[The Strugatskii brothers] have created without doubt the most significant Soviet Science Fiction (further SF) after 1958. (p. 454)

The first phase of the Strugatskiis is—except for a few early stories—a "future history" system formally similar to the science-fictional model of Jules Verne's cycles or of newer U.S. writers such as Heinlein and Asimov. It is a not quite systematic series of novels and stories with interlocking characters and locations progressing from the end of the twentieth to the twenty-second century, realistically conveying life on a predominantly communist (classless) earth and human relations in explorations on and between the planets of the Solar system and some nearer stars. [Ivan] Efremov's monolithic leaders and huge exploits were here supplanted by young explorers and scientists finding romance in their everyday pioneering tasks. Retaining the utopian sense of absolute ethical involvement and personal honor, even the Strugatskiis' early protagonists—at times moody or vain, tired or capricious—were much more lifelike than the usual cardboard or marble figures in most Soviet SF. Together with the vividly depicted and variegated surroundings, the sure touch for detail and the adventure-packed action leading to some ethical choice, this immediately brought the young authors to the forefront of Soviet SF. But from good juvenile-adventure SF they quickly passed to a richer form in which the adventure level serves as vehicle for socio-philosophical exploration and understanding.

This first Strugatskii cycle is still fairly idyllic. Except for the occasional egotistic and capitalist survivals, conflicts take place—as they formulated it—"between the good and the better," i.e., within absolute and generally accepted ethics. Thus, the only fundamental conflict left is the epic adventure of man faced with and conquering nature as a "collective Robinson."… Yet at the end of the cycle—in The Apprentices and some stories such as Wanderers and Travellers, The Puzzle of the Hind Foot, and The Rendez-Vous—an element of open-ended doubt and of darkness enters into these somewhat aseptically bright horizons. Some protagonists die or retire, and some "come home" from cosmic jaunts to Earth and its problems. Though the future is still envisaged as a golden arrested moment of "noon," historical time with its puzzles, pain, and potentialities of regress begins to seep in as shadows of postmeridial experience lengthen. This adventure model is interlarded with quotations from neo-romantic poets such as R. L. Stevenson and Bagritskii. In the second phase, an adult exploration of a more complex and painful world concentrates, as one of its novels has it, on the "predatory things of our age"—a title appropriately enough taken from Russia's major poetic exploration of relationships in such a world by Voznesenskii.

The dialectics of innocence and experience, of utopian ethics and historical obstacles on the way to their enthronement provides henceforth the main tension and pathos of the Strugatskiis' opus. In their second phase they went about finding the proper form for such dialectics. The black horizon of a history where slavery and high technology go together appears in An Attempted Escape, though only as an exception (a backward planet) within the utopian universe of the first phase. In this work the Strugatskiis are still defensive about their new tack. Even stylistically, it is halfway between the careful realism of the extrapolative-utopian cycle and a new parable form, so that it reads as a first sketch for It's Hard to be a God. The protagonist—an escapee from Nazi concentration camps—and the paradoxical society are even less motivated than Mark Twain's Yankee in Camelot. Nonetheless, this story introduces the first full-fledged conflict of utopian innocence and twentieth-century experience using the highly effective device of a protagonist caught in a blind alley of history.

The first two masterpieces of the Strugatskiis are the long story Far Rainbow and the novel It's Hard to be a God. In both of them extrapolation gives way to a clearly focussed analogic or parabolic model of mature SF. In both, utopian ethics are put to the test of anti-utopian darkness, of an inhuman and apparently irresistible wave of destruction. (pp. 456-57)

It's Hard to be a God amounts to a Bildungsroman where the reader is the hero, learning together with the protagonist the nature of painful conflict between utopian human values—always the fixed Polar Star for the Strugatskiis—and the terrible empirical pressures of mass egotism, slavery to petty passions, and conformism. Under such pressures the great majority of people turn to religious fanaticism, mass murder or apathy…. Outside interference cannot liberate a people without introducing a new benevolent dictatorship: the Earthling "gods" are both ethically obliged and historically powerless to act. The true enemy is within each man: Slavery and Reason, narrow-minded class psychology and the axiological reality of a classless future, are still fighting it out, in a variant of Dostoevskii's Grand Inquisitor confrontation. The Strugatskiis' mature opus retains the utopian abhorrence of "the terrible ghosts of the past" and belief in the necessity of a humanized future, but it is also intensely aware of the defeats humanity has suffered since the heyday of utopianism in the early 1920's. Thus, from this time on their work takes its place with the insights of best SF—of Wells, London, and others—into the dangers of social devolution: it is a warning without pat answers, a bearing of witness, and "an angry pamphlet against tyranny, violence, indifference, against the philistinism which gives rise to dictatorships" (Revich). Even further, it is a significant rendering of tragic utopian activism, akin in many ways to the ethico-historiosophical (geschichtsphilosophisch) visions of the best Hemingway and of poets like Brecht (the protagonist's dilemma in this novel is not too dissimilar from that in The Measures Taken), Okudzhava, or Voznesenskii. It is no wonder this novel has become the most popular SF work in the USSR.

Predatory Things of Our Age returns to the anticipatory universe of the first cycle, with which it shares the protagonist, a Soviet cosmonaut turned UN Secret Service agent. His task is to flush out an evil new influence in the Country of the Fools, a wealthy, demilitarized capitalist state in a world dominated by socialism; this turns out to be addictive stimulation of pleasure centers, born of social demoralization and feeding into it. The story is a half-hearted try at a more precise Earthly localization of the concern with historical blind alleys, but its focus is blurred. The Country of the Fools is midway between an updated USA of Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, or gangster movies, and a folktale-like Never-never Land. Though vigorous and swift-paced, it is neither sufficiently concrete for precise sociopolitical criticism—as some Soviet critics were quick to point out—nor sufficiently generalized for a parabolic sociophilosophical model of a mass welfare state. It's Hard to be a God remains thus, in its clear and historically vivid yet sufficiently estranged localization, in its fusion of medieval and twenty to twenty-first century, public and private concerns (evident even in the epigraphs from Abelard and Hemingway), the supreme model of the Strugatskii's work until 1965.

Since explicit criticism of situations nearer home than its "thousand years and thousand parsecs from Earth" would have (among other sociological consequences) meant abandoning the SF genre and their readers, the Strugatskiis opted for the second possible way—a folktale-like parable form with increasingly satirical overtones. As different from their work so far, marked by growing precision and width of reference of a single model, their third phase is characterized by a variety of probings, formal manoeuverings and reading publics—from the juvenile to the most sophisticated one.

A sign of formal mastery, joined perhaps to a certain sociological bewilderment, can be seen in the changing Strugatskii protagonist. By this phase he has turned into the privileged point of view. As a rule he is, like Voltaire's Candide, a naive glance at the increasingly estranged and disharmonious world, but burdened by the additional twentieth-century problem of how to make sense of the events in a mass society with monopolized information channels. This makes for anxiety, as in The Snail on the Slope, or activist response, as in The Inhabited Island, or a fusion of both, as in The Tale of the Triumvirate. In The Second Martian Invasion, however, the protagonist, ignorant as Candide, is also happy in his conformist ignorance. This Martian invasion does not need to use Wellsian heat-rays and gases to poison a nation but local traitors, economic corruption, and misinformation. As befits the one-dimensional age, the calamity is muted, and thus more convincing and horrible The whole story is a tour-de-force of identifying petty-bourgeois language and horizons, the almost unnoticeable nuances which lead down the slope of quislingism. It is "a grotesque which does not reside in the style but in the point of view" (Britikov). Stylistically, it is on a par with It's Hard to be a God and the first part of Snail on the Slope as the Strugatskiis' most homogeneous achievement. (pp. 458-59)

Perhaps a central place in their late work is due to the "Privalov cycle"—so far the novels Monday Begins on Saturday (1965) and The Tale of the Triumvirate (published only in the bimonthly Angara for 1968). In an updated folktale garb, they embody the underlying atmosphere of this phase—a total invasion of human relationships by a lack of linear logic and sense…. Monday Begins on Saturday deals primarily with the use and charlatanic abuse of science…. The loose picaresque form—the "ideational adventures" of the candid protagonist—can be used for hitting out at anything that fits the authors' bill. Thus one section, in which Privalov tests out a machine for travelling through "ideal times," is a spoof of SF from the utopias and The Time Machine, through technological anticipations and Soviet cosmic SF (with considerable self-parody), to western SF behind an "Iron Wall" dividing the Universe of Humanistic Imagination from the Universe of Fearing the Future where violent warfare with robots, aliens, viruses, etc., reigns supreme.

The Tale of the Triumvirate (or Troika) is blacker, concentrating on a bureaucratic triumvirate—originally a commission for checking the plumbing system—that has usurped power in a country of unexplained social and natural phenomena, which it proceeds to "rationalize" by misusing or explaining them away. (pp. 460-61)

[The Strugatskiis'] last two novels seem to mark a pause in the highpowered experimenting and permanent renewal since Far Rainbow. The Inhabited Island is a reduction of the mature Strugatskii model to a "new maps of hell" adventure novel. It is still very good at that level, with the usual candid utopian protagonist on a closed world where high technology, especially in new persuasion media, serves a military dictatorship. The environment and atmosphere, the development of the brisk plot and the hero passing through various strata of a people bereft of history, all betray the masterly touch. The insights into both Oligarchy and Underground politics, for example, and into the fanaticism of the rank and file, are as convincing as anything in their opus: this was a well-used pause. However, their next and to date last published book, Hotel "To the Lost Climber" is a frank entertainment—a detective story with an SF twist (it turns out that all the puzzles are due to alien robots with strange powers). One can only hope that the hotel's name does not represent the Strugatskiis' decision—in the wake of the unpublished Ugly Swans—that no aesthetic or sociological space is at present left for avant garde socio-philosophical SF in the USSR.

The Strugatskiis' retreat from an ever-developing exploratory SF would be a considerable loss, for the space staked out by them is at the heart of Soviet SF. Their work was a permanent polemic—in their first phase against narrow technological-adventure SF of the Soviet 1950's, in the second against Efremovian monolithism, in the third against linear progressivism—and thus acted as an icebreaker clearing aesthetic navigation for the whole Soviet flotilla. More importantly, their three phases have built up the most coherent model in Soviet SF. From static utopian brightness it moved, through a return to the complex dynamics of history, to a final model where the static norm is felt as immorally anti-utopian. Concomitantly, the protagonist grew from a boy in a golden collective, through the pioneering subject of a painful cognitive education, to a solitary hero as final repository of utopian ethics who decides to fight back at inhumanity. The time horizons also evolved from extrapolated future, through a clash of past and future in analogic worlds, to a strongly estranged arrested time (e.g., blending a folktale past with futuristic science) where the future values find refuge in ethics as opposed to backward politics.

There are deficiencies in the Strugatskiis' vision. The junction of ethics with either politics or philosophy has remained unclear; the localization of events has oscillated somewhat erratically, the sociophilosophical criticism has sometimes fitted only loosely into the science-fictional framework. Such limitations cannot be glossed over as they might grow in importance, but they may to a great extent be due to the authors' wish to keep in contact with the readers. Nonetheless, half a dozen of the Strugatskii works approach major literature. Their final phase is a legitimate continuation of the Gogol' vein and of the great Soviet tradition of II'f-Petrov or Olesha, at the borders of SF and satire as in Maiakovskii's late plays, Lem, or Kafka's In the Penal Colony. Further, the predatory bestiary into which people without cognitive ethics are transmuted, the strange countries and monsters becoming increasingly horrible as the authors and readers discover that the de nobis fabula narratur—all such aspects certify to their final source in the greatest SF paradigm, Gulliver's Travels. The Strugatskiis' work has some of Swift's fascination with language—a mimicry of bureaucratese and academese, of philistine and fanatic jargon, irony and parody, colloquialisms and neologisms. Thus, they are polemic at the deepest literary level of work craftmanship and vision, making untenable what they termed the "fiery banalities" of the genre. Together with their less happy critical utterances, this hardly endeared them to its run-of-the-mill practitioners.

Perhaps most pertinent within the Russian tradition is the fact that the best of the final Strugatskii phase reads like an updating of Shchedrin's fables (e.g., The Bear Governor) and his chronicle of Glupovo City and its rulers. However, the hero and ideal reader is no longer Shchedrin's muzhik: he is the contemporary scientific and cultural intellectual bridging the "two cultures" gap, the reader of Voznesenskii and Voltaire, Wiener and Wells. Many Strugatskii passages read as a hymn to such young scientists who are also citizen-activists, inner-directed by and toward utopia. In Monday Begins on Saturday, for example, they are defined as having "a different relationship with the world than normal people" and believing that the sense of life resides in "constant cognition of the unknown." The central source of the Strugatskiis' pathos is an ethics of cognition, sprung from a confluence of utopianism and modern philosophy of science. Such a horizon, of course, transcends Russian borders: it marks the Strugatskiis' rightful place in world SF. (pp. 461-63)