Category Archives: Library

The Big Idea of this classic science fiction story, at 150 pages, a novella, isn’t revealed until almost at the end. You get unexplicated hints all along the way, of course, as you do in most good fiction. They keep you reading, trying to figure out the puzzle. As in the editor’s admonition: Resist the urge to explain.

But even though the Big Idea–which I’m not going to reveal and spoil for you, though WikiPedia does, so go there at your own risk–is worth the price of admission, it came rather late for me. There’s too much preceding material, however artful, and it is artful. Shows you how much our attention spans have shortened since the book was published in 1971. I almost got fed up with being teased and quit reading. Partly because the protagonist is a blue-collar brawler, a type which never interested me. He’s got a tender side, sure, but don’t all the brawler stereotypes?

Well, most of them. Then, at the end, the Soviet authors, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, turn loose the brawler’s class-consciousness and he starts whining about his low rung on the totem pole, rather than the real pain he’s hiding. Whose explication would have worked much better for me. I never identified with Marlon Brandon’s working-class sneer. Still the book is worth the read, if only for the Big Idea. It’s cynical, but it lingers as wry humor. As one of the characters, a physicist, might say: Embrace your inner cave man. Go on, it will be good for you. And I don’t mean the brawler bit. I’m resisting the urge to explain. Haw.