“Wonderful!” Pol said sadly. “Just don’t tell me all about your happy love in X thousand boring words.” He became more lively. “Happy love is inherently boring anyhow,” he declared. “Even the ancients understood that. No real craftsman has been attracted by the theme of happy love, For great works, unhappy love was always an end in itself, but happy love is at best background.”
Kostylin assented reluctantly.
“True depth of feeling is characteristic only of unrequited love,” Pol continued with inspiration. “Unhappy love makes a person active, churns him up, but happy love calms him down, spiritually castrates him.”
“Cheer up, Polly,” said Kostylin. “It will all pass. The good thing about unhappy love is that it is usually short-lived…”
One may, of course, pick nits. That the moons of Mars may be artificial satellites placed there aeons ago either by Martians or by some unknowably ancient interstellar intelligence is an intriguing idea, one that has been used by other writers, and which science has now regrettably disproved. In the very first story we find travelers on the surface of Mars, set upon by a devilish creature, and kicking vegetation out of the way. One can hardly fault the Strugatskys for this, however; they wrote it more than fifteen years before any close approach to the red planet. To demolish such fine imaginative constructs by ex post facto science is simply unfair; and to apply such “mistaken” thinking to the time-span of the book—about two centuries—is to compound, not mistakes, but the unfairness. Besides: do not sell human ingenuity short. One science-fiction writer wrote, in the late thirties, a story about the advent of color television. Because he had researched his subject thoroughly, and recognized the magnitude of the problems involved, he set his scene two hundred years in the future. In eight years, color sets were in the stores. And in spite of the fact that science fiction has, with great accuracy, predicted and described the submarine, the spaceship, overpopulation, air and water pollution, and countless other now-familiar developments and devices before their practical invention, not one single science-fiction writer has ever described those computerized marvels with the luminous readouts, the LED and liquid crystal watches before they appeared on people’s wrists. Think of that before you call the Strugatskys’ “detrinitization” impossible. That the speed of light cannot be surpassed is the most basic of the most revered astrophysicists’ axioms, like Atoms (etymologically a-tomos, uncuttable, indivisible) are subject to division and endless subdivision. Wait and see. “E=MC2,” Albert Einstein once casually remarked, “may after all be a local phenomenon…”
There is about this gigantic book very little political cant. The Strugatskys are products of their nation and their culture, and there are one or two—no more—passages indicating unquestioning acceptance of their national precepts. There is virtually no acknowledgement of Western science and technology, but there is no damnation of it either. There are characters drifting in and out of the stories who have English names and speak English, as there are Germans and Japanese. The authors clearly see unanimity among humans in their future world, and leave it to others to concern themselves with its achievement. Their deepest preoccupation, especially toward the end of the book, is with the fellowship of sapience, of intelligence anywhere in the cosmos, and one sees an increasing concern with the possibility that highly intelligent life-forms may pass close to one another, even coexist with one another, with characteristics so very different that they may have no way to recognize one another.
The organization of this book is ingenious and beautifully loose. For example, the first story—the one taking place on Mars—concerning the travelers in the desert: they are on their way to assist in the birth of the first human baby to be born on that planet, and one of them throws away the information that the parents’ name is Slavin. In a later story one encounters a man named Slavin, and realizes it is that child, now a young man, a space cadet. Among his classmates is one Kondratev. In the next story an almost forgotten, very ancient spaceship comes bumbling into orbit, smashing a space-mirror in the process, and crashes. A terribly injured man emerges from it, calling for doctors to save his even more seriously hurt comrade—Kondratev. The next story loops back in time to an absolutely charming quartet of twelve-year-old geniuses rooming together in a school; their names are Komov, Gnedykh, Kostilyn, and Sidorov. These last three appear off and on throughout the book, in the interweaving of their lives and fortunes, and one comes to know them very well indeed. The authors have a firm hold on yet another basic (and often overlooked) concomitant of living literature: to be alive and lasting, a story must present protagonists who grow and change irreversibly because of the events of the narrative.
The maturation of these three especially, but also others whom you will encounter, is a revelation and a learning.
The book is divided into four sections, and will take you in four giant steps from tomorrow into the 22nd century: Almost the Same, Homecoming, The Planet with All the Conveniences, and What You Will Be Like. I know what you will be like.
Delighted.
Part One: Almost the Same
1. Night on Mars
Suddenly the red-brown sand under the crawler treads gave way. Pyotr Alekseevich Novago threw her into reverse. “Jump!” he shouted to Mandel. The crawler shuddered, throwing up clouds of sand and dust, and started to turn stern up. Novago switched off the engine and scrambled out of the crawler. He landed on all fours, and, without standing up, scurried off to one side. The sand slid and sank underneath him, but Novago managed to reach firm ground. He sat down, tucking his legs under him.
He saw Mandel, who was kneeling at the opposite edge of the crater, and the stern of the crawler, shrouded in steam and sticking up out of the sand on the bottom of the newly formed crater. Theoretically it was impossible for something like this to happen to a Lizard model. Here on Mars, at least. A Lizard was a light, fast machine—a five-seat open platform mounted on four autonomous caterpillar-tracked chassis. But here it was, slowly slipping
into a black pit, at the bottom of which sparkled the treasure of deep-buried water. Steam was gushing up from the water.
“A cavity,” Novago said hoarsely. “This wasn’t our day, it seems.”
Mandel, his face covered up to the eyes by his oxygen mask, turned to Novago. “No, it sure wasn’t,” he agreed.
There was absolutely no wind. Puffs of steam from the crater rose vertically into the violet-black sky sprinkled with bright stars. The sun hung low in the west-a small bright disk over the dunes. Black shadows stretched from the dunes to a reddish valley. It was completely still—the only sound was the rustling of the sand flowing into the crater.
“Well, all right,” Mandel said as he got up. “What’ll we do? We can’t drag it out.” He nodded in the direction of the cavity. “Or can we?”
Novago shook his head. “No, Lazar, we can’t pull it out.”
There was a long, slurping sound, the stern of the crawler disappeared, and on the black surface of the water a few bubbles swelled up and burst.
“You’re probably right—we can’t pull it out,” said Mandel. “So we’ll have to walk, Pyotr. But it’s no big deal—thirty kilometers. We should get there in five hours or so.”
Novago looked at the black water. A delicate pattern of ice was already forming on it.