Monday Starts On Saturday

I've been enjoying working my way through the Strugatsky Brothers' novels. I just finished "Monday Starts On Saturday," which is the fourth one of theirs I've read. I haven't been following any particular order, just what happens to be at the library. All of their books I've read up until now have been science fiction, although they're all pretty different from each other. Roadside Picnic is set on a future Earth, not exactly post-apocalyptic but aspects of it can seem dystopic. Hard to Be a God was set on another planet, but its setting feels equivalent to our historic past. Monday Starts on Saturday is set on Earth, in modern times, but the setting feels very strange. 

 

MINI SPOILERS

It takes until about a third of the way through the book to clock what's going on. The narrator, Privalov, is a young computer programmer in the contemporary 1960s. He's driving while on vacation and picks up two hitchhikers, who set him up in an unusual house. This leads into an increasingly odd series of encounters: a quirky landlady, a very disturbed night sleeping on the couch, repeated dreams, disembodied voices, a talking cat, a regenerating coin, and so on.

For a while I thought that Privalov was in an extended dream, thinking that he was waking up but actually dreaming. We eventually learn that these fantastic things are really happening. This isn't really a sci-fi book, more of a book about magic, being done in the "real world" of the Soviet Union.

Once this becomes clear, Privalov becomes a part of this world, joining NITWiT: the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy. The rest of the book is kind of a series of vignettes about life in the Institute: the magical research being conducted, the zany scientist/magicians, the administration and bureaucracy, feuds and rivalries and collaborations. There are demons and djinns and homonculi and all sorts of creation and manipulation of matter.

The setting reminded me of quite a few other books without being very much like any of them. I was immediately reminded of the Laundry Files by Charles Stross, which I'm reading in parallel. Like that book, MSoS has an explicit linkage between mathematics and magic: the Aldan computer is a key component to the simulations that power many magical experiments. And both books/series pay nearly equal attention to the mundane bureaucracy that supports the supernatural excitement. But the tones of the books are very different; both are funny, but the Laundry Files tends to be very sarcastic, while MSoS is satirical but also optimistic, maybe having a bit more of a Swiftian or even occasionally Wodehousian voice. And the Laundry Files are set against a very dark and malevolent Lovecraft-esque backdrop, while MSoS's magic feels much more whimsical and ridiculous.

The "magic in the real world" angle to the book feels a bit like Harry Potter in general and Hogwarts in particular, with a sense of place where magic is being focused on in a world that mostly ignores it; but there isn't a focus on learning magic at all in MSoS, NITWiT is very much a research institute and not at all a teaching college. As you get further in the book, it also seems like there's a different relation between magic and mundanity. In Harry Potter, magic is real in our world, but all non-magical people are ignorant of it. But late in MSoS, there are a bunch of sections where journalists are covering the "experiments" of various researcher-magicians, and it's clear that stuff is being written about and reported on. So it seems like this is probably an alternate world to ours and not a hidden side to our world. (Though, now that I'm writing that, I suppose it's also possible that these journalists are writing for a select audience, maybe not the general population, in which case the overall dynamic may be similar.)

The overall feel of the setting is maybe closest to Unseen University from Terry Pratchett's Discworld, especially the bumbling of the supposedly very intelligent wizards. But again, MSoS is definitely set in the Soviet Union and not a fictional world.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when Privalov volunteers to be a guinea pig in a time machine. "Time machine" is one of the only elements of this book that sounds science-fiction-y, but this is very different from an H. G. Wells - style machine. This machine takes the rider into the "described past" or the "described future": not our own timeline, but the timeline as recorded by historians or as predicted by science-fiction writers. Privalov opts to go into the future, which feels like it's probably a tongue-in-cheek criticism of Soviet science fiction. He sees hundreds of rockets blasting off into space, each one with a heroic young man being seen off by a doting young woman. Later on each one comes back with a tale to tell of what they encountered out in space. Privalov is very bored at how there is so much talking and so little action, which feels like a tongue-in-cheek criticism of contemporary Soviet sci-fi, or perhaps some lampshading self-criticism.

A particularly interesting segment occurs when Privalov encounters the "iron wall" that blocks off the view from one side of the "Refrigerator" complex: I'm like 99% sure this is a reference to the "iron curtain". A young woman says he's allowed to look at the other side but will have to answer for it, which fits with the supposedly open but de-facto autocratic surveillance state of the era. Privalov peeks through a door and is immediately overwhelmed by what he sees on the other side, a horrifically violent post-apocalyptic scene of destruction and despair. He revisits the door a couple of times, briefly chatting with an English-speaking man on the other side. Over there, they have dealt with malevolent invaders from other planets: a planet of aggressive bees, a planet of aggressive spiders, a planet of aggressive vampires, even a planet of aggressive Communists! I laughed out loud at that. Again, this has to be meta commentary on the state of science fiction in the 1960s, and it's fascinating to see a sort of comparative literature lens over genre fiction from within a work of genre fiction itself.

The end of the book does get a bit more science-y and a bit less fantasy-y, but the science always feels pretty magical and unknowable. There's an interesting bit on counter-motion near the end, where someone starts traveling backwards in time: not second-by-second, but living one day midnight to midnight, then jumping back to midnight on the previous day, and so on. This feels less plausible to me than a continuous Looper-style backwards flow through time, and the characters in the book are similarly initially skeptical. Ultimately it serves the story, which seems to be what this is all about: not science fiction for science's sake but for fiction's sake.

END SPOILERS

I looked up a few things in the book after finishing it, which led me down a wiki wormhole that led to Trofim Lysenko, who was the inspiration for a particularly pompous and buffoonish character. Reading about that person makes me feel freshly depressed about the times ahead for the United States with RFK Jr. in charge of our national health.

I haven't dug deep into this, but I have been fascinated by Boris's afterwords to these novels, which usually touch on the censorship the brothers occurred under the Soviet regime. There was a bit of a dance, where sometimes they were able to slip through some criticisms and original ideas, other times innocent and innocuous things would bring down the censorship hammer. Sometime I would love to read a biography of them, I'm so curious what their personal ideology was, how that was expressed through their writing, and what their experiences were like living through the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Overall, Monday Starts On Saturday leaves me even more impressed at the Strugatsky brothers. I'm coming to appreciate how there is a huge variance not just in their stories and settings, but even the style and tone of their books. Most of their books may end up getting filed under "Science Fiction", but each one I've read has felt like a wholly original creation. I'm glad that I have more of their books to look forward to!