Definitely Maybe - Closing Thoughts on the Strugatsky Brothers' Masterpiece

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.

Not That Kind of Sci-Fi

This book has no spaceships. No alien planets. No laser battles. No chosen one saving the universe. It takes place in a regular apartment building in Leningrad during a heat wave. The characters are middle-aged scientists who drink too much and argue about philosophy.

And it’s one of the most unsettling science fiction novels I’ve ever read.

Because the horror here is not about monsters or invasions. It’s about pressure. The slow, grinding, personal kind of pressure that finds your weak spots and pushes until you break. Everyone has a price, and this book is about watching people discover theirs.

The Double Layer

On one level, this is a story about the universe defending itself against scientific progress. A homeostatic mechanism that detects breakthroughs and shuts them down. It’s a fascinating idea, and the Strugatsky brothers never confirm or deny it. They leave it as one theory among many.

On another level, this is a book about living in the Soviet Union. About what happens when the state decides your work is dangerous. Scientists really were pressured to abandon their research. Writers really were told to change their manuscripts. People really did “capitulate,” to use Glukhov’s word, and spend the rest of their lives trying to pretend it didn’t hurt.

Boris Strugatsky wrote this book while being interrogated by the KGB about a friend who was arrested for writing an introduction to poetry. The “Homeostatic Universe” wasn’t just a clever sci-fi concept. It was the system he lived in every day.

Both layers work. You can read this purely as science fiction and it holds up. You can read it as political allegory and it holds up. That’s the mark of something genuinely good.

The People and Their Choices

What stays with me most are the characters and what they chose.

Snegovoi killed himself rather than comply. We never meet him alive. We only hear about him, see his sealed apartment door. But his choice hangs over the entire book. He refused to bend, and it destroyed him. Is that courage or tragedy? The book says both.

Glukhov broke years ago and has been trying to make peace with it ever since. He watches TV, drinks tea, enjoys simple pleasures. He tells the others to just let it go. But when you look at him closely, you see that giving up didn’t bring him peace. It just replaced one kind of suffering with another. He’s sitting hunched on a staircase, saying goodbye forever, and you know the wound never closed.

Weingarten surrendered while hating himself for it. He’s smart enough to know exactly what he’s losing and practical enough to calculate that the alternative is worse. He handed over his research with full awareness of what it means. The pragmatic coward. And yet, can you really call someone a coward for choosing to live?

Malianov is torn apart. He’s not brave enough to be Vecherovsky and not cynical enough to be Weingarten. He loves his work and he loves his family, and the universe made him choose between them. His final scene, sitting hunched with that white envelope, repeating borrowed words about crooked paths, is one of the saddest images I’ve encountered in fiction.

Vecherovsky is the one who keeps fighting. Even with singed eyebrows and a scorched apartment. He doesn’t fight by resisting directly. He adapts. He plans to leave, to become a meteorologist in the mountains, to study the force itself rather than be crushed by it. His approach is the long game: a billion years to the end of the world. No hurry.

I admire Vecherovsky. But I also think the book is honest enough to show that his path is not available to most people. Most people have a Bobchik. Most people have something they can’t risk.

The Question

The big question this book asks is simple. What would you do?

If something bigger than you, something you can’t see or fight or reason with, demanded that you give up the most important work you’ve ever done. If it offered you everything you wanted in exchange for stopping. If it threatened everything you loved when you refused.

What would you do?

I don’t have a good answer. I’m not sure the Strugatsky brothers did either. And that’s exactly why this book works. It doesn’t preach. It doesn’t tell you the right choice. It shows you a group of smart, decent people being ground down, and it lets you sit with the discomfort of knowing you’d probably fold too.

Why It Still Matters

The Soviet Union is gone. The KGB has new names. But the pressure to conform? That’s eternal.

We still live in systems that push back against uncomfortable truths. Whistleblowers still face retaliation. Researchers still get pressured to produce convenient results. Artists still self-censor. The mechanisms are different now, sometimes corporate, sometimes social, sometimes algorithmic. But the pattern is the same. Something detects a deviation and applies pressure until the deviation stops.

The Strugatsky brothers saw this clearly in 1974, and their insight hasn’t aged a day.

Read This Book

If you’ve followed this whole series and haven’t read the book itself, please do. The ISBN is 978-1-61219-282-6, published by Melville House, translated by Antonina W. Bouis. It’s short, maybe 200 pages. You can read it in an afternoon.

And even if you don’t normally read science fiction, this one is worth your time. It’s not really about science fiction at all. It’s about being human in a world that sometimes doesn’t want you to be.

Thank You

Thanks for following along through this entire retelling. This was a book I wanted to share because it meant something to me, and I hope some of that came through. If you want to start from the beginning, the intro post has links to every chapter.

Take care of yourselves. And if you’re working on something important, something that matters, don’t let anything stop you.

Unless they threaten Bobchik. Then all bets are off.

Previous: Afterword and Translator’s Note

Full series link: See all posts in this series