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Pinkos or not, sci-fi writers have been emerging independently of latitude and longitude just because of tech progress: Stanisław Lem, Boris Strugatsky, Isaac A
by Eli_P 8y ago
Pinkos or not, sci-fi writers have been emerging independently of latitude and longitude just because of tech progress: Stanisław Lem, Boris Strugatsky, Isaac Asimov.
I wanna share my tiny observation.
Typical USSR-originated sci-fi story tells you about space travels, space ships, interstellar journeys, aliens, valuable resources discovery. This aligns well with USSR and Russian space achievements and ambitions and fossil deposits development, and treating cybernetics as a pseudoscience or just funny crap.
On the other hand, non-pinko sci-fi is biased to soul, thinking machines, different lifeforms, artificial intelligence, coexistence of human and robot.
Interestingly, the concept of Information Society emerged in Russian Empire before revolution by Pitirim Sorokin[1], he was expelled from USSR to USA. He wasn't sci-fi writer per se, but the point is the way of thinking renders itself into everything including fiction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitirim_Sorokin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitirim_Sorokin
- int_19h 8y agoI don't think it's that simple. If you look at the Golden Age of Western sci-fi, it was so full of spaceships and travels that a space rocket - as seen on countless book covers - became the symbol of the genre. Western sci-fi was also much heavier on aliens, and especially on conflict with aliens - thousands of alien races bustling around is very much a Western trope with no equivalent in Soviet sci-fi. On the other hand, the closest sci-fi prediction of something like Wikipedia was the Grand All-Planet Informatory from Strugatsky books, complete with an index and search queries and pervasive use in day-to-day activities to "look things up".