This is Part 4 of my chapter-by-chapter retelling of Definitely Maybe by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (ISBN 978-1-61219-282-6). Start from the introduction if you’re new to this series.
This is Part 3 of my chapter-by-chapter retelling of Definitely Maybe by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (ISBN 978-1-61219-282-6). If you’re just joining, start with the introduction.
This is Part 2 of my chapter-by-chapter retelling of Definitely Maybe by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (ISBN 978-1-61219-282-6). If you’re just joining, check out the introduction post first.
So I picked up this book called Definitely Maybe by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and I want to walk you through it chapter by chapter. Think of this as me retelling the story to a friend over coffee. No spoiler-free zone here. We’re going all in.
And that’s it. All 1,168 pages. All 30 chapters. All three parts. 53 posts. If you’ve been reading along since the beginning, you just went through one of the longest, most argued-about novels in the English language. So here are my honest final thoughts.
This is the last chapter. After a thousand pages and change, after every bridge burned and every generator stopped, we get the ending. And it’s both exactly what you expect and somehow still hits hard.
This chapter is called “The Generator” and it works on two levels. There’s a literal generator that breaks down during the torture of John Galt. And there’s the metaphorical generator, Galt himself, the engine of the world that has stopped. Both stop working in this chapter. The lights go out.
The government has John Galt. They have him locked in the royal suite of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel with armed guards outside the door. They have all the guns and all the power and all the television cameras. And they have absolutely no idea what to do with him.
So the looters have Galt locked in the royal suite of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, surrounded by armed guards. And they send in their best people, one after another, to convince him to cooperate. Every single one of them fails. And the way they fail tells you everything about who they are.
“It wasn’t real, was it?” says Mr. Thompson, staring at the radio. The speech is over. Three hours of John Galt dismantling their entire worldview, and the first thing out of the government’s mouth is denial. Not “what do we do now” but “that didn’t just happen, right?”