Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky Libri

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems.

It is a mysterious city whose sun is switched on in the morning and switched off at night, bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its inhabitants are people who were plucked from twentieth-century history at various times and places and left to govern themselves, advised by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable. This is life in the Experiment. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a die-hard believer in the Experiment, even though his first job in the city is as a garbage collector. As increasinbly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect.

Die bewohnte Insel, ein Planet unseres Milchstrassensystems, wird von einer anonymen Gruppe von Tyrannen, den Unbekannten Vätern, regiert - und zwar mit Hilfe der modernsten technischen Einrichtungen. Hinter den Türmen der ballistischen Raketenabwehr verbergen sich Strahlensender, die die Bevölkerung zielstrebig nach Belieben programmieren und manipulieren, um fantastische Verteidiger des Systems aus ihnen zu machen. (Buchdeckel verso).