vetoed Arkady’s original plot idea, involving battles with space pirates. Since “Amalthea” was written in October to November 1959, there might barely have been time to borrow a replacement plot-driver from the Anderson novel, but it is also possible that the similarity is a coincidence or a dual borrowing from some common fiction or nonfiction source.

In any case, in the Strugatsky work, the technology is less advanced (after all, it is set in 2000 or so), and what is a minor incident in the Flandry book becomes the central problem of an entire novella. The brothers’ two major concerns are the hard-science phenomena of the Jovian atmosphere and the psychological reactions of the Takhmasib’s crew and passengers to the prospect of almost certain death once their supplies run out. In contrast to LCC, this time the Strugatskys kill off no one, not even the mimicrodon. The crew manages to readjust the focal point of the photon generator to compensate for the damage to the reflector and thus to escape Jupiter and deliver the needed food to Amalthea.

Perhaps because I had never paid close attention to the early work that preceded it, I had not realized that “Amalthea” represented an early example of a shift to what Boris calls their “new ‘Hemingwayan’ manner—deliberately sparing of words, with telling subtexts and an ascetic renunciation of superfluous epithets and metaphors. And an absolute minimum of scientific explanations.” The Strugatskys were avid Hemingway fans, once that author belatedly became known in the USSR. It may be that Russian translations pushed Hemingway’s prose somewhat toward the center of the stylistic bell curve, because the mature Strugatsky style never reminded me of the American author. The mature Strugatskys do rely fairly heavily on show-don’t-tell and spend less time following the thoughts of their protagonists than in LCC. Instead they principally but not exclusively use dialog and outward description.

For a long period the Strugatskys were dissatisfied with the novella, belatedly deciding that nothing much really happens in it. I note that Flandry’s analogous stay in the Jovian atmosphere lasts only five pages, whereas that portion of the Strugatsky novella runs for seventy-three. The Strugatskys declined to reprint “Amalthea” in Russian between 1964 and 1985. Since that span included the run of Macmillan’s “Best of Soviet Science Fiction” series, it may also have been the brothers rather than the Macmillan editors who decided not to include the novella there. My opinion is that the Strugatskys judged themselves too severely. They had intended to portray heroism without oversized histrionics, and that entails less action than in a typical sf story. I found the novella readable although a bit hokey. It is also mildly sexist, even by the standards of the mid-1970s, when I wrote about it in my dissertation and mentioned the sexism. Post-Stalin Soviet society existed in a tension between deep social conservatism and the sexual equality preached by Marxism. (Whenever asked, for instance in the question period of a gathering with readers, to explain why females played such a minor role in their fiction, the brothers reportedly deployed a stock answer: at no point in their lives had they ever been able to understand women. Considering all the women in their lives and Arkady’s lifelong success as a Lothario, something deeper was probably going on, abetted though it may have been by the traditional conventions of the sf genre and of Soviet society. However, the nature of that “something” is unclear.)

Space Apprentice

Here and below, when discussing books published in translation in the U.S. (mostly as part of Macmillan’s Best of Soviet Science Fiction series), I will limit myself to a few new points unless there is reason to do otherwise. These works are out of print but findable in large libraries or as used books over the Internet, so interested readers can satisfy their own curiosity as to details.

Space Apprentice was published slightly later than Noon: 22nd Century, but it comes earlier by internal chronology, and it will be more convenient to discuss it first. Arkady proposed the basic idea for Space Apprentice to Boris in March 1961, and the brothers completed a draft in one burst in May to June of the same year, although it required revisions until the end of the year. The novel was not serialized, only excerpted in a magazine, so that its first publication was the book version of 1962. The English translation appeared from Macmillan in 1981. Macmillan changed the titles of many of the Strugatsky novels that it published, evidently to make them sound more science-fictional or more euphonious to the Anglo ear. The Russian title of Space Apprentice was Stazhery. This is plural. A stazher is, in the relevant sense, a worker during the break-in and trial period, a probationer. In English the latter word is also used for a convict on probation, which presumably accounts for Macmillan’s less accurate rendering “apprentice,” with the “space” tacked in front for obvious reasons. The novel indeed has a literal probationer, young vacuum welder Yuriy Borodin, who is trying to catch up with his work group, now on Saturn’s moon Rhea, and who hitches a ride with Bykov, Yurkovsky, and Zhilin as they make a tour of inspection of points in the outer Solar System. The Strugatskys’ original title had been Stazher (singular). However, after the novel was handed in, the Strugatskys received the feedback from in-house readers that the authors had not devoted all that much of the book to Yuriy, so that the title struck those readers as inaccurate. Any book’s title got locked in at an early point in the Soviet publishing process, but the brothers and their editors did at least manage to get this one changed to plural, so that it could be applied more broadly also to people like Bykov, Yurkovsky, and Zhilin, who in a larger sense were newbies in the just-evolved society of full communism. I doubt if the Macmillan editor was aware of this history, and even if he was, a plural “apprentices” would not have worked so well in the extended meaning. The best he could have done would have been something like Greenhorns, which perhaps would have been no improvement over leaving Apprentice in the singular.

Theodore Sturgeon’s introduction is generally positive toward the novel. I belatedly note that he writes about the instantaneous radio communication in Apprentice much as I did above about the same glitch in LCC. Sturgeon suggests that FTL communication may be deliberately implied. Although the Strugatskys do eventually get to FTL communication in their future history, I see no indication that the authors mean to suggest it in these books set in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If that were so, characters would have pointed to the technology as a disproof of Einstein in the discussions about possible future FTL travel that occur in several stories. I think that ignoring the communication lag is more likely an early sign of a cavalier attitude toward scientific verisimilitude that was to become more conspicuous as time went on.

Bela Klyuyeva had been the Strugatskys’ sympathetic editor at the publisher Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”). (A few sources spell her first name Bella, but most have Bela.) She was pushed out of her job by hardliners in 1974 but then had moved over to VAPP, the Soviet agency handling international copyright deals, where her responsibilities included science fiction. (The USSR joined the Universal Copyright Convention effective May 27, 1973. Earlier work was in the public domain in the West, so VAPP was just getting organized.) I would not be surprised if Klyuyeva was largely responsible for the Macmillan series of the late 1970s and early 1980s that led to the translation of most then-existing Strugatsky works. In the mid-1980s, I was told by a former low-level Macmillan employee that the publisher had not particularly wanted the science fiction but had agreed to take it as part of a package deal in order to get the rights for an English translation of the new edition (1969–78) of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (an English edition of selected articles was marketed mostly to large libraries, such as at universities). Macmillan made a genuine effort once they did have the sf series, getting Theodore Sturgeon to provide introductions to many of the volumes, having the popular sf artist Richard Powers paint the covers, and paying decent rates to translators.

Noon: 22nd Century

The Strugatskys refer to Noon: 22nd Century variously as a novel and a story cycle. It was planned and written in 1959–62. The work was, like Apprentice, not serialized, but only excerpted, before its book publication in 1962. The title is a riposte to Andre Norton’s after-the-bomb novel Daybreak, 2250 A.D.—which actually was a 1954 retitling of Star Man’s Son (1952). Arkady had read the Norton book and as a convinced Communist, he had wanted to highlight the brothers’ contention that, thanks to the inexorable forces of history, the future would be much brighter than Norton had painted it. Unfortunately, by the time that the Noon title idea occurred to Arkady, the publisher was already locked in to an earlier title choice, Homecoming, after one of the included stories. The brothers did contrive to get their new title appended as a subtitle for the book’s first edition in 1962. When the considerably amended and expanded second edition came out in 1967, the brothers managed to get title and subtitle swapped. (The subtitle is generally ignored even by Russians and was dropped in the English translation.) In the mid-1970s, I did not know all of this history, but I did know that the title was a response to the Norton book, and when I was offered the chance to translate the work, I wanted to title it Midday rather than Noon, to echo Norton’s Daybreak. (Either word is a legitimate translation of Russian Polden’.) Roger DeGaris, who spoke Russian and edited most of the Macmillan series, overruled me. As I pointed out in my 1982 article, published Soviet-era Strugatsky criticism showed little or no awareness of the fact that most Strugatsky sf was set in a single future history. In post-Soviet times, however, the Russians termed the future history the “Noon Universe,” since they considered this book to be central to it. (Actually, they literally called it the “Noon World” [Mir Poludnya]. Russian sf terminology is less likely than English to use “world” to mean “planet,” but more likely to use it for a literary secondary universe. Similarly, Russian says “alternate world” or “alternate history,” not “alternate universe.”)

The Strugatskys planned the work to be a sort of utopia, painting a broad picture of the bright future of full communism. They even, as is common in the utopia genre, included time travelers to serve as viewpoint characters, in their case space travelers jumping from 2017 to 2119 through a sort of time warp (not the more common device of relativistic time dilation). However, the brothers did not want to use the overworked tour-of-utopia structure, and as an alternative they decided to employ a series of short stories, linked by theme and by recurring characters. Although Boris’s commentary does not mention it, I suspect that the brothers had seen the 1959 Russian translation of the Czech Jan Weiss’s 1956 Grandchildren’s Land which similarly used an assemblage of short stories to portray the communist future. While working on Noon in 1960, Arkady also proposed borrowing a leaf from “Hemingway or Dos Passos” (eight years before Brunner’s Dos-Passos-modeled Stand on Zanzibar came out), not quite the way Brunner would do, but by interspersing scenes of the hardships of the twentieth century between the stories of the bright future. Arkady actually wrote the hardship scenes, but their publisher Detgiz firmly rejected the idea. Most of the manuscripts of the scenes were later lost, although some were recycled in Arkady’s untranslated solo work “The Devil Among People.” For the short stories needed for Noon, in some cases the brothers adapted earlier works, changing character names and other details as necessary to fit them in, and in other cases they wrote new stories.

It turns out that Arkady in 1952 had been intrigued by the Kipling’s 1899 novella “Stalky & Co.,” which is fairly obscure even in the Anglosphere and decidedly obscure in Russia, although (unknown at the time to Arkady) there did exist a 1925 Russian translation. Arkady had made his own translation to improve his English and for his own amusement, and for the purpose he even broke off the work on translating Son of Tarzan that he had already started. (Several Tarzan books in English had shown up at a used bookstore in Leningrad, but Arkady later lost them during a military change of station.) Skalandis sees “Stalky” as heavily influential on the Noon story “The Conspirators.” Beyond the fact that they are both set in boarding schools and concern a small group of adventurous teenage friends, I cannot detect any huge resemblance myself.

The Russian sources I have examined remain silent on what I think are most likely borrowings in other Noon stories of general ideas (not plots) from untranslated Anglo sf. There are many places (including works of Kurd Lasswitz and H.G. Wells) where the Strugatskys could have found the bare idea of moving roads, but Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll” may well have contained the most extensive description in fiction of their use for interurban transport before the brothers’ “The Moving Roads.” Similarly, there are many service-academy stories, at least in English, and Arkady himself had relevant personal experience, but “Almost the Same” certainly strikes me as showing the influence of Space Cadet. In particular, the character Panin seems a lot like Tex. The whale-ranching setup of “Deep Search” as well as the idea of a spaceman who turns to the ocean is reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1954 The Deep Range. Umpteen Western stories, probably no one of them precisely classic, portray an alien civilization based on biology rather than physics as does “The Planet with All the Conveniences.” Boris later commented that the Brothers’ goal was with each new work to do something that had never been done before in sf or at least never in Soviet sf. I think that, quite reasonably, they often settled for the latter degree of novelty. After all, most of the Western works I mentioned went untranslated until the post-Soviet period, if they have been translated at all. No one thinks the less of Shakespeare because probable sources for most of his plays have been identified. Surely it distorts the picture of where and how the Strugatskys exercised their own creative powers to not look into their likely sources. I am not sure if Skalandis and Volodikhin and Prashkevich are too unread in Western sf to see the parallels or if they chose as a matter of policy to ignore them perhaps for lack of explicit proof of borrowing.

Incidentally, in looking at my translation of the above-mentioned “Almost the Same,” I find that my younger self committed (at least) one of the translation sins that I have recently condemned in others: Russian var, which I took to be an invented science-fictional unit of measure and which I rendered “wahr,” is actually a real unit, in English termed “VAr” (first two letters upper-case), “volt-amplitude reactive.”

The story “Candles Before the Control Board” prefigures but does not quite reach the idea of personality uploading that later was to become so popular in sf. In a massive and painstaking process, the entire brain state of a dying scientist is digitally recorded in the hope that it will eventually become possible to download it again onto an artificial brain. Although sf had many stories of personality transfer even before the early ’60s, this may be the first one using a plausible-sounding rationalization via digital technology. The Strugatskys, however, never went on to show either a personality functioning in uploaded state (running on a mainframe) or one downloaded into an artificial body, situations that were to become common in Western sf and in post-Soviet Russian sf.

One striking feature of the 1967 edition of Noon is that every last character who had been Chinese in the 1962 Homecoming has been turned into a Japanese. (Other characters were already Japanese even in Homecoming.) Presumably this nationality swap was a result of the Sino-Soviet split and was forced on the authors by censorship. It appears that all of China had become an uncountry and was simply to be ignored as much as possible. I had hoped that one of the sources that I looked at might have provided an account of how this change happened and how the necessity was explained to the authors, but if the Strugatskys or their editors ever elaborated on this, I have not come across the record. The 1967 edition is the basis for the preferred text published in the collected works and available for free (in Russian) on the Strugatsky official website. This preferred version contains minor differences from the Soviet-period text such as dropping a reference to Lenin, but spot-checking suggests that no characters have been turned back into Chinese.

“Escape Attempt”

Although nothing had come of Arkady’s attempt to use interludes in Noon to contrast the bright future with the dark past and present, he and his brother were able to work this contrast into the novella “Escape Attempt,” which was completed and published in 1962. It is a story of naïve explorers from communist Earth on the extrasolar planet Saula discovering a Gulag-like labor camp, complete with very humanoid prisoners and guards. The only Terran who seems to understand what is really going on—and that, yes, intelligent beings really can be that cruel to each other—is the somewhat mysterious historian Saul, who joined the exploration trip at the last minute and in whose honor the Terran explorers have named the planet. In the end, it turns out that, in a pure fantasy motif, Saul himself is a Soviet tank commander who somehow escaped from a Nazi prison camp into the communist future and learned enough to function there but who finally decides to go back to World War II and fire his last round, fighting against the kind of horrors he has witnessed among the aliens and helping to bring about Earth’s communist future.

The reaction of at least many Soviet readers to this story was decidedly more favorable than was my own when I read the novella something like ten years after it was published—that is, in about 1972; the English translation appeared only in 1982. It was clear even to me that the alien labor camp was based at least as much on Soviet models as on Nazi ones, but the Strugatskys’ sfnal version produced a much more muted reaction on me than had the many works about the Gulag—nonfiction, plus Solzhenitsyn’s fiction—that I had already read by then. Moreover, the device of a visitor from the past who gets the courage to return there and die heroically seemed stale to me. I have a feeling that there were already multiple examples by 1962, but I particularly remembered an episode of Twilight Zone that I had seen as a child. Through the magic of the Internet, I can now report that it was “The Last Flight,” from a screenplay by none other than Richard Matheson, which episode I may have seen on its very first airing, on February 5, 1960. Decker, a British pilot from World War I, flies his biplane through a strange cloud and lands at a U.S. Air Force base in France in 1959. It eventually emerges that he had abandoned another British plane that was under attack from multiple German aircraft. Decker learns that, mysteriously, the other pilot survived and became a crucial figure in the Battle of Britain in World War II, saving thousands of British lives. Decker, having regained his nerve, concludes that he must have returned to the dogfight and saved the other pilot, and he proceeds to do so, flying his biplane back through the 1959 version of the cloud and, in 1917, downing three German planes before he himself is killed. Rather than borrowing, the Strugatskys may have independently reinvented much the same device, but for me, the novelty had been worn off it by the time I encountered their version.

For that matter, it is not out of the question that they did indeed borrow the device from Matheson. It is conceivable that one of the Strugatskys saw the TZ episode in a closed screening. By 1962 they were friendly with people in the film industry who had access to foreign productions not shown to the Soviet public. A more likely possibility is that Arkady could have run across a discussion of the plot in some Western or Japanese periodical. In the days of only three American TV networks, episodes of popular shows were sometimes dissected at length in the press after they aired. I presume that the same happened when American shows were broadcast in, say, Britain or Japan. Finally, the Wikipedia says that the TZ episode was based on a Matheson short story “Flight.” I could find no online evidence that this story was ever published, but if it was, Arkady could have read it.

Another factor in my muted reaction to the story is that as a rule I am strongly allergic to attempts to mix sf and fantasy. The Strugatskys deliberately chose to provide no rationalization whatsoever for Saul’s presence. It could perhaps be argued that time warps and the like are common enough in sf simply to be taken as implied here, but there is no credible way that anyone who had stumbled through a time warp from the 1940s to the communist future could successfully infiltrate that society without being discovered. This is simply fantasy: Saul has evidently made a wish that he be made part of the future society which as a true Communist he knows is coming and had it granted by Someone or Something. My allergy to such a mix may be partly a matter of personal taste.

For its original audience, however, “Escape Attempt” would have seemed both original and topical. It came out a month before the publication by Khrushchev’s personal permission of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Indeed, the Strugatskys had wanted to make Saul an escapee from the Stalin-era Gulag, but had been firmly overruled by their editors—after all, it later took Khrushchev’s personal agreement to get Ivan Denisovich published. (Presumably the Brothers would have had Saul do something more peaceable than to fire his last shot if he had returned to Stalin’s Soviet Union rather than to Nazi Germany.) However, while I can understand the topical impact of “Escape Attempt” in 1962, I find it a little odd that, as indicated both in Skalandis and in Volodikhin and Prashkevich, many Russians who first read the novella as late as I did or even later still find it a major work. This is probably partly a question of the limited extent to which Stalin’s Gulag had been renounced under Brezhnev and his successors. Ivan Denisovich had indeed been published before Brezhnev came to power, but until well into Perestroika, most further literary or historical treatment of the Gulag was available only in risky-to-possess samizdat or “tamizdat” (contraband Western-published émigré editions).

Another factor may be differing genre expectations in the Soviet Union. Ivan Yefremov may have been the last major Soviet sf author who made a serious effort to stick to the possible in all his science fiction. (Adherence to the traditional sf-genre rules was, however, resumed by many Russophone authors in post-Soviet times.) For his part, Boris Strugatsky rhapsodizes about “Escape Attempt”:

It was the first work where we felt the full sweetness and magical force of MAKING NO EXPLANATIONS. Not science-fictional, not logical, not purely scientific, not even pseudoscientific. How sweet, as it turned out, it was to tell the reader that THIS and THAT happened, but that why it happened, how it happened, what came from where, WERE ALL IMMATERIAL!” (All-caps in the original.)

Boris further quotes sf writer Anatoly Dneprov as approving, saying in essence that in writing you can break any rule if you get away with it. This is a truth universally acknowledged—but for me, the Strugatskys did not get away with it.

Curiously, the 1982 English translation by Roger DeGaris makes several changes at the end of the story. Saul has brought with him to the future an unfinished note to the German prison camp administration from an informer, whom Saul evidently surprised and killed. When he decides to return to the past, Saul uses the back of the note to write his farewell to the communist future, and his fellow explorers read that, then flip it over and read the other side. At that point the translation ends. The informer’s note explains that the prisoner of war 819360, who supposedly is a career criminal going by the nickname of Saul, is actually a tank commander and Party member, Savel Petrovich Repin, and that Repin is participating in a planned escape attempt. Savel is the Russian form of Saul; the latter is a name in German, English, and other languages, but not Russian. The translation, however, changes Savel to Saul, presumably on the theory that American readers, unlike Soviet ones, are too stupid to recognize that Saul and Savel are variants of the same name. (And why would it matter if they fail to recognize that Savel had incautiously derived his cover nickname from his real name?) The original note also specifically indicates that the person to whom it is addressed is an SS man. That could have been dropped inadvertently or because it was awkward to wedge it into the English syntax. Further, the original continues past the point where the translation ends, adding a brief scene in 1943 where German officers, on the other side of the fence from the smoky furnaces of what is obviously an extermination camp, investigate the aftermath of an exchange of fire that has killed both a German and our Savel Repin, still clutching a German gun. The last line is, “And prisoner 819360 stared with wide-open dead eyes at the low gray sky.” The place where the translation ends actually seems to make a good finish, and it avoids the awkward shift of scene back to 1943, but it also changes the tone from the authors’ intended grim conclusion.

“Far Rainbow”

The 1962 novella “Far Rainbow” has two translations, a 1967 Moscow-published one by the British A.G. Myers (as a separate book), and a 1979 Macmillan one by Antonina W. Bouis (in a volume together with another novella). Set in the Noon Universe, it follows the reactions of a small group of artists and scientific researchers on the mostly uninhabited planet Rainbow after they learn that a teleportation experiment has gone terribly wrong and that most of them are doomed. Only one spaceship is available to evacuate a few, and part of the plot concerns who or what will go on it. I had previously referred to “Far Rainbow” as a “Titanic story in space.” I was surprised to learn that it in fact originated not with the history of the Titanic or some similar disaster, but with the film On the Beach (1959), which both Strugatskys, plus other sf writers attending a conference in Moscow, were able to see at a closed screening in August 1962. The film made a great impression on both brothers, and they determined to write something along the same lines but something that they could get published in the USSR.

Not surprisingly, considering Soviet censorship guidelines, what emerged was a story that has very little in common with the Stanley Kramer film. Granted, as in the film, doom does move closer day by day—not from radioactive fallout but from two mysterious destructive Waves sweeping down from each of Rainbow’s poles. And the viewpoint characters do meet their end on a literal beach. (This last presumably is from a scene in the film and is definitely not from the film’s Russian title, which as given by Boris and some other sources is “On the Last Shore” [Na poslednem beregu]; the Russian Wikipedia terms it just “On the Shore.”) But Rainbow has a population in the low thousands and a few of those do escape, making the whole thing more like the story of a slowly sinking passenger liner with insufficient lifeboats than like a global doomsday. This being the communist future, no one behaves like a pure scoundrel, but some do display misplaced priorities, wishing to save research results or an adult sweetheart rather than what the Strugatskys regard as the most valuable thing on Rainbow, namely the children.

Among those last seen an instant away from certain death is Leonid Gorbovsky, a favorite character of the authors. At the time, the brothers thought they were through with their future history so that Gorbovsky might as well die a hero. Even later on, when the brothers made an abortive attempt to set what became The Snail on the Slope in the Noon Universe, they made it clear that Gorbovsky’s adventures on Pandora had happened before his trip to Rainbow. Eventually, however, the brothers did set other stories within their future history later than “Far Rainbow,” and they brought Gorbovsky back from the dead with no explanation whatsoever. In his commentary, Boris Strugatsky draws the obvious parallel with Sherlock Holmes and Reichenbach Falls, but Doyle did provide an explanation (however lame). The Strugatskys merely once again luxuriated in “the full sweetness and magical force of MAKING NO EXPLANATIONS.” To my mind, they more or less get away with the resurrection as a sort of inside joke, but this scorn for accepted literary craftsmanship leads them into more trouble elsewhere—although, needless to say, not in the eyes of their most ardent admirers.

In Myers’s translation one character is named Camille. The Cyrillic rendition of this French name is Kamil’ (ending in a single L and a Russian soft sign), whereas the Strugatskys actually instead use the French name’s rare but legitimate Russian counterpart, Kamill. Bouis alters the name to Camill, which is no real-world name at all, so far as I know. (For some reason, I nonetheless used Bouis’s form in my 1982 article.) In Noon I had rendered one character’s name as Percy Dickson (I assumed the surname had been borrowed from the author Gordon Dickson). The same character is called Dixon in the Macmillan Far Rainbow, published only a year later. One would have hoped that the editors would have insured continuity across their series of Strugatsky translations.

Patrick McGuire is a frequent contributor to NYRSF. This essay will continue next issue.

Works Cited

WORKS BY ARKADY AND BORIS STRUGATSKY

Note on the name “Strugatsky”: The Board of Geographic Names transliteration of the surname is Strugatskiy. The Library of Congress transliteration is Strugatskii. The form most used in normal English text is Strugatsky, but Strugatski can also be found, as in the DAW translations. There exist additional transliteration variants, but the above are the most important in English. In Russian, the plural form Strugatskiye is required even in the phrase “the Strugatsky brothers,” but library catalogs, etc., should list each coauthor individually.

• Arkadi and Boris Strugatski. The Final Circle of Paradise. New York: DAW, 1976.
• ——. Hard to Be a God. New York: DAW, 1973.
• A. Strugatskiy and B. Strugatskiy. Obitayemyy ostrov. Moscow: Detskaya literatura, 1971.
• ——. Strana bagrovykh tuch/A. Dneprov, Glinyanyy bog. Moscow: Detskaya literatura, 1969.
• Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Beetle in the Anthill. New York: Macmillan/London: Collier Macmillan, 1980.
• ——. Escape Attempt. New York: Macmillan/London: Collier Macmillan, 1982. (Besides the title novella, also contains “The Kid from Hell” and “Space Mowgli”)
• ——. Prisoners of Power. New York: Macmillan/London: Collier Macmillan, 1977.
• ——. Roadside Picnic/Tale of the Troika. New York: Macmillan/London: Collier Macmillan, 1977.
• ——. The Time Wanderers. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.

Free authorized e-texts of the Strugatsky works in Russian, plus some translations into English and other languages, can be found at <lib.ru/STRUGACKIE/>. Some additional authorized Strugatsky files, sometimes reflecting the text as actually published in the Soviet period rather than the preferred versions, are at <rusf.ru/abs>. Some translations into Western languages can also be found there.

OTHER WORKS

• Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell. New York: Ballantine, 1960.
• McGuire, Patrick L. “Understanding the Strugatsky Brothers.” Galileo, #7, 1978.
• ——. “Russian SF.” In Anatomy of Wonder. Neil Baron, ed. Second Edition, New York: R.R. Bowker, 1981, and, with alterations, in Third Edition, New York: R.R. Bowker, 1987.
• ——. “Future History Soviet Style: The Work of the Strugatsky Brothers.” In Critical Encounters II: Writers and Themes in Science Fiction, Tom Staicar, ed. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982.
• ——. Red Stars: Political Aspects of Soviet Science Fiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1985.
• Skalandis, Ant. Brat’ye Strugatskiye. Moscow: AST, 2008. Ebook.
• Strugatskiy, Boris. Kommentarii k proydennomu (1998). <www.rusf.ru/abs/books/bns-09.htm>, 2004. Accessed 8 October 2013.
• Volodikhin, Dmitriy and Gennadiy Prashkevich. Brat’ya Strugatskiye. Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2012.