Definitely Maybe

by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

A Soviet sci-fi novel about a group of scientists whose research gets sabotaged by mysterious forces that might be the universe itself.

The Strugatsky brothers wrote this in the mid-1970s and set it in a regular Leningrad apartment during a heatwave. A physicist named Malianov is close to a breakthrough when strange things start happening. Beautiful women show up at his door, old friends appear with bottles of wine, the phone keeps ringing with wrong numbers, and then his colleagues report the same kinds of disruptions. Something does not want them to finish their work. The original Russian title is “One Billion Years to the End of the World,” which gives you a sense of the scale they were thinking at.

On the surface it reads like a paranoid thriller, but underneath it asks real questions about whether the universe has a kind of immune system that kicks in when human knowledge gets too close to something dangerous. The Strugatskys were masters at writing stories that looked like sci-fi but were really about living under a system that crushes independent thinking. My retelling goes chapter by chapter, covering all 11 chapters plus the afterword.

Definitely Maybe Chapter 9 - Choices and Consequences

Chapter 9 is where people start making their choices. And most of them choose to quit.

The Impossible Telegram

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.