The story follows two separate protagonists who never meet. The first is Candide, who is a pilot what has crashed into the Forest (capital F intended), and is trying to find his way out. The second is Peretz, who is stuck at the Administration which has been set up to research the Forest. He too,…
When the Strugatsky brothers finished “The Doomed City” in 1972, they realized that they could not even give it to a publisher in Soviet Russia for fear of the consequences. So they hid the book for over nearly twenty years, not publishing it until 1989, when ‘perestroika’ was taking hold in Russia and the atmosphere…
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were writing in Soviet era Russia, and the environment in which they worked gives their books an added nuance, knowing the societal constraints under which they were working, and what they managed to achieve. This is the second book I have read by these authors, and I have enjoyed it just…
Written in 1972, this book tells the interesting story of an alien first contact. The aliens in question have long since gone, but they left behind ‘zones’, areas containing many alien artifacts as well as strange (and dangerous) phenomena. Initially the zones are open for anyone to go in, but after people get killed the…
