News You Can Bruise for 2009 August 7

I read Roadside Picnic, which unlike Mason & Dixon is definitely not the best book I've ever read, but which does have the all-time best title for a science fiction novel. There's this interesting assertion in the author biography that I couldn't find in English anywhere on the Web, so I'm putting it up:

The Soviet cosmonaut Georgy Grechko, while in orbit during the Soyuz-17 flight, relaxed by reading the Strugatskys, making theirs the first science-fiction novels to be read in space.

(cf.)