The Snail on the Slope
First hardcover edition in English, 1980
The Snail on the Slope (1966/1968) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is a bureaucratic dystopia that interweaves two alternating narratives that never directly meet. Peretz works at a government facility perched above a vast, incomprehensible forest. He wants to go down into it, but the Administration that governs forest affairs exists in a state of permanent, circular dysfunction that makes any coherent action impossible. Candide is already in the forest, trying to find his way back to civilization, slowly realizing that the forest's female-dominated biological civilization is absorbing and erasing the human villages around it with complete indifference.
The two storylines operate as a single argument about the powerlessness of the individual against institutions, whether those institutions are bureaucratic or biological. The Administration is a pitch-black parody of Soviet officialdom, a machine that generates paperwork, procedure, and purposelessness in place of any actual function. The forest is something stranger and more unsettling, a civilization that simply has no category for human concerns. Together they form a portrait of a world in which no one is in charge and nothing can be changed.
The novel was suppressed in the Soviet Union for years and published in its complete form only in 1988, nearly two decades after it was written. First British edition, and the first hardcover edition in English. Translated from the Russian by Alan Meyers.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, blue cloth boards with gilt lettering on spine. London: Gollancz, 1980. ISBN: 0234721456. #11458.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
The two storylines operate as a single argument about the powerlessness of the individual against institutions, whether those institutions are bureaucratic or biological. The Administration is a pitch-black parody of Soviet officialdom, a machine that generates paperwork, procedure, and purposelessness in place of any actual function. The forest is something stranger and more unsettling, a civilization that simply has no category for human concerns. Together they form a portrait of a world in which no one is in charge and nothing can be changed.
The novel was suppressed in the Soviet Union for years and published in its complete form only in 1988, nearly two decades after it was written. First British edition, and the first hardcover edition in English. Translated from the Russian by Alan Meyers.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, blue cloth boards with gilt lettering on spine. London: Gollancz, 1980. ISBN: 0234721456. #11458.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
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