Deified by their Soviet readers from the 1960s on, the Strugatsky brothers—Arkady (1925-1991) and his younger sibling Boris (1933-2012)—were not only the most popular and prolific Russian writers of science fiction, a highly respected genre in post-Stalinist Soviet culture, but its most daring practitioners. Translated widely during the cold war, their work was continually on the radar of American science-fiction writers from Isaac Asimov to Ursula Le Guin to Kim Stanley Robinson.