Sasha, a young computer programmer from Leningrad, is driving through the forests of Northwest Russia to meet up with some friends for a nature vacation. He picks up a couple of local hitchhikers, who persuade him to come work with them at the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy, or NITWiT. The adventures Sasha has in the largely dysfunctional Institute involve all sorts of magical beings and devices—a wish-granting fish, a talking cat who can remember only the beginnings of stories, a sofa that translates fairy tales into reality, a motorcycle that can zoom into the imagined future, a hungry dog-size mosquito—along with a variety of wizards (including Merlin), vampires, and petty bureaucrats.First published in Russia in 1964, Monday Starts on Saturday has become the most popular Strugatsky novel in the authors' homeland. Like the works of Gogol and Kafka, it tackles the nature of institutions—here focusing on one devoted to discovering and perfecting human happiness. By turns wildly imaginative, hilarious, and disturbing, Monday Starts on Saturday is a comic masterpiece by two of the world's greatest science fiction writers.

The 22nd Century. Mankind is free the age-old misery and poverty that have kept it in bondage, free to create a new world, to explore the universe, to confront the mysteries of human existence. Russia's greatest S-F writers, Arkday and Boris Strugatsky, have produced a futuristic masterpiece of epic proportions and breathtaking vision.Two interplanetary adventurers hurtle through space at a speed faster than light, and are flung a hundred years into the 22nd century. They find themselves on a planet both like and unlike the earth they abandoned so very long ago and so recently.It is a planet ruled by wisdom, where automated farms feed tens million inhabitants, where a complete system of moving roads brings the farthest outposts into close communion, where an advanced science in mechanization approaches the mysterious complexity of life itself. Here all effort is bound to the exhilarating art if discovery, way below the planet's waters, deep into the endless reaches of space and far beyond the boundless zones of the human mind.

Ivan Zhilin, posing as a writer working on a novel, visits a seaside resort city to investigate a series of mysterious deaths. Zhilin's role as an undercover agent becomes apparent to the reader only gradually and is not brought into the open until the final chapters of the novel. While being given a tour of the city, a tourism official tells Zhilin that he will get no work done, as he will be distracted by the "twelve circles of paradise" found in the city. These include the Fishers, which provide thrill seekers with situations of extreme and potentially fatal terror, the Shivers, which electronically induce pleasurable dreams to large crowds of people, and the Society of Patrons of Arts, who procure priceless works of art and ritualistically destroy them. The culture of this city has become utterly decadent, the product of an age of universal affluence. Zhilin refers to the present state of the world as "the age of the boob" where the highest priority is placed on orgiastic pleasure and staving off boredom, to the neglect of culture, education and scientific progress.The ultimate expression of the decadence of Earth culture is the mysterious "slug", which is apparently responsible for the deaths that Zhilin is investigating. At first Zhilin believes it to be some sort of narcotic, distributed by gangsters with secret laboratories and trafficking networks. Zhilin progressively finds clues that lead him to Peck Xenai, his former classmate and the last surviving member of his international unit that fought the Fascists some years before. Peck, however, is physically ravaged by alcoholism and the use of "slug" and does not even recognize Zhilin when he finds him. Zhilin succeeds in getting a "slug" from Peck, in the form of a small silver electronic component. What Zhilin finds when he plugs the "slug" into his radio receiver and lies in the bathtub causes him to rethink the entire situation. "Slug" turns out to be a way of generating an artificial reality significantly more intense than normal reality, to the point where there is virtually no comparison between our reality and that of the "slug". People become addicted to it and spend increasing amounts of time unconscious in their bathtubs until it kills them by nervous exhaustion or brain hemorrhages. This is "the final circle of paradise".

In the far future humanity explore distant planets while encountering different life forms on some of them. The scouts of the explorers are called Progressors and are highly trained in all forms of self-defense. One of these Progressors, Lev Abalkin secretly came back to Earth and for some reason it causes a lot of panic among high-ranking security people. Maxim Kammerer works for a security agency. He is assigned to a task of finding Lev Abalkin. Actually, he has two tasks: to find the rogue Progressor and to figure out what sort of danger he poses on our planet. As he investigates, he realizes the extraordinary measures were taken by somebody to keep Lev Abalkin as far from Earth as possible. It all might sound like a sci-fi thriller, but it is actually more mystery book set in the future with the main question: who is Lev Abalkin?

Far Rainbow:This one was pretty intense. It works well as both a disaster novel and a sci-fi novel, and I felt that the characters were well developed considering the time they were given. The Strugatsky brothers do as well to make you feel content and safe in the beginning as they do to make you feel tense and scrambled by the conclusion. My only serious complaint, really, is that there were some aspects that were poorly communicated. I wasn't clear on what The Wave actually is, for example, and if there was an explanation in there then I must have skimmed over it. Still, you just can't beat that final scene where the characters are sitting on the beach waiting for their abrupt conclusion. It felt very strongly of the 2013 film These Final Hours, and it begs the question as to whether or not the film drew some of its inspirations here.The Second Invasion from Mars:This was much more of an endearing and pleasantly perplexing read. The characters are just shy of something out of Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, and here the authors did a marvelous job of bringing to the fore these absurdist qualities. It is an approach that worked so well for the narrative, and I often found myself chuckling or shaking my head. I loved the protagonist and his obsession with his pension, and it did well to highlight this curious facet of the modern man: no matter how shocking current events may be, we are, first and foremost, concerned with mitigating our own discomforts. It's a great read, if a bit pessimistic; the Strugatsky vision of humanity is apparently a planet of bemused serfs, and I'm here for it.