Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
This use of ordinary people as the principal characters was fairly rare in science fiction when the book came out, and even now the genre slips easily into elitism—superbrilliant minds, extraordinary talents, officers not crew, the corridors of power not the working-class kitchen.
Arkady Strugatsky • Roadside Picnic (Rediscovered Classics)
его кабинете всегда лежала какая-то книжка, заложенная закладкою на четырнадцатой странице, которую он постоянно читал уже два года.
Николай Васильевич Гоголь • Мертвые души (Том первый) (Russian Edition)
They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts.”
Arkady Strugatsky • Roadside Picnic (Rediscovered Classics)
His first long novel, 1996’s Chapaev and Void (published in the US as Buddha’s Little Finger and in the UK as The Clay Machine-Gun) has been called the first post-Soviet Russian literary bestseller.