Short stories by the Strugatsky brothers

The Strugatsky brothers, Arkady and Boris, were Soviet-era writers best known for their science fiction novellas and novels who wrote about fifty short stories and other short-form works between 1955 and 1963. The first completed work by Arkady Strugatsky whose manuscript has survived is the short story How Kang Died, written in 1946. Boris Strugatsky's first literary experiments date to the mid-1950s. Around 1955, the brothers attempted to develop a technique for working together, resulting in the short story Sand Fever, which was only published in 1991. Subsequently, the Strugatsky brothers worked in parallel on major-form works (novellas and novels) and continued to write short stories, with the plot idea typically developed by one of the co-authors and joint work occurring at the final stage.

The first published short story, From Beyond, was written in 1957 and printed in 1958 in the magazine Tekhnika Molodezhi. Almost immediately, it was expanded into a novella in three stories, which appeared two years later. Some short-form works from the late 1950s formed the novel (also defined as a novella or cycle of stories) Noon: 22nd Century (1962). Certain stories, especially Six Matches, were popular, frequently reprinted, and translated into foreign languages.

By 1963, the co-author brothers, in their own words, realized that writing short stories was "no longer interesting" to them, and they never returned to the genre. Previously published short-form works were rarely and irregularly reprinted in the 1970s–1980s. In the 1990s–2000s, many archival texts not intended for publication or "rejected" by the co-authors appeared in collected works. Some sketches and plots were used in other their works; in the autobiographical novel Lame Fate, the writers' early stories are presented with extreme self-criticism and harsh self-irony. The history of the creation of most stories is described in Boris Strugatsky's Comments on the Past.