📘 Arkady & Boris Strugatksy, One Billion Years to the End of the World

21 Sep, 2026

The last time i read One Billion Years to the End of the World was in 2022, i believe. I read it hot off the tracks of Roadside Picnic, eager to read more conceptual gymnastics like those of the latter. It did not disappoint and i ended up re-reading both; Roadside Picnic last year, and One Billion... this year. Perhaps the fact that i re-read them is telling, though i maintain, each reading of any given text constitutes a new text, and this time was no different, or rather, it was different...

You see, i'd retained the central plot of the novella, which concerned gradually arriving at the hypothesis of a Homeostatic Universe, i.e., one which seeks to maintain its current state; a biological metaphor modelled on the human body, which must maintain homeostasis to stave off death. Thus, when Malianov, Weingarten, Glukhov, and Gubar are besieged by unexpected circumstances seeking to curtail their research, Vecherovsky theorises that the universe itself is out to get them. Which is why Malianov, an astronomer, is constantly being interrupted while he attempts to work out a particular mathematical problem concerning astrophysics. What i had forgotten was the theory that had been discarded on the way to the final hypothesis.

Weingarten, a biologist, who had been continuously beset by problems of a personal nature while working on an organic substance he called 'revertase' had proposed a different cause for the troubles faced by the researchers (in a rather interesting manœuvre for a sci-fi novel, there is an orientalist, i.e. a literary scholar whose research is also of interest. The position of women, however, is incredibly dire, they're all wives and temptresses in the book): an alien super-civilisation that wished to preserve its supremacy by keeping the laws of physics from being discovered by lower life-forms was hindering the work of our less-than-intrepid protagonists. This is the part which interested me this time; as Vecherovsky puts it, the hypothesis of an alien super-civilisation is just too easy, it stinks of a continued reliance on the existence of god, a concept which, according to the mathematician, is outdated, a remnant of the 19th century. For myself, i'd argue, after John Rieder, that alien super-civilisations tend to have roots in the re-figuration of narratives of colonialism and imperialism¹, but i accept the god thesis proposed within the narrative as well. As we know very well, scientists can never really get over god.

Of course, Weingarten's conclusion is understandable in-universe; the man is a biologist, therefore, he keeps his hypotheses consistent with his discipline. And i'd like to think that herein lies a very specific form of differentiation between the run-off-the-mill sci-fi story, and what the Strugatskies attempt. In Vecherovsky's words, once again, aliens would be too easy, it would court a space-opera with all its manichaean undertones, lack of subtlety, and crude political agendas of supporting imperialism in the third world (and by the by, the narrative is pointedly political, it attacks the censorship practices of the Soviet Union in the 1970s, i.e., its revisionist era). Instead, Malianova and Vecherovsky settle on a Homeostatic Universe, and even so, it's only a hypothesis, there is no proof, merely an atmosphere of intense fear and paranoia.

The Homeostatic Universe, however, is not an un-inflected theory; it leans heavily on the idea of Nature (yeah, that's right, with a capital N). Nature is a fairly specific and contested category, and well, i'm tempted to dive into it, but i will hold myself back because it's been a while since i worked on the concept seriously, i have no idea where all my papers are buried at the moment, and i do abhor un-cited works of philosophy. Suffice to say, even Vecherovsky's highly sophisticated theory which purports to separate itself from the outdated ideas of the 19th century is founded on the concept of a vivified nature, one endowed with elements of the human body as it is conceived of in medicine, at the end of the day, it's not really that different from Weingarten's, it's a god by any other name, simply further abstracted from the biologist's xenological hypothesis.

Lately i've found myself feeling intensely hostile to the idea of Nature, at least, its Enlightenment configuration (also the most common configuration), wherein it is enshrined as a sphere that is separate from human activity, a sphere which humans may freely act upon in order to achieve their ends. The fact is, these two categories, Human and Nature, are concepts that have been mobilised for a rather sinister end: the dehumanisation and exploitation of people rendered civilisationally lacking by colonialism and its co-eval and constitutive knowledge production following the events of 1492². And i think the Strugatsky brothers struggle against this to a meagre extent; the universe that upends Malianov's research is decidedly human, or rather, the universe is not separated into Human and Nature. I don't claim that the Strugatskies were directly interested in this facet of philosophy while they were writing, but they certainly grasped something of the complexity of their conceptual categories, which is why it makes for good science fiction. Darko Suvin was certainly tickled by it, that much i can confidently state, as am i.

#book review #sci-fi