The Snail on the Slope

Description

ENTER THE ADMINISTRATION Peretz spends his days navigating the bureaucracy of the Administration, the institute tasked with governing the Forest below. Except no one ever seems to go there, and his attempts only trap him further within the workings of this strange organisation. ENTER THE FOREST Candide cannot remember how he got to the Forest, and he is certain he belongs somewhere else. Determined to escape, he finds that all paths lead him round strange bends and into encounters with bizarre creatures. NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS This classic SF novel sees Boris and Arkady Strugatsky meditate on how little man can understand of the wider world, and in doing so produce one of the great literary works to come out of Soviet Russia.

Arkady Strugatsky (1925-1991) and Boris Strugatsky (1931-2012) Arkady and Boris Strugatsky began to collaborate in the early 1950s after Arkady had studied English and Japanese and worked as a technical translator and editor, and Boris was a computer mathematician at Pulkova astronomical observatory. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes them as 'the best Soviet SF writers' and works such as Hard to be a God, Definitely Maybe, The Snail on the Slope and Monday Begins on Saturdayare powerful and poignant novels that continue to amaze and move readers. Andrei Tarkovsky's much admired film, Stalker, was based on their most famous work, Roadside Picnic. Read more at http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/strugatski_arkady

A marvellous, subtle, funny book - Sunday Times A fantastic vision of extraordinary power, a difficult, demanding but rewarding work - The Times Literary Supplement The Snail on the Slope may be the most dizzyingly concentrated dose of the Strugatskys' strange and powerful medicine [Arkady and Boris Strugatsky] open windows in the mind and then fail to close them at all, so that, putting down one of their books, you feel a cold breeze still lifting the hairs on the back of your neck - New York Times Approached as a meditation on the human inability to comprehend more than a very small part of the universe, this is a surprisingly satisfying, if often perplexing, work - Publisher's Weekly