Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those strange misfits who are compelled by some unknown force to venture illegally into the Zone and, in spite of the extreme danger, collect the mysterious artefacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the Zone and the thriving black market in the alien products. Even the nature of his daughter has been determined by the Zone. And it is for her that Red makes his last, tragic foray into the hazardous and hostile depths... Tale of the Troika is a very different thing indeed which is the highest possible tribute to the authors' versatility. How much you like it will depend on your taste for satire and lampoon. The Strugatsky fury – and it is fury: disgust with hypocrisy, with bureaucratic bumbling, with self-serving, self-saving distortions of logic and of truth and of initially decent human motivations – their fury is laced with laughter, rich with scorn, effervescent with the comic spirit...

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