Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The brothers Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky (1925 –1991) and Boris Natanovich Strugatsky (1933 – 2012) were Soviet Russian writers who are inextricably linked as collaborators in some of the best and most provocative science fiction beyond US and British shores and beyond — and influenced by — Stanislaw Lem of Poland. Despite the Cold War, their books crawled to some recognition in the West in the Sixties and Seventies, often in garish DAW paperback editions. I hazard a guess that the 1979 film “Stalker,” directed by Andrei Tarkovsky with a screenplay by the brothers based loosely on Roadside Picnic, ignited a re-reading of the original brilliant novel. This naturally led to an interest in all their other writings. Their complete works in Russian run to 33 volumes. Meanwhile, here in the US, Chicago Review Press is doing a splendid job as their publisher.
The Beetle in the Anthill
The Beetle in the Anthill
Today, Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are counted among the best science fiction writers of the twentieth century.
In their Noon Universe novels, they imagined twenty-second-century Earth as a space-faring communist utopia, devoted to guiding the progress of civilization on alien worlds. But as the authors became increasingly disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, their Noon Universe stories grew darker and more complex as well.
The Beetle in the Anthill reintroduces Maxim Kammerer, the main character of their novel The Inhabited Island. Once an intrepid young space explorer, Kammerer is now an investigator with COMCON-2, the covert agency in charge of countering threats to the homeworld. He is tasked with tracking “progressor” Lev Abalkin, who has returned to Earth after a routine mission went tragically wrong. Do the secrets of Abalkin’s past pose a grave danger to humanity—or is he an innocent caught up in a deadly misunderstanding?
This new edition by lauded translator Olena Bormashenko joins updated translations of Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, and The Waves Extinguish the Wind to continue the ever-deepening saga of the Noon Universe.