Hard to Be a God
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Narrated by:
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Matt Addis
About this listen
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely known as the greatest Russian writers of science fiction, and their 1964 novel Hard to Be a God is considered one of the greatest of their works.
It tells the story of Don Rumata, who is sent from Earth to the medieval kingdom of Arkanar with instructions to observe and to influence, but never to directly interfere. Masquerading as an arrogant nobleman, a dueler and a brawler, Don Rumata is never defeated but can never kill. With his doubt and compassion, and his deep love for a local girl named Kira, Rumata wants to save the kingdom from the machinations of Don Reba, the First Minister to the king. But given his orders, what role can he play?
Hard to Be a God has inspired a computer role-playing game and two movies, including Aleksei German’s long-awaited swan song. Yet until now the only English version (out of print for over thirty years) was based on a German translation, and was full of errors, infelicities, and misunderstandings. This new edition—translated by Olena Bormashenko, whose translation of the authors’ Roadside Picnic has received widespread acclaim, and supplemented with a new foreword by Hari Kunzru and an afterword by Boris Strugatsky, both of which supply much-needed context—reintroduces one of the most profound Soviet-era novels to an eager audience.
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-
Roadside Picnic
- By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Olena Bormashenko - translator
- Narrated by: Robert Forster
- Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Gritty, resonant sci-fi classic
- By Ryan on 02-14-13
By: Arkady Strugatsky, and others
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Monday Starts on Saturday
- By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Andrew Bromfield - translator, and others
- Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Sasha, a young computer programmer from Leningrad, is driving north to meet some friends for a nature vacation. He picks up a couple of hitchhikers who persuade him to take a job at the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy. The adventures Sasha has in the largely dysfunctional institute involve all sorts of magical beings - a wish-granting fish, a tree mermaid, a cat who can remember only the beginnings of stories, a dream-interpreting sofa, and many more.
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Maybe I should have read this one.
- By M. Gage on 08-08-18
By: Arkady Strugatsky, and others
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Monday Starts on Saturday
- By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Andrew Bromfield - translator
- Narrated by: Nathaniel Priestley
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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When young programmer Alexander Ivanovich Privalov picks up two hitchhikers while driving in Karelia, he is drawn into the mysterious world of the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy, where research into magic is serious business.
By: Arkady Strugatsky, and others
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The Snail on the Slope
- By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Olena Bormashenko - translator
- Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The Snail on the Slope takes place in two distinct worlds. One is the Administration, an institution run by a surreal, Kafkaesque bureaucracy whose aim is to govern the forest below. The other is the Forest, a place of fear, weird creatures, primitive people, and violence. Peretz, who works at the Administration, wants to visit the Forest. Candide crashed in the Forest years ago and wants to return to the Administration. Their journeys are surprising and strange, and listeners are left to puzzle out the mysteries of these foreign environments.
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What insanity must feel like
- By Matt on 01-10-19
By: Arkady Strugatsky, and others
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The Waves Extinguish the Wind
- By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Daniels Umanovskis - translator
- Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In their Noon Universe novels, they imagined twenty-second-century Earth as a space-faring communist utopia, devoted to guiding the progress of civilization on alien worlds. But as the authors became increasingly disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, their Noon Universe stories grew darker and more complex as well. The Waves Extinguish the Wind provides the epic conclusion to the Noon Universe saga, as eighty-nine-year-old Maxim Kammerer looks back at his most earth-shattering investigation, which brought an entire era of human civilization to an end.
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A first and unfamiliar experience
- By Markmaster on 11-16-23
By: Arkady Strugatsky, and others
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The Doomed City
- By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Andrew Bromfield - Translator
- Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 17 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely considered the greatest of Russian science fiction masters, yet the novel they worked hardest on, the one that was their own favorite and that listeners worldwide have acclaimed their magnum opus, has never before been published in English. The Doomed City was so politically risky that the Strugatskys kept its existence a secret even from their closest friends for 16 years. It was only published in Russia during perestroika in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication.
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Great Book
- By Mr. Sparkle on 03-15-18
By: Arkady Strugatsky, and others
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Roadside Picnic
- By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Olena Bormashenko - translator
- Narrated by: Robert Forster
- Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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.
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Gritty, resonant sci-fi classic
- By Ryan on 02-14-13
By: Arkady Strugatsky, and others
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Monday Starts on Saturday
- By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Andrew Bromfield - translator, and others
- Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sasha, a young computer programmer from Leningrad, is driving north to meet some friends for a nature vacation. He picks up a couple of hitchhikers who persuade him to take a job at the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy. The adventures Sasha has in the largely dysfunctional institute involve all sorts of magical beings - a wish-granting fish, a tree mermaid, a cat who can remember only the beginnings of stories, a dream-interpreting sofa, and many more.
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Maybe I should have read this one.
- By M. Gage on 08-08-18
By: Arkady Strugatsky, and others
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Monday Starts on Saturday
- By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Andrew Bromfield - translator
- Narrated by: Nathaniel Priestley
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
When young programmer Alexander Ivanovich Privalov picks up two hitchhikers while driving in Karelia, he is drawn into the mysterious world of the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy, where research into magic is serious business.
By: Arkady Strugatsky, and others
-
The Snail on the Slope
- By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Olena Bormashenko - translator
- Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
The Snail on the Slope takes place in two distinct worlds. One is the Administration, an institution run by a surreal, Kafkaesque bureaucracy whose aim is to govern the forest below. The other is the Forest, a place of fear, weird creatures, primitive people, and violence. Peretz, who works at the Administration, wants to visit the Forest. Candide crashed in the Forest years ago and wants to return to the Administration. Their journeys are surprising and strange, and listeners are left to puzzle out the mysteries of these foreign environments.
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What insanity must feel like
- By Matt on 01-10-19
By: Arkady Strugatsky, and others
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The Waves Extinguish the Wind
- By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Daniels Umanovskis - translator
- Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
In their Noon Universe novels, they imagined twenty-second-century Earth as a space-faring communist utopia, devoted to guiding the progress of civilization on alien worlds. But as the authors became increasingly disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, their Noon Universe stories grew darker and more complex as well. The Waves Extinguish the Wind provides the epic conclusion to the Noon Universe saga, as eighty-nine-year-old Maxim Kammerer looks back at his most earth-shattering investigation, which brought an entire era of human civilization to an end.
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A first and unfamiliar experience
- By Markmaster on 11-16-23
By: Arkady Strugatsky, and others
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The Dead Mountaineer's Inn
- One More Last Rite for the Detective Genre
- By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky
- Narrated by: Keith Szarabajka
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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When Inspector Peter Glebsky arrives at a remote ski chalet on vacation, the last thing he intends to do is get involved in any police work. He's there to ski, drink brandy, and loaf around in blissful solitude. But he hadn't counted on the other vacationers, an eccentric bunch, including a famous hypnotist, a physicist with a penchant for gymnastic feats, a sulky teenager of indeterminate gender, and the mysterious Mr. and Mrs. Moses.
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Good, but poor in the end.
- By Ross on 03-14-18
By: Arkady Strugatsky, and others
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Embassytown
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: Susan Duerden
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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China Miéville doesn’t follow trends, he sets them. Relentlessly pushing his own boundaries as a writer - and in the process expanding the boundaries of the entire field - with Embassytown, Miéville has crafted an extraordinary novel that is not only a moving personal drama but a gripping adventure of alien contact and war. In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak....
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must hear to fully appreciate.
- By Don Gilbert on 01-05-12
By: China Mieville
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The Magus
- By: John Fowles
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 26 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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John Fowles’s The Magus was a literary landmark of the 1960s. Nicholas Urfe goes to a Greek island to teach at a private school and becomes enmeshed in curious happenings at the home of a mysterious Greek recluse, Maurice Conchis. Are these events, involving attractive young English sisters, just psychological games, or an elaborate joke, or more? Reality shifts as the story unfolds. The Magus reflected the issues of the 1960s perfectly, and it continues to create tension and concern today.
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One of the best novels that I really think I hate.
- By Darwin8u on 01-29-14
By: John Fowles
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A Canticle for Leibowitz
- By: Walter M. Miller Jr.
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel and widely considered one of the most accomplished, powerful, and enduring classics of modern speculative fiction, Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is a true landmark of 20th-century literature—a chilling and still-provocative look at a postapocalyptic future.
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Introibo Ad Altare
- By richard on 03-20-13
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The Star Diaries
- Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy
- By: Stanislaw Lem
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Ijon Tichy, Lem's Candide of the Cosmos, encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in space that serve to satirize science, the rational mind, theology, and other icons of human pride.
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Gulliver in Space
- By Joe Kraus on 12-29-18
By: Stanislaw Lem
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Solaris
- The Definitive Edition
- By: Stanislaw Lem, Bill Johnston - translator
- Narrated by: Alessandro Juliani
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it. To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation - complete for the first time, and the first ever directly from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani ( Battlestar Galactica), Lem’s provocative novel comes alive for a new generation.
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A comment on negative reviews
- By Burns on 09-20-11
By: Stanislaw Lem, and others
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Dhalgren
- By: Samuel R. Delany
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 34 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there...the population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man - a poet, a lover, and an adventurer - known only as the Kid.
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A classic I return to every few years
- By kwdayboise (Kim Day) on 04-08-17
By: Samuel R. Delany
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Blindsight
- By: Peter Watts
- Narrated by: T. Ryder Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in 2082, Peter Watts' Blindsight is fast-moving, hard SF that pulls readers into a futuristic world where a mind-bending alien encounter is about to unfold. After the Firefall, all eyes are locked heavenward as a team of specialists aboard the self-piloted spaceship Theseus hurtles outbound to intercept an unknown intelligence.
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Gothic Horror Hard Science Fiction
- By Doug D. Eigsti on 06-24-15
By: Peter Watts
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Perdido Street Station
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 24 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the center of the world. Humans and mutants and arcane races brood in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the river is sluggish with unnatural effluent and foundries pound into the night. For a thousand years, the Parliament and its brutal militias have ruled over a vast economy of workers and artists, spies and soldiers, magicians, crooks, and junkies. Now a stranger has arrived, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand. And something unthinkable is released.
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Brilliant, wonderful book -- horrible recording
- By James on 08-19-09
By: China Mieville
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The City & The City
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borl ú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined. Borl must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own.
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Reviews, Dishonesty and The Emperor's New Clothes
- By Robert on 01-27-13
By: China Mieville
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The Name of the Rose
- By: Umberto Eco, William Weaver - translator
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett, Neville Jason, Nicholas Rowe
- Length: 21 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. But his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths that take place in seven days and nights of apocalyptic terror. Brother William turns detective, and a uniquely deft one at that. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon-- all sharpened to a glistening edge by his wry humor and ferocious curiosity.
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The meaning of the mystery & mystery of meaning
- By Ryan on 02-14-14
By: Umberto Eco, and others
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Elder Race
- By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 4 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Lynesse is the lowly Fourth Daughter of the queen, and always getting in the way. But a demon is terrorizing the land, and now she's an adult (albeit barely) with responsibilities (she tells herself). Although she still gets in the way, she understands that the only way to save her people is to invoke the pact between her family and the Elder sorcerer who has inhabited the local tower for as long as her people have lived here (though none in living memory has approached it).
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barely more than a short story.
- By Daniel Smith on 09-10-23
What listeners say about Hard to Be a God
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Steve Rockman
- 10-04-24
An interesting read
over all interesting Soviet era "Yankee in King Arthurs Court", the same translator as the version of Roadside Picnic I read which was A+. Overall the story is fine but leaves something to be desired.
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- HonestOpin
- 06-18-24
Outstanding!
Outstanding story! Spectacular narration! Much to ponder. Sheds much light on the 2013 Russian movie Hard to be a God.
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- Tristen
- 04-28-24
A fantastic read!
I finished it in three days, and it was only because I wanted the story to last. The ending may not be to everyone's liking, but I thought it was perfect. The meta-knowledge the observers have is incredibly compelling.
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