Stephen Baxter, Bronze Summer (Roc 11/12) The Bronze Age provides the backdrop for this second book in the Northland alternate history SF series, in which England remained connected to Europe. First published in the UK by Gollancz (9/11).
Lois McMaster Bujold, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance (Baen 11/12) The latest novel in Bujold’s ever-entertaining Vorkosigan series shift focus from Miles to his hapless cousin Ivan, who tries to rescue a damsel in distress and ends up entangled in intrigue – and romance.
Felix Gilman, The Rise of Ransom City (Tor 11/12) This Wild West Steampunk fantasy novel, sequel to The Half-Made World, purports to be the memoir of the inventor Harry Ransom, a fascinating fellow whether genius or charlatan, and his plans for a utopian city.
Mira Grant, When Will You Rise: Stories to End the World (Subterranean 11/12) This collection combines the novella ‘‘Countdown’’ in Grant’s acclaimed Newsflesh series, plus an unrelated story, both prevously published as e-books.
Stephen Jones, ed., The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: 23 (Running Press 10/12) The latest volume in this celebrated year’s best anthology series presents 26 stories by authors including Joan Aiken, Steve Rasnic Tem, Michael Marshall Smith, Joe R. Lansdale, and John Ajvide Lindqvist. Jones provides his usual indispensible in-depth overview of the year 2011.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real, Volume One: Where on Earth and Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands (Small Beer Press 12/12) These two volumes present stories selected by Le Guin herself from previous collections, with commentary by Le Guin on why she selected the stories – many less familiar but still deserving of attention. Volume One presents 18 stories set on Earth, with varying degrees of realism and magic realism; Volume Two takes off into the realms of SF and fantasy with 20 stories. ‘‘The experience of reading any retrospective as excellent as the Selected Stories reduces you, if not to babbling, to just delighting in some of your favorites… discovering some new treasures, and recognizing that a few old favorites might not stand up as well as you’d expected.’’ [Gary K. Wolfe]
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Helen Marshall, Hair Side, Flesh Side (ChiZine 11/12) Original collection of 15 stories, one a reprint, mixing fantasy and horror as they look at history, memory, and the price of creating art. The first prose collection from an up-and-coming author already known for her poetry.
Jack McDevitt & Mike Resnick, The Cassandra Project (Ace 11/12) SF novel loosely based on the eponymous story by McDevitt, involving secrets from a NASA moon mission that surface 50 years later, leading to puzzles within puzzles that unwind with steady suspense. ‘‘It’s a rather old-fashioned story… I found myself turning the pages as quickly as I could, even though there was nary a dead body or superweapon or car chase to be found.’’ [Russell Letson]
Hannu Rajaniemi, The Fractal Prince (Tor 11/12) This sequel to Rajaniemi’s impressive first novel The Quantum Thief returns to that far-future post-singularity world, this time for a series of tales within tales. ‘‘Some of these tales are spectacularly well-done as adventure set pieces… while others are genuinely moving… Rajaniemi can and does write beautifully about characters trapped within their own stories…’’ [Gary K. Wolfe]
Ekaterina Sedia, Moscow but Dreaming (Prime 12/12) The first collection from award-winning author/editor Sedia presents 21 stories, two original.
Allen Steele, Apollo’s Outcasts (Pyr 11/12) A handicapped boy gets sent to the moon, where the lower gravity lets him overcome his physical handicap and join Lunar Search and Rescue in this ‘‘classically Heinleinian’’ young-adult SF adventure, ‘‘well crafted and engaging in a way that has nothing to do with nostalgia….’’ [Russell Letson]
Jonathan Strahan, ed., Edge of Infinity (Solaris 12/12) An impressive roster of authors including Elizabeth Bear, Paul McAuley, Gwyneth Jones, and Alastair Reynolds explore the possibilities of human expansion into the Solar System in this anthology of 13 original all-SF stories. ‘‘Easily the best original science fiction anthology of the year, by a good margin….’’ [Gardner Dozois]
James Van Pelt, Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (Fairwood Press 11/12) The latest collection from a noted author of short fiction presents 23 stories, a wide-ranging mix of SF, fantasy, and horror.
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TERRY BISSON: THIS MONTH IN HISTORY
January 1, 2077. Elixir Order. In a bipartisan congressional effort to save Social Security, the legal age of all Americans born in 2007 is reduced by ten years. The 4.3 million affected are compensated with free dental care and a $1,200 Amazon gift card.
January 3, 2091. Airliner clips cloud. Financial markets tremble as NY-LA Delta jet “wings” and scatters the ultralite ununoctium striated cirrus databank backing up the world’s infocurrency. GPS error blamed.
January 14, 2105. Airbag attack. Estimated 6,500 killed in rush hour chaos as Missouri drone triggers Indiana airbags in major escalation of the War Between the States.
January 23, 2321. Curiosity found. The twisted remains of the lost 21st-century robot explorer are discovered by trekkers under the SW scarp of Olympus Mons. The rover, which went rogue in 2019, was apparently trying to summit the Solar System’s highest peak when it fell.
–Terry Bisson
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OBITUARIES
BORIS STRUGATSKY, 79, the younger brother of the Russian author team Arkady (1925-1991) & Boris Natanovich Strugatsky (born 1933), died on November 19, 2012, at 7:30 p.m. in a hospital in St. Petersburg.
Boris Strugatsky (1987)
He had long been suffering from leukemia, which often required stays in the hospital, but the immediate cause of his death seems to have been pneumonia and a heart attack. He forbade his friends to speak with him about his illness, and few people knew the state of his health, which didn’t prevent him from working. The reputation of the Arkady brothers (or ABS, as they are called by their fans) rests mostly on the books they wrote together in the ’60s and ’70s. Boris Strugatsky (BNS) wrote just two solo novels after the death of Arkady, under the pseudonym S. Vititsky: The Search for Predetermination or the Twenty-Seventh Theorem of Ethics (1994) and the The Powerless Ones of the World (2003), but he wrote commentaries on the ‘‘Distance Traveled’’, taught and encouraged young writers, and, beginning in 2002, edited the magazine Noon, 22nd Century. From June 1998 to November 2012, BNS also answered 8,620 questions asked by readers on the Internet from all over the world.
His letters exchanged with the jailed oil tycoon Mikail Khodorovsky, a Strugatsky reader, appeared in the paper Novaya Gazeta and in book form (a French translation was published in 2011 in Paroles libres by Fayard). Khodorkovsky sent a wreath for the author’s memorial service, which was placed in the most prominent place.
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky (1987)
Although BNS initially supported Putin, he became a strong critic of him, feeling that nationalism, the state control of the press, and the power of the bureaucrats were on the rise. He protested with other Russian intellectuals in open letters against the imprisonment of both Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the punk band Pussy Riot. Nonetheless, Putin sent a telegram of condolence calling BNS ‘‘one of the brightest, most talented and popular writers of the time. The books that he wrote in creative collaboration with Arkady Strugatsky are an entire epoch in the history of Russian literature, in the history of our country. Even today, they are at the highest levels of modernity.’’ Prime minister Dmitry Medvedev wrote on Twitter that Strugatsky was ‘‘a great writer and thinker. An irreplaceable loss to Russian and world literature.’’ This is an indication of the status and moral authority the Strugatskys have in Russian culture and politics.
Boris Strugatsky, Charles N. Brown (1987)
Boris Strugatsky’s father, Natan Zalmanovich Strugatsky, was a bolshevik even before the revolution, fought in the Russian Civil War, and served in various cultural funct
ions. He died of exhaustion in WWII during his evacuation from Leningrad. The family was poor, but they always had plenty of books, and BNS read early H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Karel Capek, Alexander Belyaev, and Jack London. As a boy he survived the terrible winter of 1941-42 when Leningrad was besieged by the Germans for 872 days, read The War of the Worlds by the dim light of an oil lamp, and was hooked on fantastic literature. He studied astronomy and worked in the observatory of Pulkovo, but soon became a science fiction writer in tandem with his brother Arkady. He married Adelaida Karpeliuk in 1957, and they had one son.
The Strugatskys’ first novel The Country of Crimson Clouds (1959) was a socialist space adventure, but with characters who did not fit the sterile ideal of perfect people prevalent in Soviet SF. Their heroes talked like real people and cursed and drank, which led to the authors being censored – their entire career is the story of an extended struggle with censorship. Details on that subject can be found in Boris’s afterword to the new edition of Roadside Picnic from Chicago Review Press. Initially stout believers in the ‘‘Bright Future’’ of socialism, the Strugatskys soon became disillusioned with Soviet Russia, the stupidity of its rulers, and the stagnation of society. After their initial space stories in their socialist version of future history, the Noon Universe, they turned to social criticism, attacking stifling bucreaucratic structures. Most popular in Russia is Monday Starts on Saturday (1965), a story deeply steeped in Russian folklore, a romp through philosophical systems and myths of many different places and times, and a satire on bureaucratic procedures in a research institution (of magic). It’s satirical of SF and the utopian aspirations of socialism. Some have compared the novel to Harry Potter, since it is the story of an apprentice of sorcery. While this book went through numerous editions in the Soviet era, other stories, such as The Tale of the Troika (1968), and the ‘‘Pepper’’ part of The Snail on the Slope (1972) appeared only in obscure magazines. The Ugly Swans (1972) was first printed in the Russian language only outside of Russia, and The Doomed City (1989), considered by some their most important novel, was published only in the Gorbachev Thaw years, though it was written in the early ’70s, when the Strugatskys were at the height of their powers.
Boris Strugatsky (1987)
The Strugatskys had stout supporters, but also enemies who denounced them. For some years they had to live off the meager portion of their foreign income that the authorities left them, but they never considered leaving Russia. The Doomed City (Grad obrecennyj) is a surrealist novel of a postmortal artificial world outside our reality (much like Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld), in which people from various countries and times of our reality, for the most part from the ’40s and ’60s, have been brought together. The characters have been recruited from hopeless situations by so-called ‘‘mentors,’’ mysterious beings in human shape. The humans, whose jobs are rotated according to a stochastic principle, have been told that their lives in the city are part of a grand experiment whose nature cannot be revealed to them, or the conditions of the experiment would be corrupted. The city is located on a ledge wedged in between an infinitely high cliff of hard rock on the one side, and a bottomless abyss on the other, and lighted by a sun that is shut off during the night.
Their most internationally acclaimed novel is Roadside Picnic (1972), to my mind the great existentialist novel of science fiction. Apparently alien visitors left a couple of zones filled with wondrous artifacts that offer great chances of great riches as well as deadly dangers. It is the story of a not-quite-sympathetic hero, a ‘‘stalker’’ or smuggler, who is hunting for treasures in one of the forbidden zones, struggling against the hardship of life, but remaining human in the face of overwhelming obstacles. Andrei Tarkovsky’s great film Stalker was loosely based on the novel, with a Strugatsky screenplay. The successful computer game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl takes only the concept of the ‘‘Zone’’ and the term ‘‘Stalker’’ from the novel. (The term ‘‘Stalker’’ is, by the way, derived from the bowdlerized title Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling.) First published in English by Macmillan in 1977, Roadside Picnic was out of print for decades in the US, but is one of the most successful titles in Victor Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series. Roadside Picnic was reissued by Chicago Review Press in May 2012 in an unexpurgated, uncensored new translation by Olena Bomarshenko. It sold out a 4,000-copy first edition on the day of publication, and has since been reprinted twice, with 10,000 copies in print. Audiobook rights have been sold to Random House. Other translations have been published all over the world; in Germany the Suhrkamp edition has been in print since its first appearance in 1981, and in France a recent reissue quickly went through three printings and will next year be issued in mass market in Gallimard’s prestigious ‘‘folio’’ series.
Other important Strugatsky books are The Snail on the Slope (published in 1980 by Bantam but withdrawn from circulation when the Strugatskys protested that is was presented as anti-Soviet), The Inhabited Island (1969, in English as Prisoners of Power), The Crooked Fate (which includes The Ugly Swans), and Hard to Be a God (1964, only available in English as a translation of a problematic German translation). In Hard to Be a God, the historian Anton, an observer from an advanced Earth civilization stationed in disguise on a feudal planet where pogroms and a new tyranny are on the rise, is faced with the moral decision of whether or not to interfere. The novel was filmed by the German director Fleischmann (1989) and again by Aleksei German, who finished shooting in 2006, but is taking his time editing the film, tentatively titled History of the Arkanar Massacre. That film should reach theatres in the near future and promises, to judge from prelimary reports, to become one of the great SF films. A new American edition of the novel is forthcoming from Chicago Review Press, also translated by Olena Bomarshenko, and with an afterword by Boris Strugatsky.
Many other Strugatsky stories have been filmed. Fedor Bondarchuk’s two-parter of The Inhabited Island (aka Prisoners of Power) was the most expensive Russian film ever, but met with mixed reviews. The first film was considered quite good, but the second part less so. The film doesn’t seem to have reached the cinemas outside of Russia, and a shorter international DVD version combining the two films seems to have been released so far only in Germany under the title of Dark Star: Prisoners of Power, which some reviewers found incomprehensible.
The core of the Strugatskys’ work is human commitment, responsibility of the individual, and social satire; many of the experiences and descriptions are autobiographical. They are always addressing Russia and writing for a Russian audience. For instance, Boris Strugatsky said in a recent interview that the streets of Arkanar in Hard to be a God are the stinking small alleys in Leningrad, which were dangerous to pass at night, and the disgusting comic stories of the courtlings in Arkanar are slightly changed rumors of the legendary binges during the regimes of Stalin and Khrushchev. Inexplicable phenomena haunt some some scientists in Leningrad in One Billion Years to the End of the World (aka Definitely Maybe). This was made into the award-winning 1988 Soviet film Days of Eclipse, directed by Aleksandr Sokurov. The short novel was also filmed in Finland, Greece, and Hungary.
Boris Strugatsky (1987)
The fiction of the Strugatskys is not addressed simply to socialism of the Soviet style – it transcends and transforms it artististically, or its relevance and vitality would have been lost with the collapse of the system that it addressed. But bureaucratic systems, totalitarity, and tyranny as well as the struggle against them, and the keeping of personal integrity in oppressing circumstances are universals in human history, and the history of Strugatsky reception in the world attest to that universality: the philosophic, political and moral questions raised by their fiction and their humanism are as valid as ever. The number of new editions in the former Communist countries and in the West has increased, and in many countries they are now read more than ever: in Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, France, Spain, and Germany, where
Heyne Verlag has published so far four big omnibus volumes in a Works edition planned for six books, with a cloth-bound limited edition and other books from Golkonda publishers (which takes its name from The Land of Crimson Clouds). Worldwide, the Strugatskys have had a circulation of more than 60 million copies, although the have often been served badly by their translators, especially in their English language editions.
The Strugatskys were by far the best writers of fantastic literature in the Soviet Union, and are still very popular today. They have won numerous Russian SF awards and were guests of honor at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention in Brighton, UK.
My personal engagement with the Strugatskys began when I became editor of a SF series with Insel Verlag in Germany in 1970, where I published Monday Starts on Saturday, The Second Martian Invasion, and The Tales of the Troika. Later, with the prestigious Suhrkamp, we did more than a dozen Strugatsky books, beginning with The Snail on the Slope in 1978, the first complete book edition of that novel anywhere in the world. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when conditions permitted it, Boris Strugatsky entrusted first me and later my son Joachim Jan with the literary representation of his works abroad, and since then dozens of new editions have appeared. It is a great pity that Boris Strugatsky died on the eve of what might well become a major Strugatsky revival in the English language. He was a great writer, creating under stifling circumstances, and he and his brother managed to remain uncorrupted in a corrupt Communist society and keep their moral and artistic integrity.
–Franz Rottensteiner/Locus
Locus, January 2013 Page 20
