Definitely Maybe (novel)

Billion years before the end of the world, even a billion years before the end of the world (Russian: За миллиард лет до конца света ), is a 1977 published science fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The novel was published in German in the translation of Welta Ehlert first proposed in 1980 in the publishing world and the people in the GDR and a year later in Germany at Heyne. In 1986 he came out with Suhrkamp.

Content

During a hot summer, the astrophysicist Maljanow is in a high rise in Leningrad in the 1970s with his work on the interaction of stars and diffuse matter close to a breakthrough. From the completion however, it is held by a series of unusual events: He receives a non- ordered delivery already paid delicatessen; an attractive stranger who claims to be a school friend of his wife, is at the door and spends the night in his apartment; his neighbor, who works for a secret government project, commits suicide or is murdered; Maljanow is heard and suspected by the police.

Maljanow learns of some well-known scientists from other disciplines that they will also be held partly by more drastic and absurd measures of their work. Behind these processes an extraterrestrial civilization, or Super existing since time immemorial Secret Society of Nine, the both want to stop the progress of mankind?

His neighbor, the mathematician Wetscherowski, believed that the homeostatic world building, the balance between increasing rationality and non-decreasing entropy is threatened by the increasing knowledge of mankind in the distant future, and the current events are the first reaction of the universe to the danger to mankind could turn into a super civilization. The world building continues to fight back.

Under increasing pressure, the scientists quit for various reasons their research, only Wetscherowski, who considers this to be a law of nature that should be researched and then used does not capitulate. Through the work of the other, he wants to fight alone in the solitude of the Pamir against the universe.

Form

The novel can be assigned to the Powesti due to the small size and concentration on the figure Maljanow within the Russian literature. The individual chapters and sections begin and end with an ellipsis and commenced or unfinished sentences. In the eighth chapter, the narrative perspective from the third to the first person ( Maljanow ) changes. More important than an explanation are the Strugazkis the different reactions of the scientists, given the anonymous overpowering threat. Erik Simon is one of the novel to the philosophical novels of the Strugazkis.

Filming

The film Days of Darkness by Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov based on the novel of the Strugazkis.

Evidence

Atom volcano Golkonda | Return | Interns | escape | The remote rainbow | It is not easy to be a God | The Monday begins on Saturday | The greedy things of the Century | The second invasion of Martians | The snail on the slope | The Tale of Troika | the inhabited Island | Hotel "Zum unfortunate climber " | the third Civilization | Picnic along the way | the Boy from Hell | billion years before the end of the world | A beetle in the anthill | the waves drown the wind | the lame fate | the experiment | the weight of evil

• Literary work
• Science fiction literature
• Literature ( Russian)
• Literature ( 20th century)
• Work of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
• Novel, epic
• Literature (Soviet Union)