In wilderness of vast unconquered wood, where nature still prevails
Out of reach, and not controlled by techno style civilization
Lies land with strange, mysterious society of powerful females
Who do not need the help of men and use Parthenogenesis for sexless procreation.
In this essay, I want to focus on two very narrow aspects of this work, namely, the elaborate satire covered there about the extremes of two popular Western movements:
a) Feminism
b) Protection of the Nature and Environment
General Soviet audience was not familiar at the times with any of those two social phenomena.
Also, as in other Strugatsky brothers's books (especially in "Hard to Be a God"), they used here (in this book) the quasi science fiction camouflage format in order to hide the real meaning of the book (harsh criticism of the Soviet Russia/USSR regime reality) and, thus, to pass through the censorship in order for the book to get published.
That is the ONLY type of book (intended to criticize Soviet Russia/USSR regime) they COULD write at that time without jeopardizing their own privileged professional positions in the Soviet Russia society of that time ...
The whole idea was to make the real social content of the books be understandable just by the elite audience(to which the majority of Russian people did not belong ...)
They (Strugatsky brothers) were of course thrilled by the challenge they were facing - to manage to "sneak" that inner hidden sense into the book without doing harm to themselves.
The authors should be truly praised that they masterfully and even I must say brilliantly accomplished their above described goal.
In general it was "fashionable" way in the latest stages of USSR, which started in 1960th and lasted until the "Perestroika" period, in all areas of the "intellectual art" to hide the critical view against the Soviet regime by bringing other "unrelated ;-) " topics ...
For example the play (see below link)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Enemy_of_the_People
was staged in one of the most "classy" Moscow theater (in 1977 as I recall it ? - I have seen it myself) and all viewers were perceiving this as the current critical voice against the Soviet regime (and not like what was happening in Norway) - under the 'An Enemy of the People"
the play was hinting to what was happening at that time with Andrei Sakharov
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov
I should also add that in "Понедельник начинается в субботу" ("The Monday starts on Saturday") and in
"Hard to Be a God" the authors contrasted uneven social *progress* with the steady progress of gaining knowledge through scientific discoveries and technological achievements.
The authors tried to show that unstoppable HUMAN HUNGER FOR KNOWLEDGE survives all persecutions and goes forward no matter how horrible human life conditions are (thus going along with my own theory that gaining knowledge is the real driving force and the end goal of the evolution).
Strugatsky brothers's books should not be considered as belonging to Science Fiction & Fantasy genre (instead those books really belong to Social Historical genre) and should not be mistakenly comparatively identified even with the best western science fiction books (Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, etc.).
This essay was written to address English-speaking (mainly and primarily to American) readers. In the US, militant feminism has turned into an epidemic of male witch hunts — that's why I focused on this aspect. I also aimed to explain to the American reader that the Strugatsky works belong to the field of social literature, and not to the genre of entertaining fiction ...
Вариант этого же эссе на Русском языке:
http://www.stihi.ru/2018/09/13/5264
P.S.
I am so much incurably "infected" by the Forest - by its mystical inescapable melancholy and pessimism. This is the swan song of the Strugatsky brothers' farewell with the optimism of “progressorism”, farewell to the idea that technological progress and cultural achievements pave the way for social and moral progress ...
Forest is a hymn to agnostic and unknowable ...
NB There is another interesting subtopic in the context of the Forest - the relationship of Candid and Nava ...
This is the only ray of light in the darkness of the Forest. Nava, with her naively-earthly, but in her own pure and sincere attachment to Candid, gives him (Candida) a certain foothold in this alien and mysterious Forest ...
But her (Nava, support, hope) is taken away from Candid in this Forest.
Here is what B. Strygatsky said in one of the interviews:
"We did not know how and even, in my opinion, were afraid to describe women, to write about women. Why? I do not know. Maybe because we professed the ancient principle: women and men are creatures of different breeds. It seemed to us that we know and understand men (we are men ourselves), but none of us would venture to say that we know and understand women. Yes, and children, for that matter also! After all, children are, of course, the third special kind of intelligent beings living on Earth."
B. Strugatsky