“We get these unexplained interruptions in transmission, perhaps due to the passage of the astronauts’ legendary neutral fields between us,” Junius Antus explained to Veda.
“Three-tenths of a galactic second—that means waiting six hundred years,” muttered Darr Veter, morosely. “A lot of good that will do us!”
“As far as I can understand they are in communication with Epsilon Tucanae in the southern sky. That’s ninety parsecs away from us and close to the limit of our regular communications. So far we haven’t established contact with anything farther away than Deneb,” Mven Mass remarked.
“But we receive the Galactic Center and the globular clusters, don’t we?” asked Veda Kong.
“Irregularly, quite by chance, or through the memory machines of other members of the Great Circle that form a circuit stretching through the Galaxy,” answered Mven Mass.
“Communications sent out thousands and even tens of thousands of years ago are not lost in space, but eventually reach us,” said Junius Antus.
“So that means we get a picture of the life and knowledge of the peoples of other, distant worlds with great delay. For the Central Zone of the Galaxy, for example, a delay of about twenty thousand years.’”
“Yes, it doesn’t matter whether they are computer records of other, nearer worlds, or whether they are received by our stations, we see the distant worlds as they were a very long time ago. We see people that have long been dead and forgotten in their own worlds.” < … >
“The Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge is engaged in projects to overcome space, time and gravity,” Darr Veter put in. “They’re working on the fundamentals of the Cosmos, but they haven’t even gotten as far as the experimental stage yet, and can’t …” The green eye suddenly flashed on again and Veda once more felt giddy as the screen opened out into endless space.
The sharply outlined edges of the image showed that it was the computer record and not a direct transmission.
At first the onlookers saw the surface of a planet, obviously as seen from an outer station, a satellite. The huge pale violet sun, spectral in the terrific heat it generated, deluged the cloud envelope of the planet’s atmosphere with its penetrating rays.
“Yes, that’s it, the luminary of the planet is Epsilon Tucanae, a high temperature star, class B, 78 times as bright as our Sun,” whispered Mven Mass.
Darr Veter and Junius Antus nodded in agreement. The spectacle changed, the scene grew narrower and seemed to be descending to the very soil of the unknown world. The rounded domes of hills that looked as though they had been cast in bronze rose high above the surrounding country. An unknown stone or metal glowed like fire in the amazingly white light of the blue sun. Even in the imperfect apparatus used for transmission the unknown world gleamed triumphantly, with a sort of victorious magnificence.
The reflected rays produced a silver pink corona around the contours of the copper-colored hills and lay in a wide path on the slowly moving waves of a violet sea. The water, of a deep amethyst color, seemed heavy and glowed from within with red lights that looked like an accumulation of living eyes. The waves washed the massive pedestal of a gigantic statue that stood in splendid isolation far from the coast. It was a female figure carved from dark-red stone, the head thrown back and the arms extended in ecstasy towards the flaming depths of the sky. She could easily have been a daughter of Earth, the resemblance she bore to our people was no less astounding than the amazing beauty of the carving. Her body was the fulfillment of an earthly sculptor’s dream; it combined great strength with inspiration in every line. The polished red stone of the statue emitted the Games of an unknown and, consequently, mysterious and attractive life.
The five people of Earth gazed in silence at that astounding new world. The only sound was a prolonged sigh that escaped the lips of Mven Mass whose every nerve had been strained in joyful anticipation from his first glance at the statue.
On the sea-coast opposite the statue, carved silver towers marked the beginning of a wide, white staircase that swept boldly over a thicket of stately trees with turquoise leaves. “They ought to ring like bells!” Darr Veter whispered in Veda’s ear, pointing to the towers, and she nodded her head in agreement.
The camera of the new planet continued its steady and soundless journey into the country. For a second the five saw white walls with wide cornices through which led a portal of blue stone; the screen carried them into a high room filled with strong light. The dull, pearl-colored, grooved walls lent unusual clarity to everything in the hall. The attention of the Earth-dwellers was attracted to a group of people standing before a polished emerald panel.
The flame-red color of their skin was similar to that of the statue in the sea. It was not an unusual color for Earth—photographs preserved from ancient days recorded tribes of Central American Indians whose skin had been almost the same color, perhaps just a little lighter. There were two men and two women in the hall. They stood in pairs, differently clothed. The pair closest to the emerald panel wore short golden garments, something like elegant overalls fastened with a number of clips. The other pair wore cloaks that covered them from head to foot and were the same pearly hue as the walls. < … >
At this moment the pair in golden clothing moved away to the right and their place was taken by the second pair. With a movement so rapid that the eye could not follow it the cloaks were thrown aside, and two dark-red bodies gleamed like living fire against the pearl of the walls. The man held out his hands to the woman and she answered him with such a proud and dazzling smile of joy that the Earth-dwellers responded with their own involuntary smiles. And there, in the pearl hall of that immeasurably distant world, the two began a slow dance. It was probably not danced for the sake of dancing, but was something more in the nature of eurythmics, in which the dancers strive to show their perfection, the beauty of their lines and the flexibility of their bodies. A majestic and at the same time sorrowful music could be sensed in the rhythmic alternation of movement, as though the dancers were recalling the great ladder—countless unnamed victims sacrificed to the development of life that had produced Man, that beautiful and intelligent being. < … >
The dance was over. The young red-skinned woman came into the center of the hall and the camera focused on her alone. The red-skinned girl from the distant world turned to face her audience, her arms spread wide as though to embrace some invisible person standing before her. She threw back her head and shoulders as a woman of Earth might do in a moment of passion. Her mouth was open slightly, and her lips moved as she repeated inaudible words. So she stood, immobile, appealing, sending forth into the cold darkness of interstellar space fiery human words, an entreaty for friendship with people of other worlds. < … >
Mven Mass had worked on the construction of the water-supply system of a mine in Western Tibet, on the restoration of the Araucaria pine forests on the Nahebt Plateau in South America and had taken part in the annihilation of the sharks that had again appeared off the coasts of Australia. His training, his heredity and his outstanding abilities enabled him to undertake many years of persistent study to prepare himself for difficult and responsible activities. On that day, during the first hour of his new work, there had been a meeting with a world that was related to our Earth and that had brought something new to his heart. With alarm Mven Mass felt that some great depths had opened up within him, something whose existence he had never even suspected. How he craved another encounter with the planet of star Epsilon in the Tucana Constellation! … That was a world that seemed to have come into being by power of the best legends known to Earth-dwellers. He would never forget the red-skinned girl, her outstretched alluring arms, her tender, half-open lips! The fact that the two hundred and ninety light years dividing him from that marvelous world was a distance that could not be covered by any means known to the technicians of Earth served to strengthen rather than weaken his dream. Something new had grown up in Mven’s heart, something that lived its own life and did not submit to the control
of the will and cold intellect. The African had never been in love, he had been absorbed in his work almost as a hermit would be and had never experienced anything like the alarm and incomparable joy that had entered his heart during that meeting across the tremendous barrier of space and time.
(1956-7) Translated by A. L. and M. K.
On Contemporary Russian Fantasy and Science Fiction:
AN AFTERWORD BY SOFYA KHAGI
AS RICHARD STITES aptly observed in Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, “the world of fantasy … reveals and evokes deep layers, archaic dreams and longings that may better describe the feelings and anxieties [of a nation] than some conventional acts of political adherence.” Thus even a necessarily concise sketch of the latest trends in Russian fantastic literature will prove of value to anyone interested in the moral, cultural, and political climate of post-Soviet Russia.
Closely on the heels of the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky appeared on the literary scene with their first fantastic fables. It was primarily their oeuvre which, as the writers insisted, was “about adventures of the spirit, and not of the body,” that captivated the heart of the Soviet intelligentsia during the twilight decades of the Soviet state. The influence of their works which, in contrast to mainstream science fiction that was dedicated to sheer entertainment, raised somber ethical questions, remains substantial up to the present. Thus younger practitioners of the genre who claim not to have succumbed entirely to the crude realities of the post-Soviet literary market profess to be inspired by the Strugatskys.
With the advancement of Gorbachev’s reforms in the mid-eighties, Russian fantastic writers (following the general trend in Russian belles-lettres of the perestroika years) engaged in an increasingly open attack on the mythology of the Socialist utopia. It was during this period that the genre of dystopia once again came to the forefront of fantastic literature. As the collapse of the Soviet empire seemed more and more imminent, there appeared a number of parodic treatments of the Socialist experiment. Of these, one ought to mark out Vladimir Voinovich’s Moscow 2042 (1986), a brilliantly farcical account of the protagonist’s time-travel to the dilapidated totalitarian republic of Moscowrep. In contrast to his grimmer classical dystopian predecessors (Zamiatin, Huxley, Orwell), who presented disturbing accounts of triumphant totalitarianism, Voinovich portrayed a singularly inept social structure. The depicted community displays all the trademark features of Orwell’s Oceania, but with a clownish face: “citizens worked poorly, drank heavily, and stole left and right”; “Newspeak” was travestied through the ridiculous jargon of “Komyaz”; technology was too backward to allow for any surveillance; and one could no longer write denunciations because “the paper situation was a total disaster.”
One may be tempted to assume that Voinovich’s hilarious rendition of a totalitarian regime at an advanced state of deterioration implied an exclusively joyful anticipation of impending social change. However, the writer did not merely debunk the corrupt social model, but also undertook to play out alternative social scenarios. It is when Voinovich devalues both back-to-nature and counter-utopian (return to the monarchical past) resolutions that one becomes aware of his darker outlook on the country’s future. Alexander Kabakov’s No Return (1989), another important dystopia of the glasnost era, revealed a similar concern with the menaces attending the looming breakdown of the Soviet state. In the novella, a scientific researcher named “Extrapolator” is forced to travel to post-perestroika Russia. He discovers that the Soviet Union has dissolved into “barbarism and idiocy,” a military dictator conducts mass executions, and crazed terrorist bands are raging on the streets of Moscow.
Whether writing in a primarily satiric vein (e.g., Voinovich, M. Veller), or in a more wistful spirit (e.g., the Strugatsky brothers’ later works), the Sci-Fi and fantasy writers of Gorbachev’s epoch were mainly preoccupied, on one hand, with the deconstruction of Soviet utopia, and, on the other hand, with prognostications of the possible consequences of the country’s breakdown. These attempts to reinterpret the past and to discern possible venues for the country’s future continued after the fall of the Soviet Union. With the faith in an upcoming technological “paradise” shaken no less badly than that in the victory of Communism, and with the country in utter disarray, it became all but impossible to produce futurist eutopian fiction.
Nevertheless, some kind of an antidote to the general sentiment of despondency attending the country’s chaotic transformation had to be found. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the demythologization of the Soviet past, vigorously undertaken during the perestroika years by a host of dystopian writers, began yielding in the nineties to a nostalgic mentality. This kind of nostalgia had to do first and foremost with the glorification of old Russia and of the country’s traditional moral and religious values. In terms of fantastic fiction this suggested several directions. One way was to spin out magic stories of primeval Rus’, an enchanted realm of pagan deities, spell-bound beauties, and supernatural entities following in the footsteps of Tolkien and other famous fantasy writers. Marina and Sergei Diachenko’s Ritual and Skrut, Nick Perumov’s Ring of Darkness (his take on the fabled world of the Middle Earth) and Hiervard’s Chronicles, and numerous similar patchworks of ancient history, mythology, adventure etc., published in the nineties, are representative of this trend.
A somewhat different mode of alleviating the ache occasioned by the dire economic and political circumstances of Russia’s present (as well as of reassessing the country’s tortuous path into the third millennium) was to engage the subgenre of alternative history. Andrei Lazarchuk, Khol’m van Zaichik, Kir Bulychev, Sergei Lukianenko, and a host of other Russian fantasts tried their hand at imagining “what would have been if….” Of those, Kir Bulychev’s River Chronos (1992) may be singled out as an epic contemplation of historical possibilities that might have taken place had the “River of Time” but slightly changed its course. One should also mention van Zaichik’s (Viacheslav Rybakov’s) highly popular series about the country Ordus’, founded in the Middle Ages, and representing a curious symbiosis of Russian and Eastern cultures (2001-).
As the ideological control of Soviet times was replaced in the nineties by the no less tyrannical demands of the market, huge masses of hack science fiction and fantasy began to be produced. Writing such works (along with detective stories and romances) became one of the most lucrative pseudo-literary venues. At present there exists in Russia, just as in the West, a well-established industry that clones innumerable stories of spaceships, matrixes, cyber-beauties and mythical brawny proto-Slavic warriors. Simultaneously, a number of trendy younger writers have been experimenting with the genre. Given fantastic literature’s probing of alternative states of consciousness, the grotesque, the absurd, and the phantasmagoric, it offers a peculiarly rewarding domain for postmodernist play. Dmitry Lipskerov’s unashamedly Marquez-inspired Forty Years of Chanddzoe (1996) and Vladimir Sorokin’s provocative, if distasteful Blue Lard (1999), are examples of postmodernist engagements with the genre.
The postmodernist works mentioned, though highly conspicuous on the literary market, can hardly be deemed sterling expressions of Russian fantasy. Recent years have witnessed an appearance of several productions that deserve to be placed alongside those excellent Russian and Soviet fantastic works that are gathered in this anthology. One of these works is Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel The Slynx (2001), a first-rate dystopia that draws a striking picture of a primitive post-nuclear war society. Moscow is transformed in her novel into a feudal village inhabited by physically and mentally deformed citizens. The people, ruled by petty tyrants, survive on a diet of mice, are forbidden to have books, and are pursued by a frightening monster wandering in the forest. Like the Strugatsky brothers, as well as classical modernist dystopian writers, Tolstaya employs fantastic discourse to explore burning social, historical, and ethical issues. As her readers realize in the course
of the narrative, the mythical monster of the title symbolizes the human “heart of darkness.” The work is a bitter, thought-provoking meditation on Russia—past, present, and future.
No survey of recent Russian sci-fi and fantasy, however succinct, would be adequate without saying a few words about Viktor Pelevin, one of the most popular contemporary Russian writers. Pelevin’s socio-metaphysical fantasies, compared by some critics to those of Mikhail Bulgakov, Abram Tertz, and even Nikolai Gogol, blend hilarious parody and the blackest absurd, supernatural twists of plot and meticulous observations of the everyday, the occult and the surreal. Blue Lantern (1992), his early collection of short stories, presented a darkly phantasmagoric vision of Russia during the era of perestroika. In the course of the nineties he published other short stories, as well as several novellas and a novel. One should mention The Yellow Arrow, a novelette about a train that rushes into nothingness, while uncomprehending passengers go about their mundane lives; Omon Ra, the story of a young Soviet astronaut, named by his father after the OMON (a special division of the Soviet police), who renamed himself Ra after the Egyptian God of the Sun; a satiric parable The Life of Insects; Buddha’s Little Finger, a fascinating exploration of realities and illusions; and finally, Generation ‘P’, a scathing fin-de-siècle consumer dystopia in the spirit of Huxley’s Brave New World.
Of those works, Omon Ra (1992) would prove particularly pertinent for the companion volume to this anthology. Written three and a half decades after the Soviet Union dumbfounded the world with the launch of the first Sputnik, this is a story of a young boy dreaming of space exploration. Having undergone training, he is sent to the moon to pilot a supposedly unmanned moonwalker. There is no way for him to return to Earth. As the narrative progresses, the young protagonist gradually comes to perceive all of existence as “a life sentence in a prison car on an endless circular railroad.” As for the reader, he just as gradually comes to comprehend that what seems to be on the surface a mere phantasmagoric send-up of Soviet space exploration has a greater depth to it. In Pelevin’s own words, he “did not write a satire on the Soviet space program, as the book was branded both in Russia and abroad.” Rather, “[this] was a novel about coming of age in a world that is absurd and terrifying. His part of this frigtening world was Russia.” The novelette, thus, explores profound existential and moral concerns in the guise of science fiction. As such, it follows the time-honored tradition of the best examples of Russian fantastic literature presented in this volume.
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