Arkady Strugatsky: Monday Begins on Saturday

I understood that he was right. It all wouldn’t fit into just one question. Would there be a war? Would I amount to something? Would the recipe for universal happiness be found? Would the last fool die someday?

I said, “Could I come to see you tomorrow morning?”

He shook his head, and replied, with what seemed to be a touch of perverse enjoyment, “No. It is quite impossible, Tomorrow morning, Alexander Ivanovich, you will be called by the Kitezhgrad plant, and I will have to approve your trip.”

I felt stupid. There was something degrading about this determinism, delivering me, an independent person with free will, to totally defined steps and actions outside of my control. And it was not a question of whether I wanted to go to Kitezhgrad or not. It was a question of inevitability. Now I could not die or get sick, or act up (“up to getting fired”). I was fated, and for the first time, I grasped the terrible meaning of this word. I had always known that it was bad to he fated to execution or blindness, for example. But to be fated to the love of the most wonderful girl in the world, to a round-the-world voyage, and to the Kitezhgrad trip (where, incidentally, I had rared to go for the past three months) also proved to be most unsettling. The knowledge of the future now presented itself to me in an entirely new light.

“It’s bad to read a good book from its end, isn’t it?” said Janus Poluektovich, watching me frankly. “As to your questions, Alexander Ivanovich… try to understand, Alexander Ivanovich, that a single future does not exist for everyone. They are many, and each one of your actions creates one of them. You will come to understand that,” he said convincingly. “Very definitely, you will understand it.”

Later I did indeed understand it.

But that’s really an altogether different story.

A short epilogue and commentary by the head of the SRITS computing laboratory, junior scientist A.I. Privalov.

The subject sketches about life in the Scientific Research Institute of Thaumaturgy and Spellcraft are not, in my view, realistic in the strict sense of the word. Nevertheless they possess certain virtues that favorably distinguish them from the analogous works of G. Perspicaciov and B. Pupilov and consequently permit their recommendation to a wide circle of readers.

First of all it should be noted that the authors were able to perceive the situation and to distinguish that which is progressive in the work of the Institute from the conservative. The sketches do not evoke the kind of irritation that one experiences when reading adulatory articles about the hack tricks of Vibegallo or the enraptured transliterations of the irresponsible prognostications from the Department of Absolute Knowledge. Further, it is a pleasure to note the correct attitude of the authors to the magus as a human being. For them, the magus is not an object of fearful admiration and adulation, but neither is he the irritating film fool, a person out of this world who is constantly losing his glasses, is incapable of punching a hooligan in the face, and reads excerpts from. Difterential and integral Equations to the girl in love. All this means that the authors had assumed the proper attitude toward their subject. The authors should also be given credit for presenting the Institute environment from the viewpoint of a novice and for not missing the profound correlation between the laws of magic and the laws of administration. As to the shortcomings of the sketches, the preponderant majority of them are the result of the fundamental humanitarian orientation of the authors. Being professional writers, they time and again show a predilection for the so-called artistic verity to the so-called verity of facts. Also, being professional writers, and just as the majority of writers, they are insistently emotional and pitifully ignorant in matters of modern magic. While in no way protesting the publication of these sketches, I feel nevertheless impelled to point out certain concrete errors and inaccuracies.

I. The title of the sketches, it seems to me, does not correspond with their content. Using the title Monday Begins on Saturday, which is indeed a widespread saying among us, the authors apparently wished to state that the magi work without respite even when they are resting. In reality such is almost the case. But it is not evident in the sketches. The authors became excessively entranced by the exotic aspects of our activities and succumbed to the temptation to proffer the more adventurous and exciting episodes. The adventures of the spirit, which constitute the essence of life in any magus, were given almost no expression in the sketches. Of course, I don’t include here the last chapter of Part Three, where the authors did attempt to depict the labor of the mind, but based themselves on the ungrateful medium of a rather dilettantish and elementary problem in logic. (Incidentally, I had expounded my viewpoint on this question to the authors, but they shrugged their shoulders and said, in something of a pique, that I took the sketches too seriously.)

2. The aforementioned ignorance of the problems of magic as a science plays nasty jokes on the authors throughout the entire length of the book. As, for example, in formulating the M.F. Redkin dissertation theme, they admitted fourteen (!) errors. The weighty term “hyperfield,” which they obviously liked very much, is inserted improperly into the text over and over again. Apparently it’s beyond their ken that the sofa-translator radiates not an M-field, but a Mu-field; that the term “water-of-life” had gone out of usage two centuries ago; that the mysterious apparatus under the name of “aquavitometer” and a computer by the name of “Aldan” do not exist in nature; that the head of a computation laboratory very seldom checks programs—for which purpose there are programmer-mathematicians (of which we have two, whom the authors stubbornly persist in calling girls). The description of materialization exercises in the first chapter of Part Two is done in a repugnant manner: examples of wild terminology that must remain on the conscience of the authors include, “vector magistatum” and “Auers’ incantation.” The Stokes equation has no bearing whatsoever on materialization and Saturn could in no way be in the constellation of Libra at that time. (This last lapse, particularly, is all the more unforgivable since I was given to understand that one of the authors is a professional astronomer.) The list of these kinds of inaccuracies and incongruities could be extended with no great exertion, but I refrain from doing so, since the authors categorically refused to change a single item. They also refused to expunge the terminology that they did not understand: one said that it was necessary for the ambience, and the other—that it adds color. I was, by the way, forced to agree that the preponderant majority of the readers could not distinguish the correct from the erroneous terminology, and also that no matter what terminology was employed, no reasonable reader would believe it anyway.

3. The pursuit of the above-mentioned artistic verity (as expressed by one of the authors) and character development (as expressed by the other) has led to a considerable distortion of the images of the real people taking part in the story. As a matter of general fact, the authors are inclined toward a certain belittlement of heroes and, consequently, some sort of believability has been achieved by them, possibly only in the case of Vibegallo, and to some extent with Cristobal Junta (I am not counting the episodic projection of the vampire Alfred, who indeed has emerged more successfully than anyone else). For example, the authors assert that Korneev is rude and imagine that the reader can construct an adequate perception of this rudeness for himself. Yes, Korneev is indeed rude. But it is precisely for this reason that Korneev, as described, appears as a “semitransparent inventor” (in the terminology of the authors themselves) as compared with the real Korneev. The same applies to the legendary politeness of B, Amperian. R.P. Oira-Oira is completely fleshless in the sketches, although in the very period described, he was divorcing his second wife and expected to marry for the third time. The adduced examples are probably adequate to keep the reader from lending too much credence to my own portrayal in the stories.