Doing Science in the Spirit World: Order, Chaos and H.G. Wells in a Billion Years Till the End of the Earth‪.‬

* The Strugatskys' novel A Billion Years to the End of the World [Za milliard let do kontsa sveta (1976); English translation Definitely Maybe (1976)] is an important work, both in terms of the writers' own development, and as a unique contribution to the growing international literature in this century about scientists practicing science. Early Strugatsky work is generally optimistic about the possibility of scientific advancement in a classless future. This is later tempered by a sense that neither human institutions nor human nature are straight-line affairs; the problem remains one of individuals rather than of the systems themselves. In A Billion Years, however, scientists work in a universe where institutional and natural systems appear to obey a like set of oppressive "laws." Scientific and political bureaucracy--restrictions rising from the depths of Russian literature and culture--is mirrored in the presence of natural control measures, those of the so-called Homeostatic Universe. Within such totaliz ing forms of "order," if there is to be any future imagination of human progress, different forms of scientific activity are needed. What might these be? There is more here however than Soviet politics or Russian culture. There is H.G. Wells. This novel has a deep Wellsian intertext, which represents a subtle dialogue with the English master of the SF genre. Chaos and order, after all, and the inadequacies of social structures in the face of catastrophe, are the themes of Wells's early scientific romances. More pertinently, Wells explored the collapse of the rational mind, of unaided scientific method, in the face of new and unknown phenomena--the future in The Time Machine, invasion from outer space in War of the Worlds, and invisibility in The Invisible Man. Elements of the two last novels provide models for a solution to the problem of the Homeostatic Universe. Deciphering this Wellsian intertext offers an exercise in comparative science fictions.