Escape Attempt (Попытка к бегству) by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

If, like me, you’d been hunting for English translations of the seemingly-lost Strugatsky Noon Universe novels

Space Mowgli

(Малыш) and

The Kid from Hell

(Парень из преисподней): they live inside the cover of this pictured

Escape Attempt

book.

I cannot explain why MacMillan Publishing didn’t think it was worth noting this on the cover. But I am not complaining—their presence here solved the big problem I’d been having tracking them down. I’d been getting worried that I was going to have to settle for these original Russian versions...

...which would have been neither cheap nor, for me, comprehensible.

Escape Attempt

and

The Kid from Hell

look at societies on other planets where (human) folks are in their feudal/militaristic stages of societal evolution. Things are Ugly. The question of whether or not to intervene—and if so, How and When—is what concerns the denizens of Future Earth. Some demand that Future Earth intervene in these Primitive Brutal Planets and put a stop to the Insanity. But it’s been determined that all Humans must go through a brutal unhappy time if they want to get to the Utopian Enlightened stage at the end of the rainbow. There are echoes of Isaac Asimov’s Psychohistory throughout the discussion of how our Future Earth manages the growth and development of other human planets. Maybe Asimov doesn’t own the term Psychohistory—but I first learned it from him, and he published Foundation in 1955, seven years before Escape Attempt came out in print.

Space Mowgli

is wonderful. A look at an organism that has gone through a sort of Evolutionary Singularity which leaves us (Humans) out of the loop and incapable of even beginning to communicate with it, no matter how much we might want to.

If/when humans stumble onto ETs, this is probably how the encounter is going to go down.