
For over a century, most of the science fiction produced by the world's largest country has been beyond the reach of Western readers. This new collection aims to change that, bringing a large body of influential works into the English orbit.
A scientist keeps a severed head alive, and the head lives to tell the tale... An explorer experiences life on the moon, in a story written six decades before the first moon landing... Electrical appliances respond to human anxieties and threaten to crash the electrical grid... Archaeologists discover strange powers emanating from a Central Asian excavation site... A teleporting experiment goes awry, leaving a subject to cope with a bizarre sensory swap... A boy discovers the explosive truth of his father's "antiseptic" work, stamping out dissent on distant worlds...
The last 100 years in Russia have seen an astonishing diversity and depth of literary works in the science fiction genre, by authors with a dizzying array of styles and subject matter.
This volume brings together 18 such works, translated into English for the first time, spanning from path-breaking, pre-revolutionary works of the 1890s, through the difficult Stalinist era, to post-Soviet stories published in the 1980s and 1990s.
Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky was born in Batumi, Russia. While he was a child, he moved with his family to Leningrad. In 1942, Leningrad was under siege and he left with his father, who did not survive the trip to Vologda. Arkady was later drafted into the Soviet Army, and in 1949 he graduated from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow. He worked as a teacher and interpreter for the military until 1955. From 1955 he began to work as an editor and writer. In 1958, he began his lifelong collaboration with his brother Boris.

by Yvonne Howell, Anne O. Fisher
For over a century, most of the science fiction produced by the world's largest country has been beyond the reach of Western readers. This new collection aims to change that, bringing a large body of influential works into the English orbit.
A scientist keeps a severed head alive, and the head lives to tell the tale... An explorer experiences life on the moon, in a story written six decades before the first moon landing... Electrical appliances respond to human anxieties and threaten to crash the electrical grid... Archaeologists discover strange powers emanating from a Central Asian excavation site... A teleporting experiment goes awry, leaving a subject to cope with a bizarre sensory swap... A boy discovers the explosive truth of his father's "antiseptic" work, stamping out dissent on distant worlds...
The last 100 years in Russia have seen an astonishing diversity and depth of literary works in the science fiction genre, by authors with a dizzying array of styles and subject matter.
This volume brings together 18 such works, translated into English for the first time, spanning from path-breaking, pre-revolutionary works of the 1890s, through the difficult Stalinist era, to post-Soviet stories published in the 1980s and 1990s.
Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky was born in Batumi, Russia. While he was a child, he moved with his family to Leningrad. In 1942, Leningrad was under siege and he left with his father, who did not survive the trip to Vologda. Arkady was later drafted into the Soviet Army, and in 1949 he graduated from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow. He worked as a teacher and interpreter for the military until 1955. From 1955 he began to work as an editor and writer. In 1958, he began his lifelong collaboration with his brother Boris.