About the book: 2024 / “Fiction is literature,” the Strugatsky brothers often repeated. And they regularly confirmed the correctness of the thesis with their books. But what if the Strugatsky phenomenon had not happened? Which of the great prose writers could take the vacant position of Soviet “science fiction writer No. 1”? Fazil Iskander, Vasily Aksenov, Viktor Konetsky, Vasily Shukshin, Yuri Koval - or someone else? What themes and plots would fantasy literature be enriched with, what would it gain and what would it lose? These alternative universes in the anthology “The World Without the Strugatskys” are explored by Sergei Kuznetsov, Daria Bobyleva, Vladimir Berezin, Timur Maksyutov, Ina Goldin and other modern writers (Vasily Vladimirsky).