The Doomed City

`The magnum opus of Russia s greatest science fiction novelists translated into English for the first time`.Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were the greatest of Russian science fiction masters, and their most famous work,`Roadside Picnic,`has enjoyed great popularity worldwide. Yet the novel they worked hardest on, that was their own favorite, and that readers worldwide have acclaimed as their magnum opus, has never before been published in English.`The Doomed City`was so politically risky that the Strugatsky brothers kept its existence a complete secret even from their closest friends for sixteen years after its completion in 1972. It was only published in Russia during perestroika in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication. It now finally appears in English in a major new translation.`The Doomed City`is set in an experimental city whose sun gets switched on in the morning and switched off at night, bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its sole inhabitants are people who were plucked from twentieth-century history at various times and places and left to govern themselves under increasingly nightmarish conditions. Boris Strugatsky wrote that the task of writing`The Doomed City`was genuinely delightful and fascinating work. Readers will doubtless say the same of the experience of reading it.`