Hard to Be a God (eBook) (2015)

An observer from a technologically advanced Earth lives undercover in a society persecuting its artists and thinkers. The Strugatsky brothers turn the distance between understanding injustice and being able to stop it into a dirty, painful adventure. Olena Bormashenko translates directly from Russian in the Chicago Review Press and SF Masterworks editions. Choose it for moral pressure beneath the apparent swashbuckling, with the fantasy-like setting made strange by the observer’s science-fiction position.