On Russian Science Fiction

Here you can read a few articles (very very old articles) about Russian SF. Those are several articles that I have found in different issues of fanzines and books for foreign readers of SF. Maybe that articles would help you a little bit to learn about Russian SF literature. But PLEASE make allowances to the articles` age!

More articles on pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,

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Soviet sience fiction reached its peak in the last two decades. The appearance of The Andromeda Nebula by the prominentsci-fi writer and scientist Ivan Efremov is concidered the beginning of this new period. This novell accumulated the best features inherent in the Soviet science fiction, faith in the mind of man, in his wonderful future.
Many prominent writers have approached the topic of science fiction. It will suffice to recall “Aelita” and “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” by A. Tolstoi.
After The Andromeda Nebula there appear in scienoe fiction many authors who signflicantly widened the topical potential of science fiction.
For a scientist science fiction becomes a screen where he projects various situations and shows possible negative results of the technological progress.
Science fiction often forecasts future. The word "robot" coined by the Czech writer Karel Capek long before the cybernetics as a science appeared. Nowadays, again, science fiction forewarns: “Beware-robots". However, a contemporary science fiction writer does not see the danger in robots' revolt; he sees it in their becoming excessively thoughtful of men.
Like many others, the problem of contacts with other civilizations was also brought up by science fiction. However, it has now become the domain of the Great science. Nevertheless, an attentive reader will immediayely recognize the feature associating these stories so different in writer's style-the irony, common among the authors when they tackle the subject. This, also, is quite in order, , because it is the science fiction which paved the way for sensations like “flying saucers" and the mysterious Bermuda Triangle, as well as for hypotheses about strangers from other planets, who allegedly buiit great ancient constructions.
Science fiction calls us, warns us, foretells and urges to be careful, thus giving us an opportunity to opt for a better future.

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SCIENCE FICTION: WHAT IT IS?

That is a question that can hardly be answered either concisely or unambiguously. And we do need an answer, for science fiction has a very wide public and is attracting ever greater numbers of writers, causing debate and argument. Although attitudes to science fiction differ, there is one point on which both its well-wishers and opponents are agreed: it has recently become one of the most popular kinds of literature.
For instance, in France, the birthplace of one of the founders of science fiction Jules Verne, new contributions to science fiction were published for a while in a series of issues. Each issue had a special advertising page with definitions of science fiction. These definitions are really interesting and noteworthy.
What is science fiction?
As the name itself indicates, it is a mixture of fiction and reality where adventures are set against the background of tomorrow.
How long has science fiction existed?
No one can answer that. It is as old as human fantasy. Plato, Svrano de Bergerac, Voltaire, Edgar Poe, and Jules Verne made their contribution to it long before the name itself was invented in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback, an American.
Whom does science fiction appeal to?
It appeals to the curious, to those willing to learn someth ing new and travel into the unknown. Even eminent scholars are among its enthusiastic readers.
Science fiction is instructive.
It may be contended to be the most instructive of all the literary genres. Science fiction readers can grasp many things that they could not learn anywhere else.
Science fiction fires the imagination.
It lures the reader to the back of beyond, where space, time, and other dimensions pose no insurmountable obstacles for man's reason. The impossible does not exist.
It is capable of foreseeing the reality of tomorrow's world.
Science fiction is entertaining.
There is always planty of dynamic action, breathtaking adventure, and strong emotions. More than any other kind of literature, it frees the reader from everyday cares and commonplace events.
Science fiction is extremely diverse.
One of its greatest advantages is its infinite variety and continUal regeneration.
Other literary genres are limited to the world around us, whereas science fiction's domain is the Universe.
Science fiction is a window into the future.
Soviet science fiction was born almost at the same time as the Soviet state. Civil War was still raging when the first Soviet publishing houses began to issue science fiction. The harder reality, the more men are attracted to dreams. The years that saw the formation of the new state were very hard indeed, and men dreamed about the new, just and wonderful society to come. This dream gave them strength, and the motto. 'The Earth shall rise on new foundation' became every man's programme and personal task. The people understood the new world could not be built at once. They slso understood that many of them would never be able to live a single second in the world of their dreams, and they wanted so much to see that brilliant world for at least a few minutes. That is where science fiction stepped in. The building of the new world born in the struggle with the old determined the main content of science fiction of those years.
Alexev Tolstoy's novels of those turbulent times, Aelita and Engineer Garin's Death Ray, now classics, have been translated into many languages. Their formula is: struggle full of tension and adventure, victory, and agaim the struggle to buil d ~ socia!ism. Science ftion of that time closely linked to the adventure and detective story. Engineer Garin's Death Ray is an example. Many famous Soviet writers like Andrey Platonov, Valentin Katayev, Vsevolod Ivanov, Mikhail Bulgakov, and others, began their literary career writing science and non-science fiction. Ilya Erenburg wrote D. E. Trust, a novel about the death of Europe, a combination of political satire, fantasy, and a thrilling adventurous plot structure. Finally, outsanding Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Academician Obruchev and others also resorted to science fiction. Obruchev's books Plutonia and Sannikop's Land are as topical as ever, snd still avidly read by the youth of today.
Soviet sci-fi writers have always been interested in scientific research. One of the most outstanding science fiction writers interested in these problems was Aleksander Belyayev. There was not a single scientific problem, not one exciting idea that would escape his attention-and there were plenty of such ideas about.
A period of tremendous construction began in the Soviet country. Power plants, canals, mines, railways, enormous works were built anew or reconstructed on a gigantic scale. This colossal construction work understandably required an adequate ~ scientific and technological basis. A number of scientific discoveries then became the subject~matter of science fiction, discoveries that determined the face of the world as we know it now. At that time Soviet science fiction writers were already taking up the subjects of giant cities, TV networks, bioelectric remote control, hypnopedics, etc. Now, some forty years later, f the topics of purest fantasy have become everyday occurrences.
From its very inception, Soviet science fiction asserted the principles of internam ? tionalism, human equality, and justice.
After Ivan Yefremov's The Andromeda Nebula, which appeared at the beginning of the space age, many attempts have been made to paint the communist future. Mankind's conquest of the infinite outer space, its problems, achievements, and difficulties, everyday life and psychology-all of this has become the subject-matter I , of science fiction. Science fiction in this country entered a stage of rapid development in the 1960's.
At that time the first stories were written by the Strugatsky brothers, Dneprov, Altov, Gansovsky, Parnov, and Yemtsov. Somewhat later the names of Varshavsky, Shefner, Gromov, and the Abramovs appear. Wellmknown Soviet realist writers, such as Tendryakov, Gor, Sokolova, Kaverin and Granin, joined the ranks of scence fiction writers.
Present-day Soviet science fiction offers extreme variety. Early in the !960's, when a new period in Soviet science fiction began, its principal centres were Moscow, Leningrad, Baku, and Kiev, whereas by the late 1970's it had become much more widespread. Young sci-fi authors came on the scene in the capitals of the national and autonomous republics writing either in their national languages or in Russian. The new generation of Soviet science fiction writers preserves and adds to the traditions inherited from their predecessors. Soviet science fiction is completely free of the mystic element, of demons, werewolves, cosmic gangsters, and horrendous murders, that are so popular in Western science fiction. Writers focus their attention on the future prospects of biology and physics, the origin of 1ife in the Uiliverse, contacts with extraterrestrial intelligence, space study and the riddles of the universe.
In Western science fiction scientific and technological progress is presented either as a panacea for cUring mankind of all its ills or, by most authors, as a monstrous destructive device threatening the Earth's civilisation, whereas Soviet science fiction writers base their conceptions of the future on the dialectical unity of four factors-scientific, technological, social and moral progress, the latter now being shifted into the foreground.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are very much concerned with aspects of educating the new man. Their heroes, men of the communist future, are endowed with the best features of our contemporaries. The authors see in it the continuity of epochs, the unbreakable unity of generations marching towards a great goal. Their heroes hardly differ from our contemporaries in their appearance, moral make-up, and behaviour.
It is not for nothing that one of their first publications was called Just Like Ourselves.
Science fiction is naturally oriented towards the future. That is precisely what endears it to young people and those in the forefront of science-the serious thinkers.
Science fiction has become a powerful means of education and progress.
We might well ask ourselves what its most attractive features are for those who, as the phrase has it, work on the borderline of the unknown’. If we look at the lives of some sci-fi writers abroad, we shall see that many of them are also scientists. Nuclear physicists Leo Szilard and Otto Frisch, Professor Isam ak Asimov the biochemist, astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, anthropologist Chad Oliver, Arthur Clarke, astronomer and popular science writer, Stanislaw Lem, philosopher and physician, Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics-that is a far from complete list of wellmknown scholars who are authors of science fiction works.
This is also true of Soviet literature. As we have mentioned, Academician Obruhev was the first Soviet scholar who turned to science fiction. In these days too, many scientists and science fiction writers combine literary and scientific pursuits. Science fiction often becomes the favourite genre of scholars, helping them in their work.
Thus Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the founder of astronautics, said on more than one occasion that science fiction helped him choose his scientific career. His favourite book was Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon.
This synthesis of science and art is not accidental. It reflects one of the principal peculiarities of contemporary science and art, or at any rate of science: the amalgamation of branches that are far, sometimes very far from each other.
It was Ivan Yefremov who remarked that science and art not only co-exist in their full bloom but also facilitate one another's development. In his view, the alliance of science and art contributes to the physical and spiritual development of the men of the future and to the formation of an all-round personality.
Science has become an integral part of fiction so that the one cannot be painlessly divorced from the other, There are several factors in this turbulent age that are liable to give a powerful stimulus to the development of science fiction at any moment.
Scientific and technological progress has been of considerable significance here.
The future is advancing towards us at a tremendous pace. This century demands a range and intensity of thought unheard-of before. The world opens up before us, its expanse and mutability unlimited. Attempts to study even a tiny bit of the future reveal boundless vistas. We are now living in an ‘age of reason' whose goal is to grasp the essence of things, the complexities of the real world, Quite recently, a reference to a symposium on contacts with extraterrestrials could only be envisaged in a science fiction context; in 1972, however, a representam tive SovietmAmerican Symposium on Contacts with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI) was held in Byurakan (Armenia), attended by outstanding Soviet and American scientists. The consensus was that efforts should be directed towards establishing contacts with civilisations whose technological potential was comparable with or higher than the terrestrial one.
Science fiction had become reality Spacemship, astronaut, space-suit, free fall-these are all specific terms of science fiction, or they used to be before Yury Gagarin's flight; now they are part of the language of science and everyday life, and they are here to stay.
The role of science fiction in the contemporary world of rapid and sometimes frenzied development cannot be overestimated. It`s indispensable if only because it prepares public opinion, as it were, for the intrusion of the nextmin-line wonder of science and technology into our lives. The first artificial satellite, the first orbital flight, man's landing on the Moon, were accepted as something long awaited precisely due to the efforts of science fiction writers. The time is bound to come when the papers will announce the first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, and it will be received without too much fuss. It will not strike us as something completely unpredicted, for we shall have been prepared first by science and later by both science fiction and science, Modern science fiction has introduced us to the scientist's laboratory and the world of his ideas. Scientific creation is impossible without flights of fantasy. Although a significant aspect of science fiction involves strong emotions, which makes it akin to art, it also introduces men to scientific methods of knowledge, for scientific thinking.
Science fiction draws the reader into clashes between human natures, views, and science all of them centred on the quest for the truth rather than the characters' aspirations, personal relations. All that is personal and petty recedes into the background and the truth emersges victoriousScience fiction us a as a rule reflects the present-day state of science irrespective of the time in which the action is set. Its main characters are scholars, men whom we meet daily. The writer' s imagination endows them with magic power over space and time, living and dead nature. They can do what our contemporaries are merely dreamin about. Of course, the heroes of science fiction can do things much better and faster than ourselves, they are capable of performing wonders but these are made possible by the imaginary science of the future. In this way the reader can trace the development of a scientific idea from its embryonic form to concrete implementation albeit fantastic as yet.
The stupendous development of science has in these daysbrought the future so close that it has ceased to be something vague and neutral - it has become part of our everyday life. Problems that were regarded as speculative evenearly in this centuryare now among the most vital questions of today. It is not accidental that the whole scienceof the future has emer~ed in recent years-futurology.
The interest for science fiction is growing the world over. That is a sign of the times. Quite recently physicists set the most important trends in thinking, now it is the turn of geneticists and sociologists. Tomorrow is entering our lives a bit faster than we expected; science fiction, modelling the coming future, tries to explain it, looking for hardly discernible paths into the future. Science fiction is read by those who seek answers to vital problems and heroes who can triumph over the invincible and solve the insoluble. To achieve this, no marvellous apparatus, formations, or intercession of fantastic beings are necessary. Once the situation is shifted towards the fantastic and extraorclinary, man is certain to reveal his latend potential and unsuspected aspects.
In the later case we are dealing with the so-called "novel of warning'. Whatever the concrete subject-matter of the novel-atomic war, the threat of fascism's rebirth, the mechanisation of mankind, or just some negative aspects of a concrete scientific discovery-it is first and foremost the scientist's personal responsibility before society that is under discussion.
However, the novel of warning' attains its goal only if it shows the social roots of evil and actively fights it, not just portrays it.
Science fiction writers from socialist countries have introducecl certain new motifs in solving future social conflicts. They reject the morbid alternative-either mankind's death through thermonuclear holocaust or the further degeneration of capitalm ist society automated hell-opposing to it their belief in the power of reason, in the possibility of creating a stable and just peace, and their conviction that a society free from exploitation will be created.
Science fiction is always optimistic and life-asserting.
The ranks of Soviet science fiction writers are continually growing; it is hard to list all to list all the new names. They write in different languages-Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian, Armenian, Estonian, Kirghiz, Georgian, Kazakh, and others, yet all of them represent the unity of our multinational Sovi' literature.
Speaking about the meaning of science fiction, Isaak Asimov, the remarkable science fiction writer, said that history had reached the point when man could wage war no longer, and people on Earth must establish friendly relations. He went on say that he always tried and stressed this wheh he wrote and took the popularity his works to mean that the public agreed with his view. He did not believe that people could be forced to love one another, but he would like to see hatred between people disappear. The writer added that he seriously thought that science fiction was one of the links which could help to unite mankind. The problems raised in science fiction were becoming burning problems for all humanity.
Summing up, Asimov concluded that the human race would survive if it looked future boldly in the face and did not cling to the past, if it plucked up the courage to accept changes and did not futilely and destructively oppose them. Asimov added that it was what science fiction taught us and he was proud to play what part he could in promoting its lessons.

More articles on pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,