Snail on the Slope

Snail on the Slope (Russian - "Улитка на склоне") is a science fiction novel by Soviet authors Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

All he can do is watch the Forest while sitting on the cliff's edge high above it, suffer through a car driver Tousik's endless sexcapades stories, and otherwise partake in Directorate life which is full of absurdity.

When a top secret robot escapes, they hunt it down with their eyes taped shut to avoid the mandatory sentence for seeing it.

When he is evicted from his hotel in the middle of the night for the expired stay permit still not being able to obtain his leave permit, having finally spent a night with Alevtina, a female librarian who has long courted him, Peretz awakens to find himself the new Director General, and her as his personal assistant.

One day his wife Nava asks him to accompany her to the nearest village on some chore, and they veer off the track by accident.

Thinking this future too cruel and terrible, having his wife taken away from him by the "sisters-in-arms" who know he's an alien "from the cliffs" but still refuse to engage with him for being a male and chase him away, Candide decides to throw in his lot with the villagers.

He returns home and tries to warn them but they take his stories of ruthless gendercidal lake-dwelling Amazon rulers of the Forest as laughable fairy tales.