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Hard to Be a God: Volume 19 - Paperback
$15.49
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Hard to Be a God: Volume 19
$15.49
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Is this book for you?
- Feels
- Bleak, Thoughtful, Tense
- Kind of story
- Literary science fiction, Classic
- About
- Power, Isolation
- Pace
- Steady
- How dark
- 3 of 5. Dark, with real menace
- Romance
- A subplot
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Featured in our reading guide: Books Like Project Hail Mary: What to Read Next
Earth sends observers to a medieval world and forbids them to interfere. Then the purges start.
Shelf note: A sixty-year-old novel that reads like it was written this morning.
Anton has spent years in the kingdom of Arkanar posing as Don Rumata, a dissolute nobleman with an inexplicable talent for swordsmanship. His actual job is to watch: to record a feudal society without altering its course, per the strict non-interference doctrine of the Institute of Experimental History.
Then Don Reba takes power and begins systematically killing everyone literate. Scholars, doctors, bookbinders. Rumata has a spacecraft, weapons beyond anything Arkanar can imagine, and explicit orders to do nothing.
The Strugatskys wrote this in 1964, and Soviet readers understood precisely what they were reading. It remains the sharpest argument in science fiction about the ethics of watching: whether restraint in the face of atrocity is wisdom or cowardice, and whether a god who intervenes is still worth being. With a foreword by Hari Kunzru.
Details
- Authors: Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
- Foreword: Hari Kunzru
- Format: Paperback
- ISBN: 9781613748282
Praise
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A thoroughly good book... robust, imaginative, satisfying.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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One of the most skillfully written, heavily freighted science fiction novels I have ever read... The writing is well paced and the narrative is beautifully structured.
Theodore Sturgeon
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An enjoyable, exciting, and gratifying novel.
New York Times
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This long-overdue translation will reintroduce one of the most profound Soviet-era novels to an eager audience.
Literalab
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