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>>>Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky). Soviet sci-fi authors with legendary status in post-Soviet space among anyone who reads sci-fi.

The iron curtain blocked a lot of great writers. Not just for Russia/Eastern Europe but also China. I recently purchased a book that was an anthology of the "best" Chinese stories and was blown away.

TRIVIA - The best selling magazine in the WORLD is a Chinese science fiction magazine. "Science Fiction World" It has a readership of 400,000. For comparison Asimov's SF is only ~15,000.

http://www.concatenation.org/articles/science_fiction_world_2010.html

Could not agree more: Strugatsky brothers and Stanislaw Lem.

Unfortunately they are not well known in US, but heir work is brilliant.

Not only the originality of ideas is amazing, but also the intrinsic quality of their literature.

The translations must be very good to capture the richness of their language, though.

The good news is a lot of Lem's works and Strugatsky's works are being reprinted in English and can be found on Amazon(Roadside Picnic, Cyberiad, The Futurological Congress) .

>>>Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky). Soviet sci-fi authors with legendary status in post-Soviet space among anyone who reads sci-fi.

The iron curtain blocked a lot of great writers. Not just for Russia/Eastern Europe but also China. I recently purchased a book that was an anthology of the "best" Chinese stories and was blown away.

TRIVIA - The best selling magazine in the WORLD is a Chinese science fiction magazine. "Science Fiction World" It has a readership of 400,000. For comparison Asimov's SF is only ~15,000.

http://www.concatenation.org/articles/science_fiction_world_2010.html

There's a copy at (Harnessing the Brane-Deer):

http://www.concatenation.org/futuresindex.html

Reminds me of What's Expected of Us by Ted Chiang.

Your post reminds me of this short SF story by Ted Chiang, published 3 years ago on Nature: http://www.concatenation.org/futures/whatsexpected.pdf (warning: PDF link, but only a single page long) I guess they built the Predictor after all. They didn't need a time machine and are even 7 seconds ahead instead of just 1.

It's already been done in The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod.