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 Waves Extinguish the Wind
The Waves Extinguish the Wind
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 Waves Extinguish the Wind provides the epic conclusion to the Noon Universe saga, as eighty-nine-year-old Maxim Kammerer looks back at his most earth-shattering investigation, which brought an entire era of human civilization to an end. Searching for evidence that the mysterious alien Wanderers were interfering in Earth’s development, Kammerer and his young trainee Toivo Glumov discovered a deeper and more disturbing secret within humanity itself.
This new translation by Daniels Umanovskis joins updated editions of Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, and The Beetle in the Anthill to bring the saga of the Noon Universe to its fitting end: a search for truth and answers in a universe that provides only questions.