{"id":3678,"date":"2023-04-18T15:59:35","date_gmt":"2023-04-18T15:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3678"},"modified":"2023-04-18T15:59:35","modified_gmt":"2023-04-18T15:59:35","slug":"and-your-imaginations-would-again-run-out-of-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3678","title":{"rendered":"“And your imaginations would again run out of room…”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading The Beetle in the Anthill and The Waves Extinguish the Wind by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. For The Times, 18 April 2023\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

In Arkady and Boris Strugatsky\u2019s The Beetle in the Anthill, zoopsychologist Lev Abalkin and his alien companion, a sentient canine \u201cbighead\u201d called Puppen-Itrich, are sent to the ruined and polluted planet Hope to find out what happened to its humanoid population. Their search leads them through an abandoned city to a patch of tarmac, which Puppen insists is actually an interdimensional portal. Lev wonders what new world this portal might it lead to?<\/p>\n

\u2018\u201cAnother world, another world…\u201d grumbles Puppen. \u201cAs soon as you made it to another world, you\u2019d immediately begin to remake it in the image of your own. And your imaginations would again run out of room, and then you\u2019d look for another world, and you\u2019d begin to remake that one, too.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

Futility sounds like a funny sort of foundation for an enjoyable book, but the Strugatskys wrote a whole series of them, and they amount to a singular triumph. Fresh translations of the final two \u201cNoon universe\u201d books are being published this month.<\/p>\n

Arkady Strugatsky was born in Batumi, Georgia, in 1925. His kid brother Boris, born in Leningrad in 1933, outlived him by nearly twenty years, though without his elder brother to bounce ideas off, he found little to write about. The brothers dominated Soviet science fiction throughout the 1970s. Their earliest works towed the socialist-realist line and featured cardboard heroes who (to the reader\u2019s secret relief) eventually sacrificed themselves for the good of Humanity. But their interest in people became too much for them, and they ended up writing angst-ridden masterpieces like Roadside Picnic (which everyone knows, because Andrei Tarkovsky\u2019s film Stalker is based on it) and Lame Fate\/Ugly Swans (which no-one knows, though Maya Vinokaur\u2019s cracking English translation came out in 2020). Far too prickly to be published in the Soviet Union, their best work circulated in samizdat and (often unauthorised) translation.<\/p>\n

The stories and novels of their \u201cNoon universe\u201d series ask what humans and aliens, meeting among the stars, would get up to with each other. Ordinary conflict is out of the question, since spacefaring civilisations have access to infinite resources. (The Noon universe is a techno-anarchist utopia, as is Iain Banks\u2019s Culture, as is Star Trek\u2019s Federation, and all for the same unassailable reason: there\u2019s nothing to stop such a strange and wonderful society from working.)<\/p>\n

The Strugatskys assume that there\u2019s one only one really grand point to life as a technically advanced species \u2014 and that is to see to the universe\u2019s well-being by nurturing sentience, consciousness, and even happiness.<\/p>\n

To which you can almost hear Puppen grumble: Yes, but what sort of consciousness are you talking about? What sort of happiness are you promoting? In The Waves Extinguish the Wind (originally translated into English as The Time Wanderers), as he contemplates the possibility that humans are themselves being \u201cgardened\u201d by a superior race dubbed \u201cWanderers\u201d, alien-chaser Toivo Glumov complains, \u201cNobody believes that the Wanderers intend to do us harm. That is indeed extremely unlikely. It\u2019s something else that scares us! We\u2019re afraid that they will come and do good, as they understand it!\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

Human beings and the Wanderers (whose existence can only ever be inferred, never proved) are the only sentient species who bother with outer space, and stick their noses into what\u2019s going on among people other than themselves. And maybe Puppen is right; maybe such cosmic philanthropy boils down, in the end, to nothing more than vanity and overreach.<\/p>\n

By the time of these last two novels, the Wanderers\u2019 interference in human affairs is glaring, though it\u2019s still impossible to prove.<\/p>\n

In The Beetle in the Anthill Maxim Kammerer \u2014 a former adventurer, now a prominent official \u2014 is set on the trail of Lev Abalkin, a rogue \u201cprogressor\u201d who is heading back to Earth.<\/p>\n

Progressors travel from planet to planet and go undercover in \u201cbackward\u201d societies to promote their technical and social development. But why shouldn\u2019t Abalkin come home for a bit? He\u2019s spent fifteen years doing a job he never wanted to do, in the remotest outposts, and he\u2019s just about had enough. \u201cDamn it all,\u201d Kammerer complains, \u201cwould it really be so surprising if he had finally run out of patience, given up on COMCON and Headquarters, abandoned his military discipline, and come back to Earth to sort things out?\u201d<\/p>\n

By degrees, Kammerer and the reader discover why Kammerer\u2019s bosses are so afraid of Abalkin\u2019s return: he may, quite unwittingly, be a \u201cWanderer\u201d agent.<\/p>\n

So an individual\u2019s ordinary hopes and frustrations play out against a vast, unsympathetic realpolitik. This is less science fiction than spy fiction \u2014 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold against a cosmic backdrop. And it\u2019s tempting, though reductive, to observe the whole \u201cnoon universe\u201d through a Cold War lens. Boris himself says in his afterword to The Beetle\u2026:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were writing a tragic tale about the fact that even in a kind, gentle, and just world, the emergence of a secret police force (of any type, form, or style) will inevitably lead to innocent people suffering and dying.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the \u201cnoon universe\u201d is no bald political parable, and it\u2019s certainly not satire. Rather, it\u2019s an unflinching working-out of what Soviet politics would look like if it did fulfil its promise. It\u2019s a philosophical solvent, stripping away our intellectual vanities \u2014 our ideas of manifest destiny, our \u201coutward urge\u201d and all the rest \u2014 to expose our terrible littleness, and tremendous courage, in the face of a meaningless universe.<\/p>\n

In their final novel The Waves Extinguish the Wind \u2014 assembled from fictional documents, reports, letters, transcripts and the like \u2014 we follow a somewhat older and wiser Maxim Kammerer as he oversees the heartbreaking efforts of his protog\u00e9e Toivo Glumov to prove the existence of the Wanderers for once and for all. It\u2019s an odyssey (involving peculiar disappearances, bug-eyed monsters and a bad-tempered wizard) that would be farcical, were it not tearing Glumov\u2019s life to pieces.<\/p>\n

Kammerer reckons Glumov is a fanatic. Does it even matter that humans are being tended and \u201cprogressed\u201d by some superior race of gardener? \u201cAfter all,\u201d Kammerer says to his boss, Excellentz, \u2018\u201cwhat\u2019s the worst we can say about the Wanderers?\u2019\u201d He\u2019s thinking back to the planet called Hope, and that strange square of tarmac: \u2018\u201cThey saved the population of an entire planet! Several billion people!\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018\u201cExcept they didn\u2019t save the population of the planet,\u201d\u2019 Excellentz points out. \u2018\u201cThey saved the planet from its population! Very successfully, too… And where the population has gone \u2014 that\u2019s not for us to know.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading The Beetle in the Anthill and The Waves Extinguish the Wind by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. For The Times, 18 April 2023\u00a0 In Arkady and Boris Strugatsky\u2019s The Beetle in the Anthill, zoopsychologist Lev Abalkin and his alien companion, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[1063,86,271,783],"class_list":["post-3678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-comintern","tag-science-fiction","tag-soviet-sf","tag-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3679,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3678\/revisions\/3679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}