Monday Begins on Saturday
When young programmer Alexander Ivanovich Privalov picks up two hitchhikers while driving in Karelia, he is drawn into the mysterious world of the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy, where research into magic is serious business. And where science, sorcery and socialism meet, can chaos be far behind?
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8recommend
19mentions
16people
2009–2026years
42% recommend53% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Strugatski brothers' Monday Begins on Saturday is aslo a difficult translation from Russian. I really love Russian literature, especially modern writers like Vladimir Sorokin, it's so different.
- "Hard to be a God" of Strugatsky Brothers.
"Monday Begins on Saturday", circa 1965, of the same authors. That is a satiric story full of brilliant humor about programmer (main hero) in Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry. This book is literally the reason why I am a programmer now.
- The noon universe is a thoroughly depressing set of books.
Most of the plot invariably occurs not in the ideal Noon society, but in one or another form of recent/current dystopia: the totalitarian state of Inhabited Island's Saraksh, the feudalist gulag of EN-7031 in Escape Attempt, Arkanar's descent into a fascist police state in Hard to be God...
Over and over, the ideal humans from future-earth hold up a twisted mirror to our own life as they try to engage and help but discover there are no good answers - at best, they don't make things any worse; but often they fail in even that much.
Monday begins on Saturday is a much more upbeat story that's actually about people who are better than who we are right now, in an environment that lets them thrive; and you do need both those components for a utopia - contrast with A Thousand Years 'till the End of the World, which has people of similar character (or better; they overcome challenges of a difficulty that Monday begins on Saturday never presents its cast with in the first place) but in an antagonistic environment, and is again super depressing.
While Watts expands horrors we are used to to new lengths, the Strugatsky brothers are out to show that even ideally moral superhumans can't save us from ourselves.
- Agreed. Monday Begins on Saturday is amazing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monday_Begins_on_Saturday
- If you enjoy allegorical, non-Western sci-fi, I would highly recommend the work of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, two prolific brothers who collaborated on a wide range of largely science-fictional material during Soviet times. Most of their work was heavily censored for allegorical references to the contemporary Soviet society and ideology; unredacted English translations have been published over the past fifteen years or so with epilogues written by Boris covering the censorship process. I would recommend beginning with "The Dead Mountaineer's Inn," which I started with, although "Hard to be a God" and "Monday Begins on Saturday" are more strongly allegorical. I read their entire catalogue after reading a book review last year and becoming (mildly) obsessed.
- Many of the ex-USSR software engineers have read and adore "Monday Begins on Saturday" which is a humorous and satirical story about a programmer working for the Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry. It was written in 1965 when the whole 'programmer' concept was unknown to the majority of population, but that's an altogether different story.
