The Ugly Swans

Infobox Book |
name = The Ugly Swans
title_orig = Гадкие лебеди
translator = Alice Stone Nakhimovsky and Alexander Nakhimovsky


image_caption = Cover from MacMillan edition
author = Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = Soviet Union
language = Russian
genre = Science fiction novel
publisher = Macmillan in U.S.,
unpublished in USSR until 1987
release_date = in samizdat since 1968
english_release_date = 1979 1st in U.S.
media_type = Print (Hardcover)
pages =
isbn = ISBN 0-02-615190-1 (US edition)

"The Ugly Swans" (Russian: Гадкие лебеди, "Гадкие лебеди" IPA| [] ) is a science fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It was written in 1966-1967 to be published in Molodaya Gvardiya magazine, but the publication was rejected due to prominent political and free-thought overtones in the novel. It circulated in samizdat, and was published abroad. In USSR, it was published only during perestroika, in 1987, in Latvian Daugava magazine, as "The Time of Rains" (Время дождей). Later it was included as a story within a story in Strugatsky's Crooked Destiny, where the protagonist, Felix Sorokin, secretly works on the novel.

In 2006, a loose film adaptation of the novel was made by Konstantin Lopushansky.

Plot summary

The novel shares some ideas with later works like The Second Invasion from Mars and Roadside Picnic (a non-standard alien invasion), and The Time Wanderers (the birth of Übermensch). The story is set in an unnamed town in an unnamed country, where the rain never stops, people suffer from strange disfiguring "yellow leprosy", and local children become superhuman geniuses despising the dirty and corrupt human world and having no remorse for adults.

English releases

# Arkadii Natanovich Strugatskii, "The Ugly Swans" translated by Alice Stone Nakhimovsky and Alexander Nakhimovsky, New York: MacMillan, ISBN 0026151901
# Arkady Strugatsky, "The Ugly Swans", New York: Collier Books, 1980, 234pp, ISBN 0020072406