Monday Starts on Saturday

Over December and into Christmas, I read a number of books. One that stood out was Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Monday Starts on Saturday (the Gollancz Science Fiction Masterworks edition). You may know the Bros. Strugatsky from Roadside Picnic (the inspiration for Stalker) or Hard to be a God; suffice it to say they were authors of science fiction in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s. The constraints of publishing in Russia at that time are interesting and relevant to their work - the SF Masterworks editions of the above have afterwords by Boris Strugatsky detailing their difficulties - however, this isn't quite what I'm here to write about today.

Monday Starts on Saturday is (effectively) three linked novellas that deal with a young programmer who gets drawn into the 'Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry' - which is abbreviated to 'NiiChaVo', a pun on the Russian 'nichero', 'Don't mention it!'. Andrew Bromfield's translation renders this as the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy, IE, NITWIT.  With a name like that, you will have grasped that the vein of comedy in Monday Starts on Saturday lies fairly close to the surface. 

Cover of the Gollancz SF Masterworks edition. 
I'm not over-enamoured of it, but it's not unfitting.

What you have is an organisation with somewhat similar responsibilities and power to the titular Laundry of Charles Stross's Laundry Files or the BPRD of Hellboy but, a) seemingly pretty civilian in its applications (this might simply be a matter of focus - Koschei the Deathless is locked up in the basement while prosecutors labour to complete the immense list of charges against him) and b) largely tangled up with it's own problems. At any rate, Monday Starts on Saturday is more a satire of scientific research than a blood-and-thunder adventure. Certain aspects of this passed me by - I didn't pick up on some of the veiled references to Lysenko, even if the general shape of scientific theories agreeable to the governing ideology of the Soviet Union was apparent. 

Apart from all the above, there's a certain air to the mishaps and goings-on of Monday Starts on Saturday. It's something in the vein of the campus or varsity novel - talented, spritely people in a communal setting not always doing much work, having conversations and passing among a fairly mixed group of characters. Even if the tone or setting of the books changes, both Brideshead Revisited and The Secret History serve well in this regard. Lucky Jim is a little too centred on its main character; parts of AS Byatt's Possession may also be worthy of attention. 

I don't suppose that I have to explain the present appeal of this kind of setting, but it did put me in mind of something comedic (in the Classical sense of the word) or pastoral. It's a tone not often evoked, I think, by role-play. There have been very campus-like, academic materials produced: this post on Coins and Scrolls, this post on Against the Wicked City - and one should not forget the Chthonic Codex of Paolo Greco. 

At any rate, it put me in mind of a hibernating project of my own, provisionally if cumbersomely entitled White Hot Sparks from the Crucible of the Enlightenment. There have been a few posts devoted to this, and I have been looking over a few of my old notes (I think there might even be a short story somewhere on a hard drive....). I haven't yet read Skerples's Magical Industrial Revolution (jolly well ought to) but it seems it may cover much of the same ground. 

Monday Starts on Saturday, whatever it may be 'About' or remind me of, is still a worthwhile read. If nothing else, it is a reminder of the stakes that may come from magic even when no-one is threatening you with extinction.