Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Hard To Be A God (1973)

"How I'd like to let out some of the hatred that's accumulated over the past twenty-four hours, but it looks like I'll have no luck. Let us remain humane, forgive everyone, and be calm like the gods. Let them slaughter and desecrate, we'll be calm like the gods. The gods need not hurry, they have eternity ahead."

In 'Hard To Be A God', Arkady and Boris Strugatsky explore the rise of totalitarianism, and the inadequacies of theories of history to deal with actual history unfolding. The story is set on a planet with medieval level technology, where the kingdom of Arkanar is undergoing a power shift as the king's minister, in a flurry of anti-intellectual paranoia, is creating a pervasive and controlling state based on fear and oppression. The main character, Anton, is a historian from a utopian Earth of the future, sent to study the unfolding of history on an alien planet, is bound by a rule of non-interference similar to the Prime Directive in Star Trek; he does what he can to save the lives of the intellectuals hounded by Don Reba's storm troopers, but he is not allowed to interfere with the natural unfolding of history. As the situation in Arkanar grows more and more violent and out of control, Anton finds himself increasingly at odds with his superiors, who insist that, as their theory of history does not allow for the development of totalitarianism out of a medieval society, the situation cannot be as desperate as he paints it.
   'Hard To Be A God' deals with the key theme that runs through much of the Strugatsky's work, censorship and the artist's struggle against it. As in 'Definitely Maybe', the novel features artists who come up against powerful forces wishing to silence them, in this case Don Reba's storm troopers, and, as they would in that later novel, the Strugatsky brothers explore the different ways in which different people respond to censorship and state-sponsored oppression. The Strugatskys quite rightly identify censorship of ideas as a key sign that something has gone deeply wrong with a society. Arkanar is being manipulated by Don Reba into fearing and distrusting new ideas and perspectives, vilifying and persecuting the very people who are capable of dragging them out of the middle ages, something that can only lead to its stagnation. Anton tries desparately to save the artists and scientists of Arkanar, some of whom are stripped of honour and property and beaten, imprisoned, executed, or else compromise their art and integrity by pandering to the strictures set out by the state.
   The book's setting allows it to mingle the tropes of science fiction and Fantasy, and to subvert the standard middle ages setting of much Fantasy in interesting ways. Because we experience the world through the eyes of Anton, in the guise of Don Rumata, the well-connected noble he pretends to be in  Arkanar, we see it through a perspective closer to our own than those who live in it. Anton is disgusted by both the social injustices of the rigidly feudal system and the technological backwardness of the people who live in it. By pointing out how bad the people smell because of the lack of modern hygiene makes the medieval setting, which could be overly familiar to readers of genre fiction, especially vivid and resonant for the reader. This allows the Strugatskys to humourously satirise the upper classes, who strut around assuming their natural superiority whilst appearing to Anton and the reader as drunken buffoons. It's also part of how the Strugatskys subvert the general tropes and expectations of the book's medieval, Fantasy-esque setting. 'Hard To Be A God' deconstructs the idea of chivalrous noblemen as brutally as George R. R. Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire, with the Strugatskys portraying them as self-interested, aggressive, drunken boors. Similarly, the book plays with Fantasy mythology. There's an excellent passage where the authors describe the legends and myths that have built up around the Hiccup Forest, before revealing that they have been put in place there and exaggerated to hide the Earth people's secret base.
   'Hard To Be A God' is thoroughly cynical about human nature. While it features, on its periphery, a utopian society on Earth, it is fully aware of the horrors of history that humanity has had to go through to get to its current state of enlightenment. Don Reba's name is derived from Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's brutal secret police chief, and his horrific methods and brutality echo those of his real life basis. His betrayal and destruction of his own storm troopers when they get too powerful echoes Hitler and Himmler's destruction of Ernst Rohm and the SA, and his torture chambers are reminiscent of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. The Strugatskys acknowledge the violence and suffering which have shaped human history, but also the pettiness of human nature that drives much of history. The noblemen make ludicrous decisions because they're permanently drunk, which makes them particularly easy for Reba to manipulate. The feudal rights of the Barons Pampa wind up having to be fought for each generation in a wasteful, expensive and unnecessary war which always has the same outcome, all for silver mines which cost less than the war does and laughably trivial privileges for the Barons. The Stugatskys have a hope for what humanity can become, but despair at its violence, cruelty and idiocy. This despair ultimately overtakes poor Anton, as circumstances get to the stage where he is no longer able to stand by dispassionately. He reaches the point where whatever he does he winds up with blood on his hands, but his decisive action only causes more death and destruction.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Definitely Maybe (1976)

"Well then, buddy, how do you expect to explain fantastic events without a fantastic hypothesis?"

Dmitri Malianov is on the verge of a major breakthrough, a discovery that will recontextualise the entire field of astrophysics, Nobel prize winning stuff. So he's sent his wife and kid away so he can concentrate. Unfortunately poor Dmitri can't get a break. First a delivery arrives with crates of vodka and caviar, then a ludicrously attractive woman turns up in a short skirt. And when he still refuses to be put off his work, that's when the government heavies turn up threatening him. Speaking to his friends, he finds out that they too have been on the verge of great discoveries in their own quite disparate fields before becoming similarly distracted. Someone, or perhaps something, really doesn't want them to make these discoveries.
   In 'Definitely Maybe' the Strugatsky brothers examine what happens when the human spirit is faced with an immovable force that cannot be reasoned with. It is a chilling work of intense paranoia, made all the more powerful for being rooted in the Strugatskies' real life experiences writing science fiction in soviet Russia, where they frequently faced censorship. In the afterword Boris Strugatsky explains the difficulty they faced at every turn publishing this very book itself. There is an undercurrent of bitterness and frustration evident in 'Definitely Maybe' that gives its satirical humour a real bite.
   The Strugatskies are masters of tight plotting. Despite its short length, 'Definitely Maybe' is perfectly formed. The creeping sense of inescapable dread is expertly built up, culminating in a pile up of unlikely reveals, each designed only to further obfuscate and misdirect the protagonist. While he and his friends desperately try to come up with some plausible explanation to explain their circumstance, poor Dmitri is constantly having the rug pulled from under him. The explanation of a jealous supercivilisation determined to stop humanity from developing to a level where it could compete with them only makes sense to these characters because they are clutching at straws, hoping against all available sense and evidence that they are up against something that can be understood or reasoned with. Dmitri's learned friend Vecherovsky comes up with the theory that it is not another civilisation bringing humanity's brightest and best minds to a screeching halt, it is a natural force that exists to limit the extent to which a civilisation can progress. This idea is rather more interesting than the concept of malicious alien intelligence precisely because a force of nature is something physical and absolute that cannot be argued or reasoned with, like gravity. It's a potent metaphor for the force that cannot be grappled with, because it both appeals to our sense of knowledge and science, in that there are natural limits on any animal population which of course includes human, as well as invoking an almost Lovecraftian horror of a vast and indifferent cosmos next to which we will always be insignificant.
   But what 'Definitely Maybe' is really interested in is how people react in the face of such a force. The Strugatsky brothers write knowing full well that everyone has their price. If a force you cannot fight offers you everything you could possibly want with one hand and threatens to annihilate you and everyone you care about with the other, what choice do you have? Is it possible for a person still to have integrity in a system where the cards are so comprehensively stacked against you? These are the big questions 'Definitely Maybe' wrestles with. Dmitri sees his friends reduced to spineless cowards who, while they have everything they desire, will never achieve anything with their lives. However, because he has a wife and child and would be putting them in danger otherwise, he too capitulates and gives up his life's work and his shot at greatness. However, his friend Vecherovsky, who has no family ties, takes it on himself to collect Dmitri's and all the others' work so that he can work on it and preserve it for future generations to work on. The story ends on a hopeful note, albeit ambiguously. Humanity can still struggle on against such forces, because concepts such as science and the truth are important.
 

M. John Harrison - The Kefahuchi Tract Book Two: Nova Swing (2006)

"How do we know what we come back to is the same?"

'Nova Swing' is less a direct sequel to 'Light', the first book in the Kefahuchi Tract sequence, than a variation on a theme. Whereas that book played with golden age space opera tropes, 'Nova Swing' focuses down its attention on one work in particular: Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's excellent 'Roadside Picnic', quoted in the preface. The Kefahuchi Tract, the negative space wedgie from the first book, is falling to earth, and sections of it have landed on the nearby planets. The areas where the Tract has touched down, event sites, are a dangerous no man's land where the normal laws of physics and causality don't apply, like the Zones from 'Roadside Picnic', and as in that book, the desperate and the foolhardy eke a living smuggling alien artifacts and flotsam and jetsam out of the event sites. 'Nova Swing' is a success because it isn't just an excuse to find new ways to play with the Strugatskys' intriguing set up; it's a deeply thoughtful work on personal change, the illusion of the continuity of consciousness, and the difficult necessity of moving on. If anything I enjoyed it even more than 'Light'.
   In 'Nova Swing' a special branch of the police has been set up to deal with artifacts from the site imported into the city and the resulting havoc. With a new type of living artifact making its way into the city, they pretty much have their hands full. While this in itself is a compelling concept, what makes 'Nova Swing' so engaging is its focus on its characters, down and outs whose lives have settled into a rut despite living on the border of this great mess of unknowable constant change. It is this tension between the site and the stagnation of these characters that drives 'Nova Swing' and gives it its heart. So we have Vic Serotonin, a smuggler who earns his living bringing artifacts out of the site and selling them to gangsters and taking foolhardy tourists into the site, a man who is unable to make anything else out of his life because of his destructive fascination with the site. He is being pursued by Lens Aschemann, a brilliant Site Crime detective fashionably altered to look like Albert Einstein, who may or may not be the serial killer behind the one crime he couldn't solve that killed his wife, and who is also driven by an equally destructive infatuation with the site. Their game of cat and mouse drags in various other  bystanders, such as Liv Hula, who's tired of tending the failing bar on Straint Street for  all these years, Edith Bonaventure, ex-child star accordion player to the space ports and daughter to one of the pioneering explorers of the site, now dying of uncountable forms of alien cancers leaving Edith to look after him, and Antoyne, failed space jockey who once flew with Chinese Ed but hasn't done anything since then.
   'Nova Swing' plays as much with the tropes of noir detective fiction as it does with those of SF. The new artifacts working their way into the city are taking the shape of human beings, to disappear in the nightclubs and back alleys where their inherent strangeness goes unmarked. These people appear out of nowhere, no past history to define them or trap them. Elizabeth Kielar, the femme fatale who hires Vic Serotonin to take her into the event site, is one of them. Harrison explores at great length what an alien perspective hers is, and really just how strange the femme fatale archetype is. Compared to the other characters, whose lives and perspectives are shaped by their pasts, Kielar's personality inhabits an uncanny valley where her collection of responses and ticks never quite coalesces into believable human responses, and she knows it. While she may be an archetype character dropped in the narrative to seduce Vic Serotonin for the purposes of the story, she has enough self awareness to be wracked with existential doubt for the obvious and intentional gap she makes in the logic of reality. Similarly, Lens Aschemann is a knowing and twisted take on the invincible detective trope. Like a space age Sherlock Holmes, Aschemann, with his intentionally bizarre appearance and eccentric mannerisms, nevertheless always solves the case so the police have learned to give him the resources and let him get on with it. He wryly dispenses worldly wisdom to his younger and frequently exasperated assistant. However, the more time we spend inside Aschemann, the more we realise he is at least as damaged and obsessive as Vic Serotonin, and in the end their shared unhealthy fascination with the event sites swallows them both. And in the end, for all his grand theorising, Aschemann's understanding of the events that unfold is as flawed and as limited as all the other characters; despite his brilliant powers of deduction he is still limited  by his own human perspective with his own personal biases and blind spots.
   Aschemann reflects at one point that he views all crimes as some form of crime against continuity. But what are the event sites themselves if a constant crime against continuity? To some extent most of the male characters in 'Nova Swing', with the notable exception of Antoyne, share this rigidity of thought, which shapes both their destructive fascination with the event sites and their inability to change and adapt. Emil Bonaventure, pioneer explorer of the sites dying of multiple forms of bizarre cancer, wonders in a lucid moment, "How do we know what we come back to is the same?" But this applies not just to the sites but to anything we go through in life. The experiences we go through change us, and there is never any guarantee that things will go back to normal when you come through the other side. There comes a time when the illusion of the continuity of our consciousness is revealed as just that: an illusion. We are not the same person that we were ten years ago, and we have to face this fact and move on or risk being buried in the past. The events in 'Nova Swing' in one way or another provide the impetus for Liv Hula, Edith Bonaventure and Antoyne to accept that one part of their lives has come to a close and gives them the courage to move on to the next stage. Liv Hula reflects, after selling her bar:

"When she went inside, ten years of her life tucked themselves away in an instant, like the theoretical dimensions of long-ago cosmology. This was how life went. A single moment seemed to extend forever, then suddenly you were snapped out of it. The forward motion of time stretched whatever rubbery glue-like substance had fixed you there until it failed catastrophically. You weren't the person you were before you got trapped; you weren't the person you were while you were trapped: the merciless thing about it, Liv discovered, was that you weren't someone entirely different either."

Moving on from the past is never easy, and you can never leave your past, or who you were, behind entirely, but it's a necessary part of being alive.