By Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
I read this in one sitting on the 24th of May, 2025. It’s a first-contact story, except unlike other classics, here the aliens have no interest in us. They visited us, landing in five Zones, for just two days, before departing, leaving us to come to terms with what they did: changing the nature of the Zones permanently and leaving strange and dangerous artefacts.
We follow a stalker Redrick, ‘Red’, who steals artefacts from the Zones under the nose of the UN committee set up to deal with them.
Okay to be honest I’m not up to the task of writing a good review of this one, it’s too multifaceted. The artefacts are incomprehensible and terrifying: perpetual motion machines, ‘hell slime’ which dissolves your bones, a glimmering cobweb which gives you a heart attack, invisible forces wringing bodies like clothes, infinite energy cells, and more. The overwhelming impression is of, as one of the characters suggests, ants crawling over the detritus of a human picnic, using artefacts like fission plants to crack walnuts, being killed and disfigured, genetically, by things they have no hope of understanding. It’s chilling and really well done, one of the rare stories properly exploring what it is to live in a vast universe in an age of science and technology.
The sci-fi is only half the story; the other half is good old Soviet literature: a blend of Russian (salvation, spirit, despair, pragmatism) and communist (authority, self-determination, greed, and money) perspectives on the various lives catalogued in its pages. While the most overt and bitter reference is the final, desperate wish at the end of the book (“HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE”), the book can’t really be reduced in this way: both the sci-fi and the political philosophy blend and interplay in really interesting ways! There is no history of such scientific disadvantage in Marxist thought, just as there had been limited exploration of redemption and grey morality in sci-fi classics.
I also found it surprisingly readable! I read a gorgeous Folio edition I borrowed from the library, the heft of which communicated that This Was A Serious Soviet Sci-Fi Novel, and while that certainly was there, it was engaging, expressive, and compelling.
You can also see a lot of the influences! Annihilation and Tales From the Loop in particular.