The Doomed City
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4.5 • 10 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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 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 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, and 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 and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its sole inhabitants are people who were plucked from Earth's history and 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
