Review (#6): Yuriy Shcherbak's "The Chronicle of Yaropol Town" (1968)
A mural in Kyiv, Ukraine (the author's photo, 2016) By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** Those following this blog will already know that I'm a fan of Yuriy Shcherbak – I praised him both as a writer and as a person (due to his parallel careers as epidemiologist scholar and writer, which he topped off with a role in politics and diplomacy in post-Soviet independent Ukraine). It would be a let-down if I wouldn't write here about one of his best-known works, "The Chronicle of Yaropol Town" ( Хроніка міста Ярополя in Ukrainian). This was written after Quarantine , and takes Shcherbak and us way outside the world of the science lab. It is not genre stuff ( Quarantine wasn't that, either, of course), but it contains fantastic as well as SF elements. Shcherbak shows much technical skill here again in the sense of building complex and nicely written text, but apart from this his w...