Arkady Strugatsky

Boris Strugatsky

One Billion Years to the End of the World

Gavin

Researchers of all kinds are familiar with the feeling that the world is conspiring against them. What if it was?

As in other Strugatsky books, every character is a ranter, everyone is cowardly and brave, funny and grave, smart and dumb. The distinctive part of their scifi is it being grotty. it has stains.

Malianov is a brilliant astrophysicist, but he's in thrall to Vecherovsky, an obscure professor of everything consulted by physicists, sociologists, state spooks, and geneticists. The others give in, need to live a life instead of fighting the universe. V doesn't. V is a "19th century robot". V chooses to be Atlas.

Gary Homewood

An astrophysicist on the verge of a breakthrough is interrupted by a beautiful women and delivery of a crate of vodka, wine and caviar. His friends researching other fields are similarly interrupted. Secret police, strange events, theories of a super civilisation and a homeostatic universe.

Mordantly funny, very Russian sci-fi satire, odd and entertaining.

'A beautiful book' Ursula K. Le Guin This mordantly funny and provocative tale from Soviet Russia's leading science fiction writers is the story of astrophysicist Dmitri Malianov. As he reaches a major breakthrough, he finds himself plagued by interruptions, from a mysterious crate of vodka to a glamorous woman on his doorstep. Is the Universe trying to tell him something? 'On putting down one of their books, you feel a cold breeze still lifting the hairs on the back of your neck' The New York Times

One Billion Years to the End of the World

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