The Bull's Hour

The Bull's Hour is a social science fiction novel by the Soviet paleontologist and writer Ivan Yefremov, written in 1968 and published in book form in 1970. It is considered a sequel to Andromeda (1957) and takes place in the same universe a century or more later. Although the cast is entirely different, the protagonist, the historian Fay Rodis, occasionally recalls characters from the earlier novel as historical figures.

The book uses a story-within-a-story framing: the narrative is told as an answer to a question raised in a classroom lesson about the patterns of development of societies. Some three thousand years in the future, a communist Earth has developed faster-than-light travel and sends the starship Dark Flame to the planet Tormance, home to human descendants of Earth's refugees. There the crew finds a society which Yefremov portrays as a blend of capitalism in its worst form and a Chinese-style pseudo-socialism, divided between short-lived ordinary workers and long-lived scientists and specialists, under the total control of a bureaucracy and police and with a monopoly over information. The crew, which gradually makes the truth about the planet's history and situation available to all, sacrifices some lives, including that of its expedition leader, for the sake of the planet's free future.

The novel develops central ideas of Yefremov's thought, such as the "Inferno", a measure of a society's infernality by the wasted effort it imposes on its individuals, and "Ahriman's arrow", the tendency of certain systems to eliminate their best members. Soon after its publication the Soviet authorities withdrew it from libraries and bookshops, seeing in it a veiled criticism of the regime itself. Republished during perestroika, it has since been translated into many languages.