The Snail on the Slope (Cyclopedia of Literary Characters)
At a glance:
- Author: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky
- First Published: 1966
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Science fiction
- Time of Work: The near future
- Setting: A forest on another planet
- Genres: Long fiction, Science fiction, Satire, Dystopian fiction
- Subjects: 1960’s, Intellectuals, Folkloric or magical people, Politics, Future, Other worlds, Science or scientists, Villages, Forests or forestry, Science fiction, Planets, Satire, Soviet Union or Soviets, Bureaucracy or bureaucrats, Marshes, swamps, or wetlands, Zombies or living dead, Mermaids or mermen
- Locales: Space
Characters Discussed
Pepper, the central figure, a linguist who tries to escape the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Directorate and seek illumination from a distant contemplation of the primal forest that the Directorate strives to contain and destroy. Intellectually superior, he is nevertheless treated with condescending tolerance as a bumbling, naïve incompetent. He flees one nightmarish situation after another: wrestling with the illogic of a Forest Study Group bent on eradication and with the jargon-ridden nonsense of Directorate communications, encountering blindfolded men...
[The entire page is 938 words long]
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