I would put this old gem - from the Strugatsky brothers in 1964 (those giants of Soviet and international 60's/70's S.F) on my top 5 of favourite science fiction novels, and I don't know how it passed me by for so long.
It reads a bit like a sort of colourful, slightly bawdy swashbuckling historical romance except that the SFnal twist is that the central character is a sort of sociohistorical spy sent from a future Earth - and we are on another planet which is roughly at a Middle Ages level of cultural stage.However, even given this, things are going from bad to worse there as a corrupt dictator takes control of society and seeks to purge any would be opponents, especially men of culture and learning.
Can our hero, who is there under an alias, resist the growing temptation to interfere in the development of this society, thus breaking one of main the rules of his being there? (Think `prime directive`)
The good writing shines through this new translation, which is courtesy of from the same translator responsible for the recent version of their `Roadside Pic Nic`. (If you have tried to read `Hard to be a God` prior to 2014 and found it too daunting then try this one - the older translation was re-translated from a German language version, and somewhat opaque).
Like all good science fiction this works on many levels - with adventure, intrigue, philosophy, satire - and , because of its heartfelt humane attitude- it all somehow leaves you feeling uplifted too. There is a helpful foreword by Ken Macleod and a stimulating afterword by Boris Strurgatsky. Both of them focus on the political underpinings of the work (it was conceived as a bit of a protest on the clamping down on the `thaw` in Soviet Russia from 1962 - but, of course, has much wider resonances than that).
This has almost made me love this genre again.