Lame Fate

Strugatsky, Arkady, and Boris Strugatsky. Lame Fate / Ugly Swans. Maya Vinokour, translator. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2020.[1] Ugly Swans: Russian, 1972; first English translation 1979.[2]

From description on Bookshop.org website at least as of 31 October 2021.

[...] Lame Fate is the first-person account of middle-aged author Felix Sorokin. When the Soviet Writers' Union asks him to submit a writing sample to a newfangled machine that can supposedly evaluate the "objective value" of any literary work, he faces a dilemma. Should he present something establishment-approved but middling, or risk sharing his unpublished masterpiece, which has languished in his desk drawer for years? Sorokin's masterwork is Ugly Swans, previously published in English as a standalone work but presented here in an authoritative new translation. Ugly Swans chronicles the travails of disgraced literary celebrity Victor Banev, who returns to his provincial hometown to find it haunted by the mysterious clammies — black-masked men residing in a former leper colony. Possessing supernatural talents, including the ability to control the weather, the clammies terrify the town's adult population but enthrall its teenagers [...].[3]

The Barnes & Noble website[4] and Rachel Cordasco in The SF in Translation Universe #8 in SFRA Review 50.4 (Fall 2020)[5][6] both label the "newfangled machine" as "a computer program" that can determine a work's "objective value."

So Lame Fate serves as a realistic science-fictional frame to a politically-charged horror story — a frame with its own political implications of an apparat judging art.

RDE, finishing, with thanks to Rachel Cordasco, 31Oct21