AUTHORS’ NOTE: “A full belly is deaf to learning.”
AUTHORS’ NOTE: “Where you can do nothing, you should want nothing.”
AUTHORS’ NOTE: “You will be called upon when you are needed.”
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: A printer’s page would have constituted approximately forty thousand characters. The Strugatskys are envisioning a story about thirty-five to forty letter-size pages long.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: “Detgiz” is Detskoe Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo, the State Publishing House for Children’s Literature.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Glavlit is Glavnoe Upravlenie po Delam Literatury i Izdatelstv, the Central Directorate for Literary and Publishing Matters.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The ludens are a humanoid race with superior mental powers that appear in the stories set in the Strugatskys’ Noon Universe.