The Doomed City

by Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Andrew Bromfield (Translator), Dmitry Glukhovsky (Foreword by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613749937
Publisher:	Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	07/01/2016
Series:	Rediscovered Classics , #25
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were famous and popular Russian writers of science fiction, with more than twenty-five novels and novellas to their names, including The Doomed City, The Inhabited Island, and Roadside Picnic. Their books have been widely translated and made into a number of films. Andrew Bromfield has translated into English works by Victor Pelevin, Boris Akunin, Sergei Lukyanenko, Mikhail Bulgakov, Daniil Kharms, Leo Tolstoy, and the Strugatsky brothers. Dmitry Glukhovsky is the author of Metro 2033. He lives in Moscow.

Table of Contents

Foreword Dmitry Glukhovsky vii

Part I The Garbage Collector 1

Part II The Investigator 93

Part III The Editor 191

Part IV Mr. Counselor 259

Part V Continuity Disrupted 331

Part VI Conclusion 431

Afterword Boris Strugatsky 457

Editorial Reviews

"This publication of The Doomed City reveals the Strugatsky's great lost masterwork, an allegorical nightmare metropolis fit for the special atlas that gives home to Kafka's Castle,  Charles Finney's The Unholy City, Rex Warner's Aerodrome, and a very select handful of others." — Jonathan Lethem

From the Publisher

04/11/2016
Mysterious idealists trample individuality in a Kafkaesque world where disillusioned humans are taken from the 20th century and brought to a strange city where they’re reduced to components in a maddeningly undefinable system. In a city where the sun is controlled by the rulers’ whim, garbage collectors Andrei and Donald are forced by the possibly alien Overseers to obey the daily demands of the Experiment, run according to a dictatorial philosophy demanding complete faith. This is a world without food, logic, or identity. Restless Donald’s suicide pushes Andrei to brave vicious animal uprisings, human rebellions, and abandoned ghost towns on a quest to discover the origin (and sinister motives) of the Overseers. The Strugatsky Brothers (Roadside Picnic) criticize not only Communism but all tyrannical governments in a startlingly original microcosm that captures humanity’s despair and resolve. Andrei is the novel’s heart’s blood, embodying both maddening trust and relentless questioning. The City is the novel’s greatest character, breathing misery and distortion upon its inhabitants. This unsettling and intelligent novel’s chief terror resides in its underlying ideas. (July)

Publishers Weekly

2016-05-30
A mysterious story about a surreal city from Russian science-fiction masters the Strugatsky brothers, translated into English for the first time.Andrei is a Soviet astronomer from the 1950s. He now works as a trash collector, but he no longer lives in the USSR—or in the 1950s. Instead, he lives in an unknown time in the City, a strange place where the sun is extinguished like a lamp each night. The City is bordered on one side by an impossibly high wall and on the other side, by an abyss. Within these confines, troops of baboons appear out of nowhere, and sinister buildings appear and disappear at will—or do they? An inscrutable group called the Mentors has populated the City with people they've extracted from 20th-century times and places: Fritz, for example, was a German soldier in World War II, Selma was from 1970s Sweden, and Donald was an American college professor in the '60s. They've all been brought to the City to participate in the Experiment, but no one knows precisely what its goal is. In successive episodes, the book follows Andrei as he's shifted from job to job: first, he's a diligent trash collector, then a police investigator, a senior editor of one of the City's newspapers, a counselor to the president, and, finally, a soldier at war, before he reaches a surprising end. Most of the book's action, if it can be called that, consists of people sitting around together and talking (and, more often than not, drinking). However, many readers will find it psychologically gripping to puzzle over what the City is and what will become of Andrei, although others may be frustrated by the lack of resolution. In the foreword by fellow Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky, he points out that Soviet science fiction "transformed into a means for at least hinting at the true state of affairs." Unfortunately, the story only hints, without ever fully explaining, and readers unversed in Soviet politics may feel as though they are missing out on deeper meanings. That said, it doesn't detract from what's otherwise a thought-provoking read.An intriguing, if somewhat vague, speculative tale.

Kirkus Reviews