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Introduction: From Nauchnaia Fantastika to Post-Soviet Dystopia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Sibelan Forrester  and
Yvonne Howell
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Extract

Science fiction is the genre that links our lives to the future: the faster the pace of scientific and technological advancement, the greater our awareness of what István Csicsery-Ronay called “the science-fictionality” of everyday life. The more we feel the effect of scientific and technological change on global flows of economic, social, and cultural exchange (not to mention the blurring of biological and environmental boundaries), the more we are drawn to a literature that Boris Strugatskii identified as “a description of the future, whose tentacles already reach into the present.“ It is hardly surprising that scholarly interest in Russian and Soviet science fiction has been growing in recent years, with an expanding roster of roundtables and panels exploring the topic at professional conferences. Why talk about Soviet science fiction? As the articles in this special thematic cluster suggest, science fiction functions more as a field of intersecting discourses than as a clearly delineated genre: for readers of Slavic Review, it is a genre that foregrounds the interdisciplinary connections between the history of Soviet science and technology, political and economic development, and social and literary history. Science fiction, in short, offers a way to read the history of the future, with texts selfconsciously oriented toward distant spatial and temporal horizons, even as they point insistently back to the foundational factors shaping the vectors of a society's collective imagination.

Type
Reading the History of the Future: Early Soviet and Post–Soviet Russian Science Fiction
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 72 , Issue 2 , Summer 2013 , pp. 219 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2013

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References

1. Csicsery-Ronay, István's seminal argument about science-fictionalality as a contemporary mode of awareness and response can be found in The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (2008; reprint, Middletown, 2011), 2.Google Scholar

2. Strugatskii, Boris, interview, “Ot cheloveka razumnogo k cheloveku vospitannomu,” published in Chelovek bez granits, at www.manwb.ru/articles/philosophy/filo sofy_and_life/Strugatzlnt_JulLuz/# (last accessed 1 March 2013).Google Scholar

3. Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, 1979).Google Scholar

4. Banerjee, Anindita, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Middletown, 2012).Google Scholar

5. Reese, Kevin Mitchell, “Immortals Are Not Men: Mayakovskii, the Strugatskii Brothers, and the New Soviet Man” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2010).Google Scholar

6. Laursen, Eric, Toxic Voices: The Villainfrom Early Soviet Literature to Socialist Realism (Evanston, 2013).Google Scholar

7. See, for example, Graham, Loren, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fali of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1996);Google Scholar Krementsov, Nikolai, A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science (Chicago, 2011);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Siddiqi, Asif, The Red Rockets’ Glare: Space Flight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge, Eng., 2010),Google Scholar as well as Siddiqi, , Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge (Gainesville, 2003).Google Scholar A crucial earlier source for Russian science fiction in its societal context is Rosalind Marsh's Soviet Fiction since Stalin: Science, Politics, and Literature (Totowa, N.J., 1986).

8. See also several excellent papers and talks by Eric Laursen, for example, “Two Heads Are Better Than One: Rewriting Beliaev's Head of Professor Dowell” (paper, Science Fiction Research Association, Carefree, Arizona, June 2010). For an invaluable interdisciplinary perspective, see Krementsov, Nikolai's “Off with Your Heads: Isolated Organs in Early Soviet Science and Fiction,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C 40, no. 2 (June 2009): 87–100.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

9. On the role of the Strugatskiis’ “progressorism” in late Soviet science fiction and political life, see Kukulin, Il'ia, “Alternative Social Blueprinting in Soviet Society of the 1960s and 1970s, or Why Left-Wing Political Practices Have Not Caught on in Contemporary Russia,” Russian Studies in History 49, no. 4 (Spring 2011): 51–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar