Arkady and Boris Strugatsky wrote science fiction that held no answers — only questions. "Roadside Picnic," "Hard to Be a God," "Snail on the Slope": books that read like Soviet reality in a distorting mirror.
Arkady was born in 1925, Boris in 1933. Both passed through the war — Arkady served; Boris, still a child, lived through the siege of Leningrad. Arkady became a military interpreter of Japanese, later an editor; Boris, an astronomer.
They wrote together from 1958, meeting a few times a year. They argued; the manuscript went back and forth between them. Soviet censors could never quite say what was wrong — but they sensed something. Many of the books came out with cuts, or did not come out at all.
Arkady died in 1991. Boris kept writing under the name S. Vititsky. He died in 2012.