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Arcady and Boris Strugatsky. Prisoners of Power


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Arcady and Boris Strugatsky. Prisoners of Power



© Copyright Arcady And Boris Strugatsky
© Copyright Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon.
© Copyright Translated from the Russian by Helen Saltz Jacobson, 1977
© Copyright Collier Books: A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc,
New York; Collier Macmillan Publishing, London
Origin: "Obitaemyj ostrov"
OCR: Vladislav Zarya




INTRODUCTION

Early in these pages, when young Maxim dips his hand into a river on
the alien planet on which he has just been marooned, and withdraws it
hastily because the water is radioactive, the knowledgeable science fiction
reader is likely to say, "Come on, now, fellows -- how could he know? Or, if
it were so devastatingly, dangerously radioactive that he could determine it
without instruments, how could he notnot know before he stuck iris silly
hand in it?" But one forgives, proceeds in a smug and self-satisfied way,
because Maxim's adventures are adventurous indeed, his encounters
believable, suspenseful, unexpected, and quite beyond anticipation, the
Strugatskys being the plot-masters that they are.
Then, some hundred-or-so pages in, the reader realizes that Maxim,
being what he is, could most certainly perform that small feat at the river,
and would; further, the reader realizes that this discovery was made some
time back, indirectly, in the gradual unfolding of Maxim's character.
This knack -- the conscious commission of apparent illogic, quietly
rectified in later narration -- is typical Strugatsky. It is the gleeful and
deliberate provocation of criticism, in the sure knowledge that the
criticism is made on the basis of insufficient data, and that the critic
will be shown to be, in the true sense of the word, prejudiced --
pre-judging. After this has happened to the reader a number of times (and it


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 Arcady and Boris Strugatsky. Prisoners of Power