Hard to Be a God (Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature)
At a glance:
- Author: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky
- First Published: 1964
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Science fiction—alternate history
- Time of Work: An indeterminate time in the future
- Setting: Earth and the kingdom of Arkanar, on an unnamed planet
- Genres: Long fiction, Science fiction, Alternate history
- Subjects: Communism or communists, Future, Other worlds, Nazism or Nazis, Earth, Soviet Union or Soviets
- Locales: Space, Earth
The Plot
The prologue introduces three children, Anton, Pashka, and Anka, who are on an outing in a Soviet forest. The bucolic mood of the afternoon is dampened by two events: A game of William Tell with a real crossbow and discovery of the skeleton of a Nazi soldier chained to a machine gun.
Action shifts, for the main narrative, to Arkanar, a kingdom on a distant planet. Its inhabitants are Homo sapiens and are developing along a path analogous to human history on Earth. Don Rumata is one of a team of specialists from the Institute of Experimental History on...
[The entire page is 1085 words long]
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