The daring Strugatsky brothers, practitioners of outwardly Soviet, covertly Jewish science fiction

Idolised by their Soviet readers, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are beginning to find increasing numbers of readers in America.

Deified by their Soviet readers from the 1960s on, the Strugatsky brothers-Arkady (1925-1991) and his younger sibling Boris (1933-2012) were not only the most popular and prolific Russian writers of science fiction, a highly respected genre in post-Stalinist Soviet culture, but its most daring practitioners.

Translated widely during the cold war, their work was continually on the radar of American science-fiction writers from Isaac Asimov to Ursula Le Guin to Kim Stanley Robinson.

With the recent advent of new and improved English translations, the latest of which is Monday Starts on Saturday, increasing numbers of American readers have become familiar with the brothers' genre-crossing output, which ranges from adventure and mystery to dystopias, parables, and parodies, all playing off the staple science-fiction themes of time and interplanetary travel, the nature of AI, and the existence of alternative "matrix" realities.

26th March 2018