"A Billion Years Before the End of the World", Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

And when we wrote this story of ours, we clearly saw before us a completely real and cruel prototype of the Homeostatic Universe we had invented, and we saw ourselves in the subtext, and we tried to be realistic and merciless—both to ourselves and to this entire situation we had invented, from which there was only one way out, as in reality—through the loss, complete or partial, of self-respect.

B. Strugatsky, Comments on the Past

#bedside reading