The Doomed City
"The Doomed City" is set in an experimental city whose sun gets switched on in the morning and switched off at night, bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its inhabitants are people who were plucked from twentieth-century history at various times and places and left to govern themselves, advised by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a die-hard believer in the Experiment, even though his first job in the city is as a garbage collector. And as increasinbly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
16mentions
13people
2011–2024years
44% recommend56% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Highly recommend Doomed City, probably the most complex novel the Strugackis ever wrote.
- The Doomed City is also great. Tried to read Noon and it was too unfocused for me.
- Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. If you start with their earliest work, like "The Land of Crimson Clouds", you can get vibe, how communist Sci-Fi looked. If you read later stuff, like "Tale of the Troika", then you get story humorously criticizing soviet bureaucracy. Then there is pretty serious stuff, like "The Doomed City" or "Ugly Swans". You probably know "Roadside Picnic" - this interpretations in films and gaming are known as "Stalker".
- Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were pretty prolific during this time (often writing in secret, and reciting their works only to trusted friends).
"The Doomed City" is one of the best pieces of philosophical scifi I've ever read:
- This is by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who were contemporaries of Lem.
FWIW by favorite Strugatsky novels were Hard to Be a God, and The Doomed City.
- FYI, there's a recent English translation of "The Doomed City" by the Strugatsky brothers, if you're into Soviet Sci-fi beyond Stanisław Lem, or if you want to see what dystopian fiction written by citizens of an actual dystopia looks like.
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