Search Worlds Without End

The 22nd Century. Mankind is free from the age-old misery and poverty that have kept it in bondage, free to create a new world, to explore the universe, to confront the mysteries of human existence. Russia's greatest S-F writeres, Arkday and Boris Strugatsky, have produced a futuristic masterpiece of epic proportions and breathtaking vision.

Two interplanetary adventurers hurtle through space at a speed faster than light, and are flung a hundred years into the 22nd century. They find themselves on a planet both like and unlike the earth they abandoned so very long ago--and so recently.

It is a planet ruled by wisdom, where automated farms feed tens million inhabitants, where a complete system of moving roads brings the farthest outposts into close communion, where an advanced science in mechanization approaches the mysterious complexity of life itself. Here all effort is bound to the exhilarating art if discovery--way below the planet's waters, deep into the endless reaches of space and far beyond the boundless zones of the human mind.

Contents:

• Night on Mars
• Almost the Same
• Old-timer
• The Conspirators
• Chronicle
• Two from the Taimyr
• The Moving Roads
• Cornucopia
• Homecoming
• Langour of the Spirit
• The Assaultmen
• Deep Search
• The Mystery of the Hind Leg
• Candles Before the Control Board
• Natural Science in the Spirit World ilgrims and Wayfarers
• The Planet with all the Conveniences
• Defeat
• The Meeting
• What You Will Be Like

Three short science fiction novellas by the Strugatsky brothers: Escape Attempt, The Kid from Hell and Space Mowgli.

Anton is an undercover operative from future Earth, who travels to an alien world whose culture has not progressed beyond the Middle Ages. Although in possession of far more advanced knowledge than the society around him, he is forbidden to interfere with the natural progress of history. His place is to observe rather than interfere - but can he remain aloof in the face of so much cruelty and injustice...?

The Snail on the Slope takes place in two worlds. One is the Administration, an institution run by a surreal, Kafkaesque bureaucracy whose aim is to govern the forest below. The other is the Forest, a place of fear, weird creatures, primitive people and violence. Peretz, who works at the Administration, wants to visit the Forest. Candide crashed in the Forest years ago and wants to return to the Administration. Their journeys are surprising and strange, and readers are left to puzzle out the mysteries of these foreign environments. The Strugatskys themselves called The Snail on the Slope "the most perfect and the most valuable of our works."

The publishing history of the novel The Snail on the Slope is somewhat untidy. The novel was based on on a previously written novella. The novel itself first appeared in two parts, and in two different publications: the "Forest" part in 1966, and the "Directorate" part in 1968. Various translations of the complete novel appeared well before the complete novel was finally published in Russia in 1988.

Note: this version of the novel is the one based on a heavily censored source.

The novel is set in the 22nd century of the Noon Universe. Mankind is the prevalent race in the Galaxy, capable of interstellar travel. Human social organization is presumably Communist, and can be described as a highly technologically advanced anarchistic meritocracy.

When Maxim Kammerer, a young space explorer from twenty-second-century Earth, crash-lands on an uncharted world, he thinks of himself as a latter-day Robinson Crusoe. Eager to establish first contact with the planet's humanlike inhabitants, he finds himself increasingly entangled in their primitive way of life. After his experiences in their nightmarish military, criminal justice, and mental health systems, Maxim begins to realize that his sojourn on this radioactive and war-scarred world will not be a walk in the park.

The Inhabited Island is one of the Strugatsky brothers' most popular and acclaimed novels, yet the only previous English-language edition (Prisoners of Power) was based on a version heavily censored by Soviet authorities. Now, in a sparkling new edition by award-winning translator Andrew Bromfield, this land-mark novel can be newly appreciated by both longtime Strugatsky fans and new explorers of the Russian science fiction masters' astonishingly rich body of work.

Imagine a small planet, far away, where the winds are warm and gentle, the seas forever calm, the land fertile. A place where children grow up happy and strong. Where poets and painters wander in solitude and perfect safety. The planet's name? Rainbow.

This was the world to which the physicists came, bent on testing the amazing phenomenon of their newly discovered "zero-physics." Their mission, they said, was benign. Vast benefits to humanity would flow from it. So what if their experiments caused huge eruptions at the planet's poles? So what if they occasionally touched off the territying Wave, capable of killing living things on contact? They were, they said, in complete control. There was nothing to worry about.

Far Rainbow is the provocative, adventure-filled story of what happened to the lovers, the artists, the politicians, the children, the scientists, and all the other people on planet Rainbow the day the experiments went out of control.

Today, Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are counted among the best science fiction writers of the twentieth century.

In their Noon Universe novels, they imagined twenty-second-century Earth as a space-faring communist utopia, devoted to guiding the progress of civilization on alien worlds. But as the authors became increasingly disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, their Noon Universe stories grew darker and more complex as well.

The Beetle in the Anthill reintroduces Maxim Kammerer, the main character of their novel The Inhabited Island. Once an intrepid young space explorer, Kammerer is now an investigator with COMCON-2, the covert agency in charge of countering threats to the homeworld. He is tasked with tracking "progressor" Lev Abalkin, who has returned to Earth after a routine mission went tragically wrong. Do the secrets of Abalkin's past pose a grave danger to humanity--or is he an innocent caught up in a deadly misunderstanding?

This new edition by lauded translator Olena Bormashenko joins updated translations of Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, and The Waves Extinguish the Wind to continue the ever-deepening saga of the Noon Universe.

Today, Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are counted among the best science fiction writers of the twentieth century.

In their Noon Universe novels, they imagined twenty-second-century Earth as a space-faring communist utopia, devoted to guiding the progress of civilization on alien worlds. But as the authors became increasingly disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, their Noon Universe stories grew darker and more complex as well.

The Waves Extinguish the Wind provides the epic conclusion to the Noon Universe saga, as eighty-nine-year-old Maxim Kammerer looks back at his most earth-shattering investigation, which brought an entire era of human civilization to an end. Searching for evidence that the mysterious alien Wanderers were interfering in Earth's development, Kammerer and his young trainee Toivo Glumov discovered a deeper and more disturbing secret within humanity itself.

This new translation by Daniels Umanovskis joins updated editions of Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, and The Beetle in the Anthill to bring the saga of the Noon Universe to its fitting end: a search for truth and answers in a universe that provides only questions.