Soviet Sci-Fi
al., Kir Bulychev et
BOOKS Soviet Sci-Fi EARTH AND ELSEWHERE: New Science Fiction from the Soviet Union by Kir Bulychev et al. Translated by Roger De Garis Macmillan. 315 pp. $22.95. Soviet science fiction isn't just...
...Called a pantheist by his critics, Zabolotsky had a vision of immortality based on the cycle of birth and decay which is reflected in Korabelnikov's story...
...Although it turns out that Sergei Andreyevich isn't quite so bad, the question remains: Can one take the same experiences and memories and interpret them so diiferently that they yield a different—and better—person...
...Like the ax-wielding Egor, man is a destroyer of nature in the story, and there is no upbeat ending to reassure us that this will change...
...Artistically, it's significant because it offers alternatives to the realist style that dominates Soviet prose fiction...
...For that reason, if for no other, Soviet science fiction deserves to be read by Americans interested in the spectrum of Soviet thought...
...Tower of Birds" can be read as a politicized fairy tale...
...A 1968 Soviet study found that 60 per cent of the undergraduate physics majors at Moscow University were influenced by science fiction when they chose their area of specialization...
...Kir Bulychev's "Another's Memory" is a sci-fi detective story with philosophical themes...
...If I don't, I must die like Bykov," thinks one of his younger colleagues in space, so that no reader will miss which character is to serve as a role model...
...In it, Egor, a rational man from the city, comes to the Russian taiga to collect ikons, spinning wheels, and samovars...
...Soviet science fiction often exhibits discontent with highly developed civilization...
...Centralized technology requires a centralized and unified control," states one character...
...The problems in this plot are posed by nature and by technological breakdowns, and are solved by the "positive hero" demanded by socialist realism: Alexei Petrovich Bykov, captain of a photon freighter carrying desperately needed food supplies to one of Jupiter's satellites, is strong as a bull, mentally and physically...
...Ivan, the appealing and responsible young hero, is the clone of a careerist scientist, Sergei Andreyevich Rzhevsky, who is accused by some colleagues of cruel acts...
...But work where and for whom...
...In Olga Larionova's "A Tale of Kings," renewal is sought in youth and physical beauty, but that turns out to be a sterile source...
...Russian science-fiction books—new and secondhand—are in such great demand that they are extremely hard to find in Soviet shops...
...More than in America, science fiction in the Soviet Union speaks for and to the scientific-technical intelligentsia about the ethical use of technology...
...In fact, the final picture of a sympathetic doctor framing appeals to save the forest spirits and writing articles that no one will publish suggests that the future holds an uphill struggle for environmentalists...
...Ironically, the least striking story in the collection is by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky...
...Many of the readers of science-fiction stories (found in magazines as well as books) are teen-age boys, whose views can be shaped by this medium, as critics and educators know...
...The anthology Earth and Elsewhere suggests the range of Soviet science fiction, from the adventurous to the conventional, both in style and content...
...the result is such secrecy that specialists know only their immediate tasks...
...The Way to Amalteia" is an example of their early work, before they turned to grotesque anti-utopias (most now translated) which gained them notoriety...
...Material abundance, too, fails to create happiness for two earthlings on another planet...
...That remains vague...
...By stressing free will and moral choice, the author places his story within the post-Stalin search for socialist ethics...
...There he meets pagan Slavic gods and literally becomes part of nature, gaining an awareness of the oneness of living things...
...The publishing firms of Macmillan in New York and Collier in London deserve applause for their series of Soviet science fiction in translation, of which Earth and Elsewhere is the latest volume...
...This interest in Russia's past myths and folk objects is characteristic of a recent Soviet literary movement called "village prose," but Korabelnikov seems less nationalistic and more ecologically oriented than some members of that literary school...
...Soviet science fiction isn't just for sci-fi fans...
...Gansovsky's contribution depicts crumbling and wasteful high-tech capitalism, but its warnings are relevant to socialism...
...Karen Rosenberg (Karen Rosenberg is a staff member of the Russian Research Center at Harvard...
...If I get out, I must become like Bykov...
...Bulychev says yes, a significant answer in a society where Marxist determinists speak of inevitability...
...In the stories by Bulychev and Korabelnikov, as well as in Sever Gansovsky's "A Part of the World," the plot turns around problems caused by human beings, not by nature or machines...
...The epigraph announces its daring, for the author of the quoted verse is Nikolai Zabolotsky, who was arrested on trumped-up charges during Stalin's purges and released from the camps eight years later, in 1946...
...By setting their works in imaginary times and places, some Soviet writers, like the famous Strugatsky brothers, were able to pose controversial questions, at least until the "freeze" of the late 1970s...
...Oleg Korabelnikov's "Tower of Birds" stands out in contrast...
...But within the limits of state-published Soviet literature, there are deviations from official optimism...
...Returning to primitive nature is shown to be a pathetic escape attempt, and the Chekhovian hero, in the end, preaches work and responsibility...
...anti-utopias, while controversial, are still safer than dissident Utopias in the U.S.S.R...
...They are giving English readers a much-needed glimpse of Soviet popular culture...
...That's why Russian sci-fi is a battleground: extreme conservatives and extreme liberals in the U.S.S.R.— sometimes called neo-Stalinists and anti-Stalinists—as well as those in between have fought for control of this influential and popular territory...
...Politically, it's important because it expresses fears and warnings about the reassertion of authoritarian tendencies...
...Even his name is derived from the Russian for bull or ox...
...they sell out immediately and fetch wild prices on the black market...
...Not surprisingly, what is lacking in these stories are political alternatives...
Vol. 50 • June 1986 • No. 6
