Prisoners of Power
First hardcover edition in English, 1979
Prisoners of Power (1978), published in the Soviet Union in 1969 as Obitaemyi Ostrov ("The Inhabited Island"), is one of the Strugatsky brothers' most ambitious novels. A young man named Maxim, an explorer from a utopian future Earth, crash-lands on an unknown planet and finds himself stranded in a society that has survived nuclear war and descended into brutal authoritarian rule. The planet's population is kept docile through a network of radiation towers that suppress independent thought and induce euphoric compliance in most of the population, while a small percentage experience agonizing pain instead, making them natural dissidents. Maxim, immune to the towers' effects, gradually discovers the full machinery of the regime and becomes entangled with underground resistance movements.
The novel works simultaneously as an adventure story and political allegory. The towers are an unmistakable metaphor for Soviet ideological control, and the populace's inability to perceive their own manipulation is the novel's darkest observation. Where Hard to Be a God asks what a powerful outsider owes to a society he cannot save, Prisoners of Power asks what happens when that outsider decides to act and discovers the consequences of well-intentioned intervention.
This is the first English language edition, published by Macmillan in 1978 as part of their Best of Soviet Science Fiction series, translated by Helen Saltz Jacobson. Includes an introduction by Theodore Sturgeon and cover artwork by Richard Powers.
Hardcover. First American Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1977. ISBN: 0026151707. #11459.
Fine in fine in dust jacket.
The novel works simultaneously as an adventure story and political allegory. The towers are an unmistakable metaphor for Soviet ideological control, and the populace's inability to perceive their own manipulation is the novel's darkest observation. Where Hard to Be a God asks what a powerful outsider owes to a society he cannot save, Prisoners of Power asks what happens when that outsider decides to act and discovers the consequences of well-intentioned intervention.
This is the first English language edition, published by Macmillan in 1978 as part of their Best of Soviet Science Fiction series, translated by Helen Saltz Jacobson. Includes an introduction by Theodore Sturgeon and cover artwork by Richard Powers.
Hardcover. First American Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1977. ISBN: 0026151707. #11459.
Fine in fine in dust jacket.
Related items
