I picked this up in bookstore because I was intrigued by the cover. And I have to admit this was very interesting SF story that reads like blend of Time Patrol and Foundation. We follow agents from very advanced humanity civilization from planet Earth (years in the future from now) as they try to subtly guide the humans living on distant planet (this seems to be a colony that is completely cutoff from Earth and is not aware of its very existence). Goal is to direct that society from existing medieval-like state towards the advancements in science and society in general so they can prosper and develop into enlightened society that can (re)establish links with Earth.

Authors excellently portray the dilemma these agents have on how to properly direct this society when one has access to advanced technology and knowledge (they are gods in this society for all the means and purposes) but needs to remain in shadows and must not use full powers overtly. All the agents are very emphatic and first and foremost they are humans, meaning they cannot live outside their surroundings and they get touched by all the violence and hard-living conditions of the locals. When they see how society slowly starts to degrade and spiral into reminiscent of Earth's [very] dark age (all caused by unknown variable that popped up unexpectedly - person very similar to Mule from Foundation series) they have to chose whether to continue their undercover guidance from the shadows, trying to save as many people with skills and knowledge as possible, or take active role. And they know that taking active role in leading the society (organizing peasants, fighting wars and revolutions) while that same society can be easily influenced, swayed and forced on the wrong path is something that will only bring more conflict and wont solve anything in the long run.

While they try to guard the civilization they are aware that single-mindedness, superstition and complete social inflexibility cannot be so easily overcome. How does one communicate with non-compromising people that are used to violence and living under the iron ruthless rule of aristocracy. How can people that are kept under very bad conditions of life, constantly on the lookout for ruler's spies and snitches, chased because of knowledge or because of thinking that contradicts the established dogma .... how can one expect people to approach the life from different perspective. Once tyranny puts people into the ground it takes generations to create free thinking society back again.

In all honesty I did not expect the book to be so contemporary. But again considering that authors come from Russia they are more than aware how society can be easily degraded and how difficult it is to recover.

Excellent novel, translation was so good it was pure joy to read the story.

Highly recommended to all fans of SF and especially SF readers that enjoy social aspects of the story. ( )

The outline of the story is pretty much a TNG episode; advanced human civilization observing life on another colony stuck at an earlier stage of development. On a deeper level, it's directly attacking Beria (almost by name, as the afterword suggests) and the faults of the soviet union, which while interesting from a nonfictional context doesn't make that good a story in itself. You can follow how they've tried to walk a line with what they can say without running afoul of censors, so as polemic it's also hamstrung.
Roadside Picnic remains their best so far. ( )

This is my third Strugatsky work (The Dead Mountaineer's Inn and Roadside Picnic) and likely not the last. The premise is the future (violence and political turmoil are a thing of the past) with space travel and concern to help prevail. Having come across a planet so earth-like as to be virtually identical (homo sapiens top of the food chain) but mired in medieval chaos, 'historians' are sent to 'observe' and where possible tweak things in the direction of enlightenment. The soviet way has prevailed in this future world, and the initial story was meant to be apolitical and fun--except in the USSR of the early 1960's (when the book was written)--that was not an option. The protagonist/hero, Don Rumata (Anton) has been in this world for three years, posing as a powerful and wealthy aristocrat in a very class/caste oriented society, top dog. He isn't a god, but he might as well be with his unlimited gold and impervious armour. Rumata has been trying to save anyone who shows any spark but even the best are not ready to progress beyond their own personal situation/salvation. He feels increasingly hopeless, intuiting a situation beyond anything that ever happened on earth, that any of their "Basis Theory" of history encompasses. The man behind this, Don Reba (oddly resonant with Beria) has seized control of the area Rumata is observing, but Rumata cannot figure him out--no motivation or purpose is perceivable, just ever increasing violence and chaos which moreover Reba doesn't even, really, seem to relish but is compelled to keep on with even to his own downfall. Knowing great violence will erupt the next day, Rumata ponders: "Two hundred thousand people! To a visitor from Earth they all had something in common. It was probably the fact that almost without exception, they were not yet humans in the modern sense of the word, but blanks, unfinished pieces, which only the bloody centuries of history could one day fashion into true men, proud and free." This passage, on p 145 of my copy, lies at the heart of where the story, meant once to be light-hearted adventure, turned into an exploration of the constant tension between pure self-interest and working for the benefit of the aggregate. Kind of timely. Or perhaps always timely. Not an SF light read. As with like Roadside Picnic a book with so much in it, humor, imagination, heart and soul and seriousness. The greatest flaw is that, apparently, in the future, women don't play much of a part in the big affairs. The Strugatskys' were men of their time in that regard after all. **** ( )

My second book by the Strugatsky brothers, and while I didn't really love Roadside Picnic I felt it was good enough to try another before I decided whether to avoid them in future or not. I can safely say this will be my last.

Hard to be a God has a storyline that I really thought would interest me. An agent from an Earth set in the future travels back through time to another world to see how they are developing. He is not allowed to intervene (think Star Trek Prime Directive) no matter how much he may disagree or dislike what he sees around him. Can he continue to keep his origins a secret and not pollute the timeline?

Firstly the positives, I fully appreciate this was a book written under an Iron soviet rule and the plot is a veiled representation of the regime people had to live under. Therefore they were restricted in what they could write to get past the censors and also needed to make the criticisms fairly identifiable but without being too obvious. The plot idea was original for the time written and surely would have created an interest as the world starts to look to the skies and the unknown of space etc.

For some reason, and I fully appreciate I am in the minority as there are many reviews shouting the praises of Hard to be a God, I just hated it. I found the plot irregular, far too many characters and pages and pages of babble. This was one of the rare occasions when I could actually read a full page and be none the wiser about what I had just read. It literally bored me to tears. Confession time, I read around 2 thirds and then cast it aside, so maybe there was some sort of epiphany moment in the last 80 pages, but I will never find out, and if I am honest I pretty much doubt it. ( )

The more I think about this book the better it gets.

It starts rather abruptly with a prologue that shows three youngsters wandering around a wilderness to no real purpose. The real function of this prologue isn't clear until the epilogue...

Then suddenly everyone has grown up and we're on a different planet which is remarkably like Earth (same ecology, humans live in a feudal society with mediaeval technology) a bizarre coincidence that is never addressed. We also learn that back home on Earth a genuinely Communist society has taken root globally and technology has advanced greatly - interstellar travel is practised, after all. The visitors from Earth are historical observers - they are supposed to be collecting data to support the prevaling theory of history which dictates that there is only one eventual result of human history - the Communist State of course. But things seem to be going wrong - an alarming individual, a minister to the King, seems to be trying to eliminate all centres of learning and all literate individuals. Is it a bid to establish a Totalitarian State? That shouldn't happen according to the accepted theory of history.

The observers from Earth are not supposed to interfere, but it's hard to be a god and remain aloof when surrounded by misery, disease, ignorance, brutality and persecution. What's the right thing to do?

It's a thematically complex novel that nevertheless could be read by a young person simply as a kind of adventure tale. Unsurprisingly many of the themes are political; censorship and suppression of learning, Totalitarianism and will to power, Communist theory, religious oppression, but some are as much ethical: is interference in an attempt to improve the lot of the masses justified or not? And (perhaps the most interesting and unexpected to me) if you take a person from an ideal society, Utopian, safe, stable, moral, with fair and equal distribution of resources and put him in the antithetical situation, largely isolated from his peers, what happens? Does he maintain the moral code of home, or does the society around him eventually corrupt him? What exactly happens at the end is left a little ambiguous but the implication is clear. The impact is made clear in the epilogue, back on Earth, with the three friends from the prologue re-united.

There's an afterword to this translation which appears to date back to 1997, by the surviving Strugatsky brother. It's as fascinating as the book itself, setting a context for its writing that is very illuminating. Initially a straight-forward SF adventure story in the vein of Dumas' Musketeers novels was the sole aim, but it was the early 1960s and the political situation in Russia inevitably reared its ugly head. A furore arose regarding whether the SF community's younger elements' satirical and critical attacks on the status quo of political oppression, ever changing approved political doctrine, hypocrisy were allowable. Older writers, government shills, were loudly complaining. The regime was visibly critical of much of the new art, visual, literary or even musical. Was there going to be a crack-down?

Well, the Strugatskies decided to risk it and turned their prospective piece of pure escapism into an attack on those in power, Communist theory, Totalitarianism in general and the will to power of individuals. The crack-down never came and the book was not treated severely by the censors, though their editor persuaded the authors to change the name of the villain from Rebia (anagram of Beria, a prominent politician of the time) to the marginally more subtle Reba.

The other thing the afterword establishes is that there was a thriving market for SF in Soviet era Russia, big enough to have a society specifically for SF authors, a fact that it would be hard to believe given only the evidence of what has been published in English translation. Another observation is that just as social and political concerns are frequently explored in English language SF, so they were in the Russian SF of that time, with the same somewhat reduced level of scrutiny by dismissive people in power. (Compare with Solzhenitsyn, who published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, the same year Hard to be a God was being written).

I'll certainly be looking for the other Strugatsky books with editions in English but I'm also interested in picking up any other Russian SF available in translation to further compare and contrast the trends and themes of Russian and Anglo-American SF. ( )