Funny that the work that made me think most about utopia lately
- comes from a failed utopian project, and also
- never outright depicts the utopia at all.
The Inhabited Island was serialized in 1969, in the aftermath of the Prague Spring, under conditions of strict Soviet censorship. The authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, facing rejection after rejection for other manuscripts, had originally set out to bolster their finances with a frothy unobjectionable boys’ adventure novel. What they ended up writing earned them dozens of denunciations, the original manuscript seized from the publisher, and 896 state-mandated edits (“What is a telegraph pole? It’s a well-edited pine tree.”) before it was allowed in book form. The uncensored version would only be published after the fall of the Soviet Union.
So what’s so provocative about this boys’ adventure?
The story follows Maxim Kammerer, a sunny young space explorer from 22nd-century Earth (now a post-scarcity communist utopia,) crash-landed on the remote alien planet of Saraksh after what he assumes to be a freak meteorite strike. He soon discovers he’s not alone: his corner of the planet is already inhabited by basically-human aliens, living in a totalitarian dystopia that absolutely in no way shape or form resembles the USSR. Of course it doesn’t. The censors made sure of it by forcing the Strugatsky brothers to change all the Russian names and terms to German ones.
Saraksh is encased in permanent, oppressive cloud cover, with an atmospheric index of refraction that makes the world appear concave, such that the inhabitants imagine themselves to live on the inner surface of a giant bubble in a universe of infinite solid matter. They have never seen the stars. The citizens of the Country of the Unknown Fathers insist that Maxim must be a confused foreigner from elsewhere in their own world—just bigger, faster, smarter, stronger, more cultivated, mentally and morally, than anyone they’ve ever seen, courtesy of his New Soviet Man upbringing.
(There’s this thing you see in older speculative fiction, where a book gives you some time in the protagonist’s POV, makes sure you’ve gotten attached, before casually dropping the reveal that they’re nonwhite. I’d only come across it in Anglophone books before—Le Guin, Butler, Gaiman—and I was amused to see it here: in the spirit of Soviet internationalism, Maxim, shining ambassador of 22nd century New Soviet Man amid the downtrodden, is repeatedly described as brown-skinned, with black hair and brown eyes.
Naturally the 2008 movie adaptation, made in modern Russia, cast a blond-haired blue-eyed ethnic Russian with a tan.)
Maxim, for his part, grows increasingly dismayed as he gets to know the country—a grubby, impoverished remnant of a once-glorious empire shattered a generation ago by nuclear world war. Mutants and abandoned autonomous war machines roam its hinterlands (one of them shot down his spaceship, in fact). Hostile states menace its borders. The central regions keep some semblance of law and order only thanks to the Unknown Fathers, a mysterious military junta that seized control during the chaos of the war and holds the populace’s fanatical devotion.
Even more unsettling are the people Maxim meets, the product of their environment: haggard and hungry, resentful and narrow-minded, constantly flying into fits of violent, hysterical rage. But they’re people, nonetheless, and Maxim was brought up in a generous, trusting world. He quickly makes friends and joins the Battle Guards, believing them to be protecting the locals from murderous, inhuman “degenerates.” He tries to quash his doubts and fit in, reminding himself that he’s an ignorant outsider. He hadn’t known that you had to pay for food, or that you’re supposed to obey a commander even when he’s wrong. He ought to be more understanding of the locals in their difficult circumstances.
Then he refuses to execute a female degenerate prisoner, and his commander shoots him four times and leaves him for dead while his friend does nothing.
But a New Soviet Man can see in the dark, bend coins with his bare hands, and heal from injuries that should be fatal. Maxim survives, and begins his brutal coming-of-age in the resistance.
The citizens’ rabid loyalty to the regime isn’t natural, he learns. The towers that litter the Country of the Unknown Fathers, sold to the populace as air defense, in fact broadcast a type of radiation that destroys the capacity for critical thought, that transforms thinking individuals into believing individuals who can effortlessly be manipulated by propaganda. The few locals who are immune instead suffer visible agony during the peaks in radiation; they’re labeled degenerates, hunted down—and occasionally co-opted into the ruling elite. All the Unknown Fathers are secretly degenerates.
But Maxim from utopian Earth, who experiences no effect whatsoever from the radiation, who gets sentenced to the deadly “educatee” camps and merely marvels at the naivety of a court that doesn’t first make him give his word to stay there, exists outside of the system altogether. At first he seeks to work for the established resistance, but finds them incompetent and short-sighted, blinkered by their own pain and trauma—and worse, much of the leadership would like to keep the towers, just aim them toward their own ends. Then he seeks allies abroad, but the mutants are too despairing and fatalistic, the Island Empire monstrously sadistic, the breakaway states from the former empire hardened at the border for quite justified reasons—the sequence where the Country of the Unknown Fathers launches a revanchist war against Hontia, using radiation emitters to drive convict meat brigades in rusting Imperial tanks into Hontian minefields, is eerie to read today in light of the war in Ukraine.
The Maxim who emerges is a ruthless lone operative, driven by his internal conviction that the towers must fall, even if no one else in the world agrees with him.
The Strugatskys, living in an actual dystopia, are more clear-eyed than a lot of dystopian authors writing from the comfort of the West. We would prefer to think of dystopia as imposed from above, with enormous effort and engineering, and if the ordinary people are bad it’s because they’re victims of an overwhelming system, and not really their fault. Yet the Strugatskys, even with the literal brainwashing rays in this setting, convey that the dirt is ingrained: yes, the denizens of Saraksh would be better under better circumstances, but as they stand they are well and truly worse people in the thousand petty cumulative ways that make up the texture of a society. They’ll rat out a neighbor, and they’ll also bully an old woman on the train, and spit on the walls of the apartment stairwell. Their degradation is real and banal and disgusting.
No one is untouched. Not the leadership, who are not dignified tyrants but petulant old men with enough power to make up for their incompetence. Not the underground rebels, often as self-centered, authoritarian, and delusional as their enemies. And not Maxim himself. He doesn’t just grow into a hard strong man of action, or pick up sympathetic trauma. Even with his total immunity to the towers, he becomes angrier, less empathetic, quicker to outbursts and violence. He can’t conceal his impatience and contempt for the natives he wants to save; he starts to see other people as means to his end. His world increasingly narrows to his goal.
And the ending is far more ambivalent than that of the typical overthrow-the-tyrants adventure. Maxim succeeds in destroying the control center for the towers…only for the man who’s been pulling strings behind the Unknown Fathers to step out and cuss him out for an idiot. He’s also from Earth, a COMCON agent secretly sent to steer Saraksh out of disaster with as little collateral damage as possible, and Maxim just ruined all his plans. There’s no food or medicine stockpiled, the Unknown Fathers still have their security forces, the Island Empire will seize the opportunity to invade, people will go mad from radiation withdrawal—and did he even think about the economy?!
He demands that Maxim go home immediately, but Maxim insists on staying. Saraksh is his home now, and he’ll do everything he can to work with the experts and salvage the mess he created. But there will be no more towers on Saraksh while he lives, “not even with the very best intentions in the world.”
I would actually not recommend The Inhabited Island as your first Strugatsky. The usual rec is Roadside Picnic; my rec for this specific crowd is Hard to Be a God. Both are short, finely-crafted, and devastating; both ought to be experienced rather than described. The Inhabited Island is a sprawling beast in comparison—and what’s more, has two sequels very different from it, which deliberately elide the fate of the Country of the Unknown Fathers to instead feature Maxim as an aging Earth bureaucrat on the flip side of the Saraksh scenario: even communist utopia is not the endpoint of human development, Earth itself may be the playground of more advanced agents, and perhaps the only thing to be done is to meet one’s supersession with grace. It’s a deeply interesting trilogy, especially in light of today’s anxieties about AI, but comparatively more inspiring as a collection of ideas than as an exemplar of novel-craft—you can spoil it for an ACX book review in good conscience.
It’s a very inspiring collection of ideas. You could take any one and run with it. Liu Cixin, author of The Three-Body Problem and avowed Strugatsky fan (the Soviet influence on modern China is underrated by outsiders,) wrote an entire novelette pretty clearly inspired by a single worldbuilding detail from The Inhabited Island—aliens who believe themselves, for perfectly empirical reasons, to live in a hollow bubble in an universe of solid matter. As for me, I’ll humbly offer the rest of this book review. I’ve talked about what the book has to say about dystopia; what it suggests about utopia is even more thought-provoking.
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While the Strugatskys do depict the utopia on Earth in some of their other books, I hadn’t read any of them when I first encountered The Inhabited Island. The entirety of The Inhabited Island takes place on Saraksh, and the utopia is carried solely in its people.
Maxim can sing, draw, learn an alien language in a month, hold his breath for twenty minutes, sense radioactivity, draft complex mechanical schemata from memory, hunt deer with his bare hands, read physics monographs for fun, and pilot all kinds of exotic machinery effortlessly. Maxim is curious, cheerful, rational, strong-willed, and humane; he is ironic without cynicism, and deeply altruistic while refusing to subsume himself into collectives. Even in his darkest moments, he’ll pity a fallen enemy, and feed a friend he’s angry at.
And the thing is, the book is clear that Maxim is an immature loser by the standards of his 22nd-century Earth! If he were particularly talented or mature, he wouldn’t be gallivanting around in space, working his way through an inexhaustible list of unexplored planets, for lack of anything better to contribute to society. It’s just that the baseline on Earth is so high that, on Saraksh, a mediocre Earthman still seems superhuman.
Notably, that superhumanity is portrayed not as something innate, but something systematically instilled. It’s a product of environment (and thus affected by change in environment.) And it’s a product of personalized cultivation—when Maxim realizes his loved ones will think he’s dead after his stranding on Saraksh, he worries about his mother, his father, and his Teacher with a capital T. The people of utopia are made, not born.
“All people are created educable” is not a new concept, nor a uniquely Soviet one. Two thousand years ago, Mencius declared that anyone could be perfected into a sage-king; two hundred years ago, Horace Mann revolutionized public education in the name of forging a unified, virtuous citizenry for the American republic.
And yet it feels curiously alien to see this as the premise of an utopia. These days, we have a dazzling catalogue of self-help and therapy for the individual. We have a long list of -isms and pathologies to uproot as a society. But one square in the 2x2 grid of individual vs. societal, positive vs. negative morality is missing. Somewhere along the way, we’ve abandoned the idea of society-scale positive cultivation, of nurturing the forest of saplings instead of simply plucking at the weeds. We bemoan kids these days and the decline in civic virtues—but how hard did we actually try to instill them? Subgroups within society used to pick up the slack, religions and local communities, but these have long been in decline, and replaced only with the gu-pot of the social media algorithms. We’ll engineer all kinds of nudges and crutches and safeguards, managing around the problem instead of turning our engineering to: what if we just taught everyone to be better?
But you can’t, you might object. Man is not infinitely malleable, and idealistic projects failing to understand this point have created immense misery. Only the Soviets would believe that societal effort is going to make everyone a virtuous gigachad genius.
And some of Maxim’s abilities are pretty improbable…but others come across less like silly propaganda if you think about them in the context of the Soviet ‘60s. Within living memory, life expectancy had doubled and average height shot up multiple inches, thanks to better medicine and nutrition. People were freer in the post-Stalin Thaw. Literacy rates had gone from minority to vast majority. The Strugatskys simply extrapolated in a straight line. Was it so outrageous, from the perspective of the 20th century, that the average person in the 22nd century could study a textbook in thirty minutes, when it would’ve seemed miraculous to most in the 18th century that the average person could study a textbook at all?
The problem is that, in the developed world, the straight line has since flattened and even turned back on itself. We’ve put all the kids in school and picked the low-hanging fruit, while the science of education has stalled out into at times actively destructive fads.
Except now we have AI.
I’m not speculating about AGI here; I’m talking the absurd unlocks in education and cultivation already possible with existing tech. We know individualized tutoring works as much as two standard deviations better than classroom learning; every field that demands elite performance institutionalizes some form of one-on-one mentorship, whether tennis coaches or university academics. We just couldn’t afford to scale individualized instruction beyond the select few, until now.
Yes, AI can be used to cheat on assignments and outsource learning, we’ve all heard, but properly-scaffolded AI tutoring systems are already beating the gold standard in human-taught classrooms. And this is only the start, because it’s easier to collect clean data on best practice without the confounding variable of the teacher implementing it, and to scale up best practice without retraining every single teacher.
Some argue that AI can’t replicate the interpersonal element of human tutoring. I have my doubts, given how many people simultaneously worry that we’ll all marry chatbots. But even if that’s true, there’s another near-future path to a similar destination: the white-collar labor displacement that AI may cause could supply us with enough potential human teachers to approach Bloom’s Two Sigma in a more traditional fashion. We’d have to value this enough to pay with all that AI abundance—but in the post-scarcity future, what endeavor would remain more prized and personal than human cultivation?
And the really spicy take is—why can’t the same advancements teach virtue as well as knowledge? The two have been historically linked in pedagogy by the philosophers, both crafts trained through deliberate exercise, and it’s only recently that we’ve reduced one half of the pair to lecturing you against underage drinking. Both have actual skills involved, as we well know: steelmanning, emotional awareness, self-regulation. Both can be modeled, practiced, corrected in a feedback loop.
That’s the easier part, relatively speaking. The harder part is: how much can we and should we impose this? How much can we and should we determine the ends toward which these skills are used?
We should be honest about what that degree of human cultivation means. There’s a reason why negative morality is easier than positive morality—it’s easier to delineate harms to spurn than guiding lights in the asymptotic distance. We’d have to agree on what’s good, and we’d have to not, like so many utopians, go insane chasing after the ghostly light. Even if we want perfectly modest and liberatory things like “critical thinking on social media,” we will have to gingerly wield the power of a deus ex machina at people of another sphere, and argue the distinction between virtuous intervention and high-handed overreach.
It would be less arrogant to simply not go adventuring in this final quadrant of the grid. But also, the towers are already here.