I liked it quite a bit, but it seems as if I read a different book from everyone else. It has almost no relation to the movie, which I also love. It is a pretty testosterone-fueled, action-packed novel, in fact. To compare to movies, it has the working-class grittiness of something like "Alien" with the toughness of "Commando." It's much more fun and meat-headed (in a good way) than a lot of the reviews give it credit. Why such a disparity between the actual book as written and the reviews? I think because basically no one just picks up this book cold and takes it for what it is. The book has become a symbol, and that's all. Everyone goes into it knowing two things: the Tarkovsky's movie, and that this book makes some kind of statement about the Soviet Union, perhaps because of Adam Curtis's "Hypernormalisation." One's thoughts before and after having read the book remain essentially unchanged.

Common among reviews is that this book is very "Russian" or "Soviet." Perhaps it's because I flunked out of "19th Century Race Science 101" and "Introduction to the Russian Soul," but I have to say that I don't know what is so quintessentially "Soviet" about the book, as many seem to be saying. Of course, the book was written by Soviet writers, and this will of course influence their views and their background, but I find this discourse tiresome, dishonest, and borderline offensive.

Americans, the English, and perhaps the French on a good day, are allowed to write "novels," though of course only so long as they come from the right class, gender, and ethnicity. Everyone else is limited to writing "Ghanaian novels," "Russian novels," "Chinese novels," "Black Southern novels," "Gay novels," and so on, all of which express the deep pain/suffering/joy, or whatever other cliché that is supposedly quintessential to their one-note experience.

I somehow find this even more offensive with a sci-fi novel. An offense to whom? Against humanity itself. Perhaps I'm a purist, but I find that the goal of the sci-fi writer is to achieve terminal velocity and leave orbit: To create and imagine new worlds, beyond our own. Perhaps there will always be limitations to this imagination, and one's dreams can never be totally divorced from one's waking life, but a lot can still be done. The ability to rise above one's own place and quotidian experiences, to see things abstracted, is a human gift which many reviewers seem to deny exists, and here is the offense. They want to chain this novel down, and turn it into a rote "statement" about the "Soviet Union." They will not allow the Strugatsky Brothers to write anything that doesn't fit into their system of propaganda.

I don't have my copy with me, but I remember Ursula Le Guin's introduction making a similar point, that the Strugatsky Brothers, more than anything else, wrote like "free men." Absolutely.