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Overall Mark : 8/10
It is a mysterious city with an artificial sun, bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its inhabitants have been plucked from different time periods of twentieth-century history and left to govern themselves, advised by the inscrutable Mentors. This is the Experiment, seen through the eyes of Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer from 1950s Leningrad, whose rise through the political hierarchy has a devastating effect.
ARKADY STRUGATSKY (1925-1991)
BORIS STRUGATSKY (1931-2012)
The Strugatsky brothers began to collaborate in the early 1950s. Arkady worked as a technical translator and editor, and Boris was a computer mathematician at Puklova astronomical observatory. Their work includes Hard To Be A God, Definitely Maybe, The Snail On The Slope and Monday Starts On Saturday. Andrei Tarkovsky's much admired film, Stalker, was based on their most famous work, Roadside Picnic.
VERDICT
I do secretly like the Strugatsky’s, though Roadside Picnic was never a favourite. This is up there with likes of Monday Starts On Saturday, though not as obviously funny. Instead this takes the political satire end of the comedy spectrum – something that was definitely risky in the time it was written – and goes with that by parodying the ideas that were so prevalently observed in the former Soviet Union.
