The Doomed City

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky are widely considered the greatest of Russian science fiction masters, & their most famous work, Roadside Picnic , has enjoyed great popularity worldwide. Yet the novel that was their own favorite, & 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 best friends for sixteen years after its completion in 1972. It was only published in Russia in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication. It was translated into a host of major European languages, & now appears in English in a major new translation by acclaimed translator Andrew Bromfield. 

The Doomed City is set in an experimental city bordered by an abyss on one side & an impossibly high wall on the other. Its sole inhabitants are people who were plucked from Earth’s history & left to govern themselves under conditions established by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable. 

Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a diehard believer in the Experiment, even though he’s now a garbage collector. And as increasingly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect.

°°°

Arkady Strugatsky (1925 - 1991) & Boris Strugatsky (1933 - 2012) are Russia's most acclaimed & popular science-fiction writers. Their unique style - at once hilarious & pitch black - encompassed a remarkable variety of different genres: from space opera to alien invasion, from locked-room mystery to dystopian apocalypse. While their initial output was uncritical of Soviet life, over time their work became much more subversive - science fiction being the perfect vehicle...