The Final Circle of Paradise
First hardcover edition in English, 1979
The Final Circle of Paradise (1965) is a dystopian novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the most celebrated Soviet science fiction writers of their era. The novel is set in a prosperous seaside resort city in an unnamed Western country, a society of total material abundance where the population has turned entirely toward the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of boredom. The protagonist Ivan Zhilin, an undercover agent for a world governing body, arrives posing as a writer to investigate a series of mysterious deaths. What he finds is a culture in full decadent bloom: thrill-seeking entertainments that court real death, devices that electronically induce mass euphoria, and ritualistic destruction of priceless artworks. Behind all of it is the "sleg," a device that generates an artificial reality so overwhelmingly vivid that users abandon ordinary life entirely, eventually dying of neural exhaustion.
The novel's target is the West and its consumer culture rather than Soviet society, which allowed the Strugatskys to publish it without interference. Booker's The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature describes it as a "somewhat Huxleyan depiction of bourgeois decadence," and the comparison to Brave New World is apt: both novels imagine a society that has achieved material comfort at the cost of everything that makes life meaningful. The Russian title, Khishchnye veshchi veka, translates more literally as "Predatory Things of the Century," a phrase drawn from a poem by Andrei Voznesensky. Boris Strugatsky later observed that most of the novel's predictions had come true in Western societies within forty to fifty years of its publication.
First published in English by DAW Books in 1976 as a paperback original, translated by Leonid Renen. This edition, published by Dennis Dobson in 1979, is the first hardcover English language edition.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, black boards with silver lettering on spine. London: Dennis Dobson, 1979. ISBN: 0234721456. #11456.
Very good copy in dust jacket with a couple closed tears and light soiling. Uncommon.
The novel's target is the West and its consumer culture rather than Soviet society, which allowed the Strugatskys to publish it without interference. Booker's The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature describes it as a "somewhat Huxleyan depiction of bourgeois decadence," and the comparison to Brave New World is apt: both novels imagine a society that has achieved material comfort at the cost of everything that makes life meaningful. The Russian title, Khishchnye veshchi veka, translates more literally as "Predatory Things of the Century," a phrase drawn from a poem by Andrei Voznesensky. Boris Strugatsky later observed that most of the novel's predictions had come true in Western societies within forty to fifty years of its publication.
First published in English by DAW Books in 1976 as a paperback original, translated by Leonid Renen. This edition, published by Dennis Dobson in 1979, is the first hardcover English language edition.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, black boards with silver lettering on spine. London: Dennis Dobson, 1979. ISBN: 0234721456. #11456.
Very good copy in dust jacket with a couple closed tears and light soiling. Uncommon.
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