Definitely Maybe (novel)
''Definitely Maybe'' (russian: links=no, За миллиард лет до конца света , translit=Za milliard let do kontsa sveta, literal translation: ''A Billion Years Before the End of the World'', sometimes called ''Definitely Maybe: A Manuscript Discovered Under Unusual Circumstances'') is a science fiction novel by Russian writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, first published 1977. Plot summary The story takes place in Leningrad, USSR, apparently in the 1970s. The protagonist, Dmitry Alekseyevich Malyanov (Дмитрий Алексеевич Малянов) is an astrophysicist who, while officially on vacation, continues to work on his thesis, "The Interaction of Stars with Diffused Galactic Matter". Just as he begins to realize that he is on the verge of a revolutionary discovery worthy of a Nobel Prize, his life becomes plagued by strange events. First, Malyanov is visited unexpectedly by an attractive woman claiming to be his wife's classmate and food and wi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Arkady And Boris Strugatsky
The brothers Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky (russian: Аркадий Натанович Стругацкий; 28 August 1925 – 12 October 1991) and Boris Natanovich Strugatsky ( ru , Борис Натанович Стругацкий; 14 April 1933 – 19 November 2012) were Soviet-Russian science-fiction authors who collaborated through most of their careers. Life and work The Strugatsky brothers ( or simply ) were born to Natan Strugatsky, an art critic, and his wife, a teacher. Their father was Jewish and their mother was Russian Orthodox. Their early work was influenced by Ivan Yefremov and Stanisław Lem. Later they went on to develop their own, unique style of science fiction writing that emerged from the period of Soviet rationalism in Soviet literature and evolved into novels interpreted as works of social criticism. Their best-known novel, ''Piknik na obochine'', has been translated into English as ''Roadside Picnic''. Andrei Tarkovsky adapted the novel ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Science Fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, extraterrestrial life, sentient artificial intelligence, cybernetics, certain forms of immortality (like mind uploading), and the singularity. Science fiction predicted several existing inventions, such as the atomic bomb, robots, and borazon, whose names entirely match their fictional predecessors. In addition, science fiction might serve as an outlet to facilitate future scientific and technological innovations. Science fiction can trace its roots to ancient mythology. It is also related to fantasy, horror, and superhero fiction and contains many subgenres. Its exact definition has long been disputed among authors, critics, scholars, and readers. Science fiction, in literature, film, television, and other media, has beco ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Paranoid Fiction
Paranoid fiction is a term sometimes used to describe works of literature that explore the subjective nature of reality and how it can be manipulated by forces in power. These forces can be external, such as a totalitarian government, or they can be internal, such as a character's mental illness or refusal to accept the harshness of the world they are in. History The elements of paranoid fiction can be seen in works dating as far back as the late 19th and early 20th century. Some of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novels contained paranoid and psychologically troubled characters set against the dark backdrop of a modernizing Russia. Franz Kafka, in particular, was known for his exaggerated accounts of what he portrayed as real life in his works, to enhance the absurdity of the life themes they conveyed. Similarly, George Orwell's works, while not as exaggerated, confirmed the practice of using dystopian fiction to take a different outlook on highly common themes, including identity and pers ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Macmillan Publishers
Macmillan Publishers (occasionally known as the Macmillan Group; formally Macmillan Publishers Ltd and Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC) is a British publishing company traditionally considered to be one of the 'Big Five' English language publishers. Founded in London in 1843 by Scottish brothers Daniel and Alexander MacMillan, the firm would soon establish itself as a leading publisher in Britain. It published two of the best-known works of Victorian era children’s literature, Lewis Carroll's ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865) and Rudyard Kipling's ''The Jungle Book'' (1894). Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Harold Macmillan, grandson of co-founder Daniel, was chairman of the company from 1964 until his death in December 1986. Since 1999, Macmillan has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group with offices in 41 countries worldwide and operations in more than thirty others. History Macmillan was founded in London in 1843 by Daniel ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Science Fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, extraterrestrial life, sentient artificial intelligence, cybernetics, certain forms of immortality (like mind uploading), and the singularity. Science fiction predicted several existing inventions, such as the atomic bomb, robots, and borazon, whose names entirely match their fictional predecessors. In addition, science fiction might serve as an outlet to facilitate future scientific and technological innovations. Science fiction can trace its roots to ancient mythology. It is also related to fantasy, horror, and superhero fiction and contains many subgenres. Its exact definition has long been disputed among authors, critics, scholars, and readers. Science fiction, in literature, film, television, and other media, has beco ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Aleksandr Sokurov
Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov, PAR (russian: link=no, Александр Николаевич Сокуров; born 14 June 1951) is a Russian filmmaker. His most significant works include a feature film, ''Russian Ark'' (2002), filmed in a single unedited shot, and ''Faust'' (2011), which was honoured with the Golden Lion, the highest prize for the best film at the Venice Film Festival. Life and work Sokurov was born in Podorvikha, Irkutsky District, in Siberia, into a military officer's family. He graduated from the History Department of the Nizhny Novgorod University in 1974 and entered one of the VGIK studios the following year. There he became friends with Tarkovsky and was deeply influenced by his film ''Mirror''. Most of Sokurov's early features were banned by Soviet authorities. During his early period, he produced numerous documentaries, including ''The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn'' and a reportage about Grigori Kozintsev's flat in Saint Petersburg. His film '' Mou ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Days Of Eclipse
''Days of Eclipse'' (russian: link=no, italics=yes, Дни затмения) (or, '' The Days of Eclipse, Dni Zatmenija, Días de eclipse'') is a 1988 Soviet film directed by Alexander Sokurov. The screenplay is by Yuri Arabov and Pyotr Kadochnikov based on a screenplay by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which is in turn based on their 1974 novel '' Definitely Maybe'' ('). Plot A recently qualified medical doctor, Dmitri Malyanov, has taken a posting to a remote and very poor part of Soviet Turkmenistan. On top of his day job as a pediatrician Malyanov is undertaking research into the effects of religious practice on human health. His research has drawn the politically incorrect conclusion that religious faith does indeed improve health. However, as he attempts to write up his thesis, various sorts of improbable, bizarre events take place one after another. Malyanov perceives that some force is preventing him from completing his research. Production In the novel, the protagonist w ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Vladimir Voevodsky
Vladimir Alexandrovich Voevodsky (, russian: Влади́мир Алекса́ндрович Воево́дский; 4 June 1966 – 30 September 2017) was a Russian-American mathematician. His work in developing a homotopy theory for algebraic varieties and formulating motivic cohomology led to the award of a Fields Medal in 2002. He is also known for the proof of the Milnor conjecture and motivic Bloch–Kato conjectures and for the univalent foundations of mathematics and homotopy type theory. Early life and education Vladimir Voevodsky's father, Aleksander Voevodsky, was head of the Laboratory of High Energy Leptons in the Institute for Nuclear Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences. His mother Tatyana was a chemist. Voevodsky attended Moscow State University for a while, but was forced to leave without a diploma for refusing to attend classes and failing academically. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1992 after being recommended without e ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Yuri Manin
Yuri Ivanovich Manin (russian: Ю́рий Ива́нович Ма́нин; born 16 February 1937) is a Russian mathematician, known for work in algebraic geometry and diophantine geometry, and many expository works ranging from mathematical logic to theoretical physics. Moreover, Manin was one of the first to propose the idea of a quantum computer in 1980 with his book ''Computable and Uncomputable''. Life and career Manin gained a doctorate in 1960 at the Steklov Mathematics Institute as a student of Igor Shafarevich. He is now a Professor at the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in Bonn, and a professor emeritus at Northwestern University. Manin's early work included papers on the arithmetic and formal groups of abelian varieties, the Mordell conjecture in the function field case, and algebraic differential equations. The Gauss–Manin connection is a basic ingredient of the study of cohomology in families of algebraic varieties. He wrote a book on cubic surfaces and cubic ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Maksim Moshkow's Library
Lib.ru, also known as Maksim Moshkow's Library (russian: link=no, библиотека Максима Мошкова, started to operate in November 1994) is the oldest electronic library in the Russian Internet segment. Founded and supported by Maksim Moshkow, it receives contributions mainly from users who send texts they scanned and processed ( OCR, proofreading). This method of acquisition provides the library a broad and efficient augmentability, though sometimes it adversely affects the quality (errors, omissions). The structure of the library includes a section where one can publish his own literary texts ("Samizdat" journal, named after the samizdat of the Soviet era), a project for music publishing ("Music hosting"), a travel notes project ("Foreign countries") and some other sections. ''Maksim Moshkow's Library'' received several Ru-net Awards, including the National Internet Award (2003). The headline on the site Lib.ru says "With support from the Federal Press a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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1976 Novels
Events January * January 3 – The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights enters into force. * January 5 – The Pol Pot regime proclaims a new constitution for Democratic Kampuchea. * January 11 – The 1976 Philadelphia Flyers–Red Army game results in a 4–1 victory for the National Hockey League's Philadelphia Flyers over HC CSKA Moscow of the Soviet Union. * January 16 – The trial against jailed members of the Red Army Faction (the West German extreme-left militant Baader–Meinhof Group) begins in Stuttgart. * January 18 ** Full diplomatic relations are established between Bangladesh and Pakistan 5 years after the Bangladesh Liberation War. ** The Scottish Labour Party is formed as a breakaway from the UK-wide party. ** Super Bowl X in American football: The Pittsburgh Steelers defeat the Dallas Cowboys, 21–17, in Miami. * January 21 – First commercial Concorde flight, from London to Bahrain. * January 27 ** The United States ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Novels By Arkady And Boris Strugatsky
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term Romance (literary fiction), "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek novel, Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |