I
am an animal, you see that I’m an animal. I have no words, they haven’t taught
me the words; I don’t know how to think, those bastards didn’t let me learn how
to think. But if you really are—all-powerful, all knowing, all
understanding—figure it out! Look into my soul. I know—everything you need is
in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone. It’s mine,
it’s human![i]
Redrick
Schuhart’s desperate prayer for justice and decency, which comes at the end of Roadside
Picnic
(1972), is addressed to a “god” that is only one of the baffling pieces of
technological debris left on our planet by passing aliens as we ourselves might
leave trash behind after a picnic. The visitation zones are as fiendishly
indifferent to mankind as the alien artifact in Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon (1960), but in the sf
of Arkady (1925-1991) and Boris (1933-2012) Strugatsky, the indifference and
uncaring inertia of human society are as cruel as the cosmos. In their science
fiction, they struggled unceasingly against that inertia and indifference to
reawaken the moral and social conscience.
The
Strugatskys have been interpreted and reinterpreted and misinterpreted. Marxist
critic/theorist Darko Suvin (Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 1979 and other works)
and American academic Stephen W. Potts (The Second Marxian Invasion, 1991) both take them
to have been true believing Communists. That is indeed how they represented
themselves during Soviet times, as witness an interview with Arkady published
in Soviet Literature in 1983:
Soviet
science fiction is the child of the great revolution, and that explains its
mission and special features. Our science fiction is socially and ideologically
committed and humane… Its ideal is communist humanism and it approaches all
problems from this angle… It fosters an active mentality, a kind of mentality
that is intolerant of narrow-minded bourgeois attitudes.[ii]
Alexander
Genis, an émigré Russian author who grew up reading the Strugatskys, credited
them in an essay on the occasion of Boris’ death with having “vindicated the
fundamental myth of the entire Soviet regime” in their Noon Universe future
history, but argued that their Communist heroes “evolved from one book to the
next, acquiring supernatural abilities and losing human traits,” until they
became so inhuman they “frightened even the authors.”[iii]
Only, what Genis calls their best novel, The Snail on the Slope, a sly critique of Soviet ideology, was first
conceived in 1965, well before the Noon Universe novels that venture into
transhumanism.
In Arkady Strugatsky’s
solo novel Devil Amongst People
(1991, as by S. Yaroslavtsev), published as the Soviet Union was coming apart,
the protagonist has experienced the worst horrors of Soviet times, from the
Gulags to Chernobyl. But the brothers’ disillusionment actually dates back to
1962, when they were working on Hard to be a God (1964).
Nikita Khrushchev had
just denounced modern art, and that was followed by campaign against post-thaw
works by writers like Ilya Ehrenburg and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. At a 1963
conference of the science fiction section of the Moscow Writers Organization,
Genrikh Altov was assailed by Aleksandr Kazantsev over “The Star River Test”
(1960), in which a scientist who has devoted 20 years to faster-than-light
communication and travel is persuaded to give it up to save three subterranean
explorers who are trapped far underground. For Kazantsev, just imagining FTL
was equivalent to making common cause with fascists against Einstein. Only,
given that Altov was of Jewish descent (his real name was Altshuller), and had
done time in a labor camp under Stalin – he had begun work there on developing
an influential theory about patterns of invention[iv]
– this attack was especially outrageous.
“I broke out in a cold
sweat,”[v]
Boris later recalled. Even though the denunciations of liberal sf (joined by
Anatoly Dneprov and others) didn’t lead to any arrests, he feared for the worst
– concluding that, whatever he and Arkady thought communism should stand for,
it was not what the Soviet regime stood for. “We shouldn’t have illusions,” he
said he realized at the time. “We shouldn’t have hopes for a brighter future.
We were being governed by goons and enemies of culture. They will never be with
us. They will always be against us. They will never let us say what we believe
is right, because what they believe is right is completely different.”[vi]
Only five years later,
Yefremov came under attack for The Bull’s Hour (1968), a sequel to Andromeda that was seen as veiled criticism of the Soviet
regime although it was ostensibly directed only at capitalism and the Chinese
version of Communism.[vii]
The Strugatskys had to play things very cagily over the next two decades. But
after the collapse of Soviet power, Boris emerged as a relentless critic of all
authoritarianism, past and present, which he feared was endemic in Russia. On
the occasion of the invasion of Georgia in 2008, he remarked: “We already have
returned to the beginning of the 1980s. God forbid that this doesn’t take us
back to the end of the 1930s.”[viii]
One of his last political acts was to sign an open letter urging Vladimir
Putin’s regime to free members of the punk rock band Pussy Riot, who had been
jailed for offending the Russian Orthodox Church. He had also corresponded with
imprisoned oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.[ix]
Khodorkovsky was a fan of the Strugatskys’ works, especially Space
Mowgli, Hard to be a God and Roadside Picnic. “When you finally come to the third, you begin to
dislike not only the ‘Soviet power,’ but any totalitarian or authoritarian rule
in principle,”[x] he wrote in Prison and Freedom (2012). In 2004, Boris voiced sympathy for at least
some private enterprise (Arkady’s daughter Mariya had married Yegor Gaydar, who
under Boris Yeltsin tried to revive the Russian economy with capitalist shock
therapy.), while condemning the “dictatorship of bureaucrats” under both the
Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.[xi]
Had the Strugatskys expressed such views openly during
Soviet times, they could have ended up in the Gulag. They might have chosen to
become dissidents – their work appearing only under cover names in samizdat or
published abroad, as in the case of Yuli Daniel with This is Moscow Speaking
and Other Stories
(1968) – attracting sympathy in the West without reaching their own countrymen.
But they chose a more difficult course of true humanists playing under the
protective coloration of “Communist” humanists. Their works thus reached
millions of Russian readers, and several – notably Roadside Picnic, Inhabited Island (Prisoners of Power,
1969-71)
and Hard to be a God – have been brought to the screen. The Strugatskys are
still read, and still influences to be reckoned with, at home and even abroad
in translation. Putin himself officially mourned the passing of Boris in 2012;
would he have shed crocodile tears for any other critic of his regime?
Ursula
K. Le Guin, in an introduction to a new translation of Roadside Picnic, observed that while
the Strugatskys never seemed to be “directly critical of their government’s
policies,” they wrote “as if they were indifferent to ideology… They wrote as
free men write.”[xii] Yet they
weren’t living in a free country, and they had to make allowances for that.
Moreover, according to Patrick L. McGuire, Boris Strugatsky indicated to
biographer Ant Skalandis that “the brothers’ outlooks seem to have been
modified more on the basis of the general evolution of the Soviet
intelligentsia”[xiii] than on
their personal experiences, about which little has been written. McGuire
offered a new analysis of the Strugatskys’ “traditional” science fiction in the
October, November and December 2013 issues of The New York Review of Science
Fiction.
In
their early works, the Strugatskys played the role of mainstream post-Stalin
Marxists. The Noon Universe future history that begins with The Land of
Crimson Clouds
(1959) follows the scenario outlined by Khrushchev for the triumph of socialism
through economic and ideological competition, as opposed to violent revolution.
Here we meet Aleksei Bykov, Vladimir Yurkovsky, and Grigory Dauge, three
comrades who prove their mettle while risking their lives to develop a uranium
golconda (a natural nuclear reactor) on a hellish Venus on behalf of the Soviet
Union.
It
is a period of international competition in space, but in their first mission, the
Soviet heroes never come face to face with their counterparts from capitalist
countries, who remain voices on the radio. In “The Way to Amalteia” (1960),
Bykov commands the Takhmasib, a photon freighter on a relief mission to a
research base on Jupiter’s innermost moon; planetologists Yurkovsky and Dauge
are part of his crew. By this time, they are legend for their exploits on
Venus, and young Ivan Zhilin, who has signed on as flight engineer, fresh out
of the Advanced School of Cosmogation, is ecstatic at the chance to serve with
them. When the Takhmasib comes to grief in the Jovian atmosphere, Zhilin finds
himself working to the point of exhaustion by Bykov’s side to repair the photon
reflector so that the ship can escape and bring its vital supplies to
J-Station.
Foreign
astronauts and scientists like Charles Mollart, a French crewman aboard the Takhmasib, begin to appear in
“The Way to Amalteia,” but there isn’t any sign of ideological conflict until Space
Apprentice
(1962). The apprentice, Yuri Borodin, is a vacuum welder trainee assigned to
Rhea, who misses his ship and hitches a ride with Bykov and his comrades on the
Takhmasib.
At Mirza-Charle spaceport, his initial encounter with Zhilin takes place at
Your Old Mickey Mouse, a bar-café run by a man named Joyce who prides himself
as being his own boss but who is seen by the Russians as a pathetic figure,
sacrificing himself to a life of boring work for the sake of providing himself
with an economic security that would be his birthright under socialism.
The
aging Dauge has retired by this time, but Zhilin is still flight engineer on
the Takhmasib
under Bykov. Yurkovsky has moved up in the world – as inspector general of the
International Administration of Cosmic Communications (IACC), with powers to “reduce
rank, chew out, deride, fire, replace, appoint, and even, it seemed, use force”[xiv]
to maintain law and social justice on the space frontier. On the asteroid
Bamberga, Yurkovsky shuts down a gangster-ridden gem-mining operation, Space
Pearl Ltd., that endangers miners (and their unborn children) through exposure
to cosmic radiation. The pay is fabulous, however, and most of the miners,
philistines to the end, when offered construction and technical work elsewhere,
are interested only in how much it will pay.
“Naturally,
about five times less than here,” Yurkovsky said. “But you will have work for
the rest of your lives, and good friends, real people who will turn you into
real people too! And you’ll be healthy and be part of the most important work
in the world.”[xv]
On
Dione, a Soviet research station has fallen under the sway of Vladislav
Shershen, a careerist who has exploited his power as director to play his
subordinates off against each other, to claim credit for their work, and so on.
Morale has been destroyed, and Yurkovsky must set things right by getting rid
of Shershen and his chief toady, but not without giving the staff a
tongue-lashing:
“I
didn’t expect this of you young people. How easy it was to make you revert to
your prehistoric condition, to put you on all fours – three years, one glory
hungry maniac, and one provincial intriguer. And you bent over, turned into
animals, lost your human image... You should be ashamed of yourselves!”[xvi]
Much
else happens in Space Apprentice, from a roundup of flying leeches on Mars to
the tragic deaths of Yurkovsky and one of his other comrades in an accident
exploring Saturn’s rings. As in American juvenile sf by Robert A. Heinlein,
Borodin comes of age by learning from older and wiser heads. The novel ends with
Zhilin’s decision to give up the chance for a berth on a Transpluto expedition
in order to work for mankind at home: “The most important thing is on Earth,”
he reflects. “The most important thing always stays on Earth, and I will stay
on Earth, too.”[xvii]
In
the Final Circle of Paradise (1965), we meet Zhilin again; now a secret
agent for the United Nations, he is investigating a mysterious social disorder
in the Country of the Boob, a prosperous – that in itself was enough to make
the novel controversial[xviii]
– capitalist state in the Mediterranean area. Although the Strugatskys’
approach to near-future sociological sf is clumsy compared to that common in
the West – the imaginary country has too much of a fairy-tale quality about it;
and the “secret,” a device to stimulate the brain with electric current, as in
Larry Niven’s “Death by Ecstasy” (1969), could never be kept secret in an open
society – the moral vision of their novel still comes through. Zhilin emerges
as the first of their archetypical heroes of utopian conscience in his struggle
against the philistinism endemic in a materialistic culture, which has been
unable to find any goals beyond immediate sensual gratification.
A
decadent intelligentsia, personified by “new-optimist” philosopher Sliy Opir,
sanctions this state of affairs. “Satisfy love and hunger,” prescribes Opir.
“All the utopias of all times are based on this simplest of considerations.”[xix]
But alcoholism and drug addiction are widespread, and alienated youth take part
in orgiastic street dances, or “Shivers,” which are subject to disruption by
guerrilla attacks from the even more alienated Intels. Eventually, Zhilin
exposes the ugly secret of “slug,” the current addiction device. But that is
not enough, he realizes:
What
a labor lies ahead, I thought... I didn’t know where to begin in this Country
of the Boob, caught unprepared in a flood of affluence, but I knew that I
wouldn’t leave here as long as the immigration laws permitted. And when they
stopped permitting it, I would break them...[xx]
We
never see the final crisis of capitalism, for a Communist world utopia has
become a reality in Noon: 22nd Century (1967) – “in the square in front of
Finland Station in Leningrad, Lenin held out his arm over this city and over
this world, this shining and wonderful world that he had seen two centuries
before.”[xxi]
In its broad outlines, the Strugatskys’ vision of utopia resembles Yefremov’s.
Automated farms and factories serve mankind’s economic needs, and a network of
moving roads links the far-flung parts of the world together. There is no sign
of centralized power or administration (For that matter, the Communist Party is
never referred to again after The Land of Crimson Clouds.); everything seems to
just run itself. Children are raised in boarding schools, but relations between
teachers and pupils are as warm and intimate as those in some of the closest
families of old. Although meals are usually communal, utopians often have their
own homes and, to keep in touch with their friends, through sophisticated videophone
networks and easy access to pterocars.
It
is a time of revolutionary advances in science and technology.
Faster-than-light D-ships have brought worlds of other stellar systems within
mankind’s reach, and a medical procedure involving both immunization and
radiation therapy at birth has freed mankind from disease and has given
ordinary men an almost superhuman vigor. Philistinism and other social
disorders are a thing of the past, it seems, and only the frontiers of space
and the challenge of alien contact present any ethical problems.
Leonid
Gorbovsky, a recurring hero in the Noon Universe history, represents the
antithesis of Yefremov’s anthropocentric philosophy. In Noon: 22nd Century, he is an
astroarchaeologist with the Commission on Contacts; when we first encounter
him, he is organizing an expedition of assaultmen to Vladislava, a planet with
two artificial satellites and possibly a hidden city on the surface – all left
by the Wanderers, an apparently long-vanished race like Niven’s Thrintun in the
Known Space series. Later, we find Gorbovsky pondering such mysteries as the
Voice of the Void, which few like to talk about because it cannot be explained.
Still later, he orders the abandonment of a research station on Leonida, where
his Pathfinders have disturbed a biological civilization – “Not machines, but
selection, genetics, animal training. Who knows what forces they’ve mastered?”[xxii]
– without realizing it is a civilization.
Sergei
Kondratiev, whose mission on the slower-than-light Taimyr has carried him through
time as well as space (an old convention in Western sf), represents the
traditional outsider in utopian sf; he finds a new career with the Oceanic
Guard and is happily integrated into the utopian society at the end. But in
“Escape Attempt” (1962), there comes the first close encounter between a
utopian Earth and a dystopian society beyond. In a scenario akin to an episode
of The Twilight Zone, two young adventurers about to set out for an unexplored
planet are approached by a mysterious stranger, Saul Repnin, and they agree to
take him along.
The
planet turns out to be a cross between a feudal autarchy and a fascist police
state, with one novelty of its own: there is a moving road, filled with
vehicles left by the Wanderers, and political prisoners are forced to risk
their lives by probing controls at random to try to find out how they work.
Vadim and Anton, the young adventurers, know Wanderer technology when they see
it, but they are too innocent to understand the sort of society they have run
into, until Repnin rubs their noses in the hard facts. Repnin, it turns out, is
a World War II Red Army tank commander who has somehow psychically “escaped” in
time after being taken prisoner, but decides to return to his own world in the
end.
Strugatsky
protagonists similarly confront dystopian worlds in Hard to Be a God and Prisoners of
Power
(1969, revised 1971). Although the social systems on these worlds are likened
to feudalism and fascism, it is obvious that they also represent the dark
heritage of Stalinism. Hard to Be a God was first conceived as a light adventure
story in the vein of Dumas’ The Three Musketeers.[xxiii] But after the shock of the attacks on the
liberal intelligentsia in 1962-3, the brothers Strugatsky had second thoughts,
and gave it a darker turn. McGuire argues that Hard to be a God isn’t part of the Noon
Universe future history,[xxiv]
but the two novels are nevertheless thematically akin in the confrontation
between agents of a humanist utopian future Earth and the brutal and backward
worlds on which they are stationed.
In
Hard to be a God,
a coup by an alliance of storm troopers and religious fanatics in a kingdom
called Arkanar (the planet itself isn’t named in the story) is accompanied by a
fabricated doctors’ plot and persecution of intellectuals – complete with
stage-managed confessions and show trials – and the familiar cult of
personality. Don Reba, the man behind it all, is based on Stalin’s enforcer
Beria, and he is supported by religious zealots who write manifestos like A
Treatise on Denunciation – as well as common gangsters, although those are later
purged.
Anton
Malyshev, masquerading as nobleman Don Rumata, has been working undercover for
five years. Like his fellow Terrans, he finds it increasingly difficult to
maintain his role as a dispassionate observer, especially when the events now
unfolding contradict the Basis Theory of feudalism promulgated by the Institute
of Experimental History, which supervises its agents on the ground from a space
station. Early on, he lets loose at a fellow undercover agent:
“I
don’t like that we’ve tied our hands and feet with the very foundation of the
problem. I don’t like that it’s called the Problem of Nonviolent Impact.
Because under my conditions that means a scientifically justified inaction. I’m
aware of all your objections! And I’m aware of the theory. But here there are
no theories, here there are typical fascist practices, here animals are
murdering humans every minute!”[xxv]
He
longs to “hack them to pieces, set them on fire, hurl them down from the palace
steps onto the spears and pitchforks of a roaring crowd.”[xxvi]
Yet he knows that Earth cannot intervene, cannot bring about a golden age on
Arkanar: social consciousness is too low. In a dialogue reminiscent in its
power of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor in The
Brothers Karamazov,
Anton tries to explain things to Dr. Budach, an intellectual he has managed to
rescue from the new order – the sort of small favor he is allowed to perform.
Perhaps sensing that Anton really is more than he seems, Budach begins to touch
on all the hard questions he might put to a deity:
“I would ask God to shield the
weak. ‘Enlighten the cruel princes,’ I would say.”
“Cruelty is power. Having lost their cruelty the princes
would lose their power, and other cruel men would replace them.”
Budach’s stopped smiling.
“Punish the cruel,” he said firmly, “so that it would become unseemly for the
strong to be cruel to the weak.”
“Man is born weak. He becomes
strong when there’s no one stronger around him. And when the cruel among the
strong will be punished, their place will be taken by the strongest of the
weak. Who will then be cruel. Then everyone will have to be chastised, and this
I do not desire.”
“You know best, Almighty Lord.
Then just make it so that people have all they need and do not take away from
each other that which you gave them.”
“Even this will not benefit
people,” Rumata sighed, “for when they get everything for free, without working
for it, from my hands, they will forget how to work, lose their zest for life,
and become my pets, whom I will henceforth be forced to feed and clothe for all
eternity.”[xxvii]
On
it goes, until Budach can think of nothing more than to pray that God might
remake his race, or at least ordain that it follow a better path. “My heart is
full of pity,” answers Anton, “I cannot do that.”[xxviii]
Anton himself suffers a mental breakdown when Kira, a native woman he loves, is
slain by a crossbowman before his eyes during a mob attack. He manages to
avenge her by killing Don Reba; the Terrans on the space station secure his
escape by releasing sleep gas on the capital.
In
Prisoners of Power,
mankind does intervene on Saraksh, a world at a much higher level of
technological development – too high for its own good. An atomic war has
already devastated this world: “millions upon millions had perished; thousands
of cities had been destroyed; dozens of large and small nations had been wiped
off the face of the planet.”[xxix]
Out of the ensuing chaos, famines, and epidemics, has emerged the All Powerful
Creators (Unknown Fathers in the original text and a 2008-9 movie version), a
military-technological elite which has restored order in the Central Empire and
has managed to run the economy well enough to win widespread popularity among
all classes. Or so it seems, for the real secret of the Creators is their
broadcast mind-control system – an old concept in Soviet sf, going back to
Belyayev’s Ruler of the World (1929):
The
field was everywhere. Invisible, omnipresent, all pervasive. A gigantic network
of towers enmeshing the entire country emitted radiation around the clock. It
purged tens of millions of souls of any doubts they might have about the All
Powerful Creators’ works and deeds.[xxx]
The
only people immune to the mind-control broadcasts are the despised degens,
political dissidents. The same radiation that brainwashes an ordinary man
paralyzes a degen with pain, and degens caught in the open are easily rounded
up. All this and more is revealed only gradually, through the eyes of Maxim Kammerer,
a young explorer stranded on Saraksh, who believes he is the only Earthman
there. In order to learn more about the world and what he can do, he joins the
Fighting Legion, an elite force charged with defending the frontier regions
from post-nuclear barbarians; later he joins the dissidents (socialists,
technocrats, new-Rousselians), who seem to be weak and divided among
themselves.
Some
dissidents hope to take advantage of another war that is breaking out with
neighboring Khonti, but they can’t come up with any real plans. Kammerer,
despairing of the underground, decides to strike out on his own: like a
latter-day James Bond, he manages to outwit everyone, including the secret
police of the dread Strannik (Wanderer), to locate and destroy the broadcast
center – only to learn moments later that Strannik is actually an agent of
Galactic Security, whose careful plan for the salvation of Saraksh has just
been derailed by his impetuous action. Kammerer is abashed, and yet he is not
repentant: the mind-control broadcasts should never have been allowed to
continue, even if they did make Strannik’s work easier. He is willing to work
with Strannik’s mission in any capacity he can, he says. “But I’m damned sure
about one thing; I’ll never permit another Center to be built as long as I
live. Even with the best of intentions.”[xxxi]
The
Strugatskys’ approach to the intervention theme influenced other sf, including
Yefremov’s The Hour of the Bull (1970) – and also aroused criticism in
fundamentalist quarters for casting doubt on the legitimacy of wars of
liberation.[xxxii] But the
Strugatskys themselves began to turn critical eyes inward, at the institutions
of the seeming utopian order itself, rather than outward at the confrontation
with pre-utopian worlds. “Far Rainbow” (1963) was a harbinger of this new
direction in the Strugatskys’ work. Rainbow is a world devoted entirely to
research, especially in Zero-Transport (matter transmission), it has become a
warped society; its scientists think of nothing but their work.
One
of them, Camill, is the last of the Devil’s Dozen: scientists with grafted
computer implants that render them totally rational – and totally inhuman.
Disaster strikes: an experiment goes wrong, creating deadly waves that spread
toward the equator from both poles. Only the children can be evacuated in the
one ship available; the rest face their doom. All but Camill, who has risen
from the dead before and will again, “alone on a dead planet, covered with
ashes and snow.”[xxxiii] Yet he
has always been alone: “You tear out the emotional half of humanity and leave
only one reaction to the world surrounding you – doubt.”[xxxiv]
At
one point in “Far Rainbow,” Gorbovsky shares the story of the Massachusetts
Machine, an artificial intelligence that had once almost taken over the world:
“Leonid, it was terrifying,”[xxxv]
one of its creators told him. In Beetle in the Anthill (1979-80), the
heretofore invisible state machinery begins to seem more ominous. Rudolf
Sikorski – whom Maxim Kammerer encountered on Saraksh as Strannik – is now head
of a security agency, COMCON-2, that evolved out of the original Commission on
Contacts but is concerned with threats from other worlds.
It
seems that the Wanderers are still active, after all. In Space Mowgli (1973), we get an
inkling of them, through their influence on a youth marooned for years on a
desert planet. But their intervention is more far reaching on Hope, a planet
from which they have removed nearly all the population after the local
civilization succumbed to an ecological disaster of its own making. Lev
Abalkin, who took part in the investigation of the Hope mystery, is another of
the Devil’s Dozen – here described as thirteen foundlings, raised from
fertilized human ova found in sarcophagus at an abandoned Wanderer
installation. Mankind has its Progressors, who guide the social evolution of
Saraksh and other primitive worlds; what if the Wanderers are similarly
attempting to intervene in our evolution?
To
neutralize any such threat, Sikorski uses his influence with the Council on
Social Problems to have the foundlings raised apart from each other and kept
away from Earth afterward, although this violates their fundamental rights and
personal dignity. When Abalkin nevertheless suddenly returns to Earth and then
drops out of sight, Sikorski is alarmed, and puts Kammerer on the case without
telling him what it is actually about. In a brilliantly ambiguous narrative; we
never learn whether the threat of the Wanderers is real or only in the
imagination of people like Sikorski, reverting to atavistic paranoia. We do
learn that the Tagorians destroyed a sarcophagus with larvae of their own kind,
and that their progress has since come to a dead end – or has it? What is
progress? More important, we learn how little Kammerer himself – a trusted
agent of COMCON-2 – knows.
In
the course of his investigation, he stumbles across Operation Mirror, a series
of “top secret global maneuvers, for repulsing an attack from outside (an
invasion by the Wanderers, supposedly),”57 which involved millions of unwitting
participants and killed some of them. Meanwhile, we learn of an ongoing rivalry
between COMCON-2 and Isaac Bromberg, the leader of a group that opposes
restrictions on scientific research, even when it involves the creation of
androids. It turns out that Sikorski and other world leaders are in fact
all-powerful, although they know they are not all-wise. Sikorski has his doubts
– perhaps the Tagorians were wrong to have destroyed the Wanderer-engineered
larvae – but when he confronts Abalkin at the end, he executes him with hardly
a moment’s hesitation.
What
had seemed a classless utopia, founded on humanistic values, now seems a
managerial society – one, moreover, in which the creative minority may be, in
Arnold Toynbee’s sense, turning into a mere dominant minority as it faces
historical crises beyond its competence. The Time Wanderers (1986), which deals
with the successful resolution of another crisis – the emergence of a breed of
supermen called the Ludens – is less convincing for that very reason. Kammerer
has succeeded Sikorski, and all is right with the world; humanity faces a
strange destiny but faces it openly and unafraid. This may in part reflect the
further closing of the window of liberalization in Soviet literature during the
Brezhnev years, when it became increasingly difficult to publish anything
critical of orthodox beliefs. The Ugly Swans, for example, was
written in 1966-67, but denied official publication until 1987 although it was
translated into English in 1980 and circulated in samizdat in Russian.
In novels that weren’t
part of the Noon Universe, the Strugatskys had long been less sanguine. The
technological marvels left by those passing aliens serve only the black market
and the military in Roadside Picnic,
and Schuhart can survive only by looting the visitation zone for them. The
universe itself seems to conspire against all human hope in Definitely Maybe (1977), an almost Dickian nightmare. In The Ugly
Swans, young people of genius are a
persecuted minority in a world where it always rains and adults suffer from a
loathsome disease. But the most pointed of their novels, perhaps, remains The
Snail on the Slope (1972). It was
first conceived in 1965 as a Noon Universe story, Disquiet, and that version was eventually published in 1990.[xxxvi]
The reworked version came out in fragments in the Soviet Union in 1966 and
1968; its first full publication was an English translation.
On
some nameless world, a faceless bureaucracy – the Forest Study and Exploitation
Authority – seeks to impose its will on the seemingly endless forest and its
primitive inhabitants. In alternating chapters, we follow the lives of two
protagonists: Pepper, who finds a place of honor and authority in the system at
the end, and Kandid, adopted by the forest people after the crash of his
helicopter. If Noon: 22nd Century expresses the Strugatrskys’ hopes for the
future, The Snail on the Slope reveals their fears. The Directorate seems at
first absurdly comical, but its ominous reality is clear by the time Pepper is
asked to sign a directive prohibiting “involvement in chance effects
(probability) as a criminal activity.”[xxxvii]
Meanwhile,
in the forest, Kandid confronts the brutality of a war of liberation, evidently
at least aided and abetted by the Directorate. The language is elliptical, with
its invocations of parthenogenetic Maidens and their holy cause of Accession:
telepathic broadcasts through “Ears” in each village speak of “the Great
Harrowing in the Northern lands... new advances in Swamp-making,”[xxxviii]
and the like. But its meaning becomes clear as Kandid witnesses the devastation
visited on the natives – one, called “Buster” in translation, is Kulak in the original.
Kandid, although he has always believed in progress, cannot accept a cause that
has forgotten common humanity, that has come to regard the villagers as
expendable. Yet it all comes down to the personal, to his own conscience:
If
those Maidens had picked me up, cured me and showed me kindness, accepted me as
one of themselves, taken pity on me – well, then, I would probably have taken
the side of this progress easily and naturally, and Hopalong and all these
villages would have been for me an exasperating survival, taking up too much
effort for too long... But perhaps not, perhaps it wouldn’t have been simple
and easy, I can’t stand it when people are regarded as animals. But perhaps
it’s a matter of terminology, and if I’d learned the women’s language,
everything would have sounded different to me: enemies of progress, gluttonous
stupid idlers... Ideals... Great aims... Natural laws... And for the sake of
this annihilate half the inhabitants! No, that’s not for me. In any language,
that’s not for me.[xxxix]
Yet
the elliptical language here takes the novel’s message beyond the topical,
beyond a masked critique of Soviet ideology, making it truly universal – still
relevant in the post-Soviet era, and far beyond Russia itself. Long ago, in
“Politics and the English Language” (1946), George Orwell warned against the
use of weasel words and euphemisms “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to
give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”[xl]
Soviet Communist rhetoric was a case in point, but not the only case he cited. The Soviets were not
the first to abuse language in what he called “defense of the indefensible,”
and they have not been nor will they be the last – as witness such post-9/11
U.S. coinages as “enhanced interrogation,” “rendition” and “nation-building.” The
Snail on the Slope
is a stark reminder that we must be ever vigilant against the seduction of lies
and half-truths in any language.
Contact: pierce07446@outlook.com
[i] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, Roadside
Picnic, trans.
Olena Bormashenko (Chicago Review Press, 2012),
p. 193
[ii] quoted in Potts, Stephen W., The
Second Marxian Invasion: The Fiction of the Strugatsky Brothers
(Borgo/Wildside
reprint), pp. 15-17
[iii]
http://rbth.ru/articles/2012/11/21/in_memory_of_boris_strugatsky_how_to_live_with_the_future_20309.html,
retrieved Jan. 13, 2014
[iv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ,
retrieved Feb. 6, 2015
[v] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, Hard
to be a God, trans.
Olena Bormashenko (Chicago Review Press, 2014), p. 241
[vi] Ibid., p. 244
[viii]
http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/09/window-on-eurasia-will-georgia.html,
retrieved Jan. 13,
2014
[ix]
http://phys.org/news/2012-11-russian-sci-fi-author-boris-strugatsky.html,
retrieved Jan. 13, 2014
[x]
http://www.khodorkovsky.com/the-passing-of-boris-strugatsky/, retrieved Jan.
13, 2014
[xi] http://eng.yabloko.ru/Publ/2004/PAPERS/06/040604_mn.html,
retrieved Jan. 13, 2014
[xiv] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, Space
Apprentice, trans.
Antonina W. Bouis (Macmillan, 1981, p. 78
[xv] Ibid., p. 149
[xvi] Ibid., p. 190
[xvii] Ibid., p. 231
[xix] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, The
Final Circle of Paradise, trans. Leonid Rosen (DAW, 1976), p. 63
[xx] Ibid., pp. 171-72
[xxi] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, Noon:
22nd Century, trans. Patrick L. McGuire (Macmillan, 1978), p. 88
[xxii] Ibid., p. 276
[xxvi] Ibid., p. 109
[xxvii] Ibid, pp. 208-9
[xxviii] Ibid., p. 210
[xxix] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, Prisoners
of Power, trans.
Helen Saltz Jacobson (Macmillan, 1977), p. 63
[xxx] Ibid., p, 174
[xxxi] Ibid., p. 286
[xxxii] Suvin, Russian Science Fiction,
1956-74, pp. 43, 48, 49
[xxxiii] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, Far
Rainbow/The Second Invasion from Mars, trans. Gary Kern (Macmillan,
1979), p. 131
[xxxiv] Ibid.
[xxxv] Ibid., p. 60
[xxxvi]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disquiet_(Strugatsky_novel), retrieved Jan. 13,
2014
[xxxvii] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, The
Snail on the Slope,
trans. Alan Meyers (Bantam, 1980), p. 227
[xxxviii] Ibid., p. 52
[xxxix] Ibid., pp. 242-43
[xl]
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm, retrieved Feb, 6, 2015
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