ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Josh Billings would like to thank Elizaveta Prudovskaya for her assistance.
Jeff VanderMeer would like to thank his friend, the writer and reviewer Vlad Zhenevsky, for context, including English translations from the Boris Strugatsky memoir.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ARKADY (1925–1991) and BORIS (1933–2012) STRUGATSKY were the most acclaimed and beloved science fiction writers of the Soviet era. The brothers were born and raised in Leningrad. Arkady was drafted into the Soviet army and studied at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, graduating in 1949 as an interpreter from English and Japanese. He served as an interpreter in the Far East before returning to Moscow in 1955. Boris studied astronomy at Leningrad State University, and worked as an astronomer and computer engineer. In the mid-1950s, the brothers began to write fiction, and soon published their first jointly written novel, From Beyond. They would go on to write twenty-five novels together, including Roadside Picnic, which was the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker; Snail on the Slope; Hard to Be a God; Monday Begins on Saturday; Definitely Maybe; and The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, as well as numerous short stories, essays, plays, and film scripts. Their books have been translated into multiple languages and published in twenty-seven countries. After Arkady’s death in 1991, Boris continued writing, publishing two books under the name S. Vititsky. Boris died on November 19, 2012, at the age of seventy-nine. The asteroid 3054 Strugatskia, discovered in 1977, is named after the brothers.
JOSH BILLINGS is a writer and translator who lives in Rockland, Maine. His translations of Alexander Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin and Alexander Kuprin’s The Duel were published by Melville House. His recent writing has appeared in The Collagist and The Literary Review. He blogs at http://begborrowstijl.blogspot.com.
JEFF VANDERMEER is an award-winning novelist and editor. His New York Times–bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s ten best fiction books of 2014, in addition to many other commendations. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and multiple year’s-best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian, among other publications.
PRAISE FOR DEFINITELY MAYBE
“Definitely Maybe, further proof that knowledge can be a dangerous game, is a work of towering wit and intelligence.”
“Like the best speculative fiction, Definitely Maybe doesn’t show its age: the fundamental questions it addresses are timeless—and effectively and entertainingly framed by the Strugatsky brothers. It remains an intriguing, unsettling work.”
“One of the Strugatsky brothers is descended from Gogol and the other from Chekhov, but nobody is sure which is which. Together they have now proved quite definitely that a visit from a gorgeous blonde, from a disappearing midget, from your mother-in-law, and from the secret police, are all manifestations of a cosmic principle of homeostasis, maybe. This is definitely, not maybe, a beautiful book.”
“Surely one of the best and most provocative novels I have ever read, in or out of sci-fi.”
“Provocative, delicately paced and set against a rich physical and psychological background, this is one of the best novels of the year.”
PRAISE FOR ROADSIDE PICNIC
“It’s a book with an extraordinary atmosphere—and a demonstration of how science fiction, by using a single bold central metaphor, can open up the possibilities of the novel.”
“Gritty and realistic but also fantastical, this is a novel you won’t easily put down—or forget.”
“It has survived triumphantly as a classic”
PRAISE FOR THE STRUGATSKY BROTHERS
“The Strugatsky brothers demonstrate that they are realists of the fantastic inasmuch as realism in fantasy betokens a respect for logical consequence, an honesty in deducing all conclusions entirely from the assumed premises.”
“[In writing Gun, with Occasional Music], I fused the Chandler/Ross MacDonald voice with those rote dystopia moves that I knew backwards and forwards from my study of Ballard, Dick, Orwell, Huxley, and the Brothers Strugatsky.”
“Successive generations of Russian intellectuals were raised on the Strugatskys. Their books can be read with a certain pair of spectacles on as political commentaries on Soviet society or indeed any repressive society.”
“Their protagonists are often caught up in adventures not unlike those of pulp-fiction heroes, but the story line typically veers off in unpredictable directions, and the intellectual puzzles that animate the plots are rarely resolved. Their writing has an untidiness that is finally provocative; they open windows in the mind and then fail to close them all, so that, putting down one of their books, you feel a cold breeze still lifting the hairs on the back of your neck.”
THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY
I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.