Noon: 22nd Century

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This great tapestry of interwoven short stories and novelettes was six years in the making. It is full of astonishments, and among the greatest is that the six years involved are 1960 to 1966. Sputnik, an object about the size of a beach ball, had made its tiny but profound mark on human history less than two and a half years before, dying in fifteen weeks. (Willy Ley once remarked that if the earth were the size of Sputnik, it would be smoother, and if the orbit of Sputnik were represented by a wire, you couldn’t get a knitting needle under it.) There were few people on earth who understood the full import of this achievement in all its permutations, but among them certainly were the brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

Doubtless many of their early readers, while slaking a thirst for fantasy, for the wild and improbable, felt underneath that these were excursions into the impossible, and returned from them to a certain and comfortable earthbound “reality.” Those who lacked this thirst—the majority of readers everywhere—surely greeted this literature with jibes and cynicism or dismissed it altogether. It is very likely that these two categories were clearly represented among those who listened to the persuasions of Christopher Columbus at the court of Isabella. It was the general response to Arthur C. Clarke’s first articles in technical journals on the subject of communications satellites, and the Wright brothers’ dreams of aerial commerce.

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