Definitely Maybe (novel)

Definitely Maybe (Russian: За миллиард лет до конца света, Za milliard let do kontsa sveta, literal translation: A Billion Years Before the End of the World, sometimes called Definitely Maybe: A Manuscript Discovered Under Unusual Circumstances) is a sci fi novel written in 1974 by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

Plot summary

Action takes place in the Leningrad, USSR, apparently in the 1970s.

The protagonist, Dmitry Aleskeevich Malyanov (Дмитрий Алексеевич Малянов) is an astrophysicist who, while officially on vacation, continues to work on his thesis "Interaction of Stars with Diffused Galactic Matter". Just as he begins to realize that he is on the verge of a revolutionary discovery (worthy of a Noble Prize, he claims), his life becomes plagued by strange events.

First, Malyanov is visited unexpectedly by an attractive woman claiming to be his wife's classmate and food and wine arrive for them mysteriously and already paid for. Then his neighbor dies, possibly committing suicide, and Malyanov becomes the murder suspect. After that, as things get more and more strange, a large tree grows through asphalt in minutes in the parking lot just outside his window. These events seem to conspire to prevent Malyanov from returning to his work.

Approaching the problem with a scientific mindset, Malyanov suspects his discovery is in the way of someone (or something) intent on preventing the completion of his work. The same idea occurs to his friends and acquaintances, who find themselves in a similar impasse—some powerful, mysterious, and very selective force impedes their work in fields ranging from biology to mathematical linguistics.

An explanation is proposed by Malyanov's friend and neighbor, the mathematician Vecherovsky (Вечеровский). He posits that the mysterious force is the Universe's reaction to the mankind's scientific pursuit which threatens to harm the very essence of the Universe. This reaction prevents development of "super-civilizations", ones that would be able to counteract the Second law of thermodynamics on a cosmic scale.

Vecherovsky proposes to treat this Universal resistance to scientific progress as a natural phenomenon which can and should be investigated and even harnessed by Science.

Aleksandr Sokurov's movie The Days of the Eclipse is loosely based on the novel.

External links

• Text of the novel at Maksim Moshkow's Library (Russian)