The Ugly Swans

In The Ugly Swans (1979), the Strugatsky brothers place their protagonist, the dissident writer Victor Banev, in a rain-soaked provincial town whose most unsettling residents are the "slimies," disfigured outcasts quarantined in a former leper colony. While the town's adults regard them with fear and contempt, the local children, including Banev's own daughter, are drawn to them. The reason, as Banev gradually understands, is that the slimies may represent the next stage of human evolution, intellectually and morally beyond the generation that fears them. The novel works as both a political allegory about Soviet conformism and generational stagnation, and as a genuinely unsettling vision of what progress might actually cost. Originally written in 1966-67 for the Soviet literary magazine Molodaya Gvardiya, the novel was suppressed before publication and circulated in samizdat before an unauthorized edition appeared in West Germany in 1972. It was not published in the USSR until 1987. This first U.S. edition, translated by Alice Stone Nakhimovsky and Alexander Nakhimovsky, appeared in 1979.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Macmillan, 1979. ISBN: 0026151901. #10386.
Fine in fine dust jacket.