The magnum opus of Russia's greatest science fiction novelists
translated into English for the first time
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely considered the greatest of
Russian science fiction masters, and their most famous work, Roadside
Picnic, has enjoyed great popularity worldwide. Yet the novel they
worked hardest on, that was their own favorite, and that readers
worldwide have acclaimed as their magnum opus, has never before been
published in English. The Doomed City was so politically risky that
the Strugatsky brothers kept its existence a complete secret even from
their closest friends for sixteen years after its completion in 1972. It
was only published in Russia during perestroika in the late 1980s, the
last of their works to see publication. It was translated into a host of
European languages, and now appears in English in a major new effort by
acclaimed translator Andrew Bromfield.
The Doomed City is set in an experimental city whose sun gets switched
on in the morning and switched off at night, bordered by an abyss on one
side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its inhabitants are
people who were plucked from twentieth-century history at various times
and places and left to govern themselves, advised by Mentors whose
purpose seems inscrutable. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked
from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a die-hard believer in the Experiment,
even though his first job in the city is as a garbage collector. And as
increasinbly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises
through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect. Boris
Strugatsky wrote that the task of writing The Doomed City "was
genuinely delightful and fascinating work." Readers will doubtless say
the same of the experience of reading it.
