Chapter 4 switches to third person and takes us outside, into the open. Gack and Dramba are walking along a deserted road on Earth’s plains. The sun is up, grasshoppers are screaming, and the road stretches from one horizon to the other in a perfectly straight line.
Chapter 3 is told entirely from Gack’s perspective, and it’s honestly hilarious and sad at the same time. The guy has been on Earth for five days and he’s completely overwhelmed.
So here’s what happened. Gack wakes up completely naked on a hospital bed. Two men are sitting next to him. One is a rosy-faced doctor beaming at him like a saint from an old icon. The other is a skinny, tanned guy with grey hair and a straw sticking out of his mouth. He says nothing. Just watches.
Chapter 1 hits you like a punch. No slow setup, no worldbuilding lectures. You are dropped straight into mud, smoke, and a young soldier named Gack who has zero patience for the mess he just walked into.
If you grew up in the USSR or any post-Soviet country, you know Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. They were THE science fiction writers. Not just popular, but genuinely brilliant. Think of them as the Soviet version of Arthur C. Clarke meets Philip K. Dick. They wrote dozens of novels and short stories, and most of them still hold up today.
We made it. Fourteen posts, eleven chapters, one afterword, and a whole lot of cognac and cigarettes later, here are my thoughts on Definitely Maybe as a whole.
If you thought the novel itself was intense, wait until you read what was happening behind the scenes. The afterword and translator’s note turn Definitely Maybe from a great sci-fi story into something much more personal and much more real.
This is it. The last chapter. And the Strugatsky brothers end their novel exactly the way they should: with fire, cognac, and a question that has no answer.
Chapter 10 is the one that broke me a little. Everything has been building toward this, and now the pressure finally cracks Malianov open.
Chapter 9 is where people start making their choices. And most of them choose to quit.
Let’s start with the thing that should terrify everyone. That telegram Irina got? “DMITRI BAD HURRY TO MAKE IT IN TIME.” It was signed by Snegovoi. But Snegovoi was already dead when it was sent. Nobody went to a telegraph office and typed it out. The machine just printed it. By itself.