One Billion Years to the End of the World

Dmitri Malianov is a theoretical physicist on the verge of a breakthrough — the kind of breakthrough that might rewrite the foundations of his field. Then the interruptions begin. Small things, at first: a visitor, a phone call, an unexpected delivery. Then larger ones. It becomes clear that something — the universe, fate, some force with no name — is systematically preventing him from completing his work.

The Strugatsky brothers’ One Billion Years to the End of the World is Soviet science fiction at its most philosophically ambitious — a short, dense, and completely gripping novel about the relationship between individual genius and the systems, human and cosmic, that resist it. Written in 1976, when Soviet censorship was a daily reality for every intellectual, the novel’s allegorical dimensions were clear to its original readers.

But it is also, simply, a brilliant thriller — tightly plotted, psychologically acute, and building to a conclusion that is as inevitable as it is surprising. One of the masterpieces of Soviet-era fiction, now in a beautiful Penguin Modern Classics edition. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.