6 ms·
I look forward to reading some of this. SF is pretty much always about the current day. Soviet SF was quite illuminating to me (back when anybody cared about
by gumby 3y ago
I look forward to reading some of this. SF is pretty much always about the current day.
Soviet SF was quite illuminating to me (back when anybody cared about the USSR). I’ve always wanted to read a couple of the Soviet equivalent of the James Bond novels.
- calimoro78 3y agoCan you share some examples of Soviet SF? Should be quite exciting.
- AdamH12113 3y ago"Roadside Picnic" is a well-known novel that was the basis for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
- UtopiaPunk 3y agoI read Roadside Picnic a few months ago, and yeah, it's very good stuff. While there's a lot to be said for the context in which it was written, I think it also holds up on its own even if you're not very familiar with the history.
- narrator 3y agoRoadside picnic is so ridiculously melancholy. Everyone in that book is so depressed! I also don't think I've ever seen so much smoking and drinking in a sci-fi book. You could tell the brothers were really not enjoying communism.
- devindotcom 3y agoNow watch the film adaptation, Stalker - even more depressing!
- the_af 3y agoThe novel itself and the setting are not about communism though, not even in disguise. It would have to be in disguise because the setting is an unnamed North American (possibly Canadian?) city, but even if it was, the themes are not about communism. Agreed about the melancholy.
- pjc50 3y agoYes, that's Russian literature. Even before communism the melancholy is strong.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y agoTry their other book, "The Doomed City". it's as upbeat as the title suggests.
- throw1234651234 3y ago"It's Hard to be God"
- tetris11 3y agoArkady and Boris Strugatsky were pretty prolific during this time (often writing in secret, and reciting their works only to trusted friends). "The Doomed City" is one of the best pieces of philosophical scifi I've ever read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doomed_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doomed_City
- er4hn 3y agoThe Doomed City is a bad example since it was specifically released in a post-soviet era. It had very direct criticisms of communism which lead to the authors deciding to not release it during the soviet era they wrote it. "Hard to be a God", mentioned below, is a better example. Soviet era Sci-Fi where Star Trek esque space communists try to uplift a medieval society into modern political belief before establishing official first contact.
- thriftwy 3y agoThe Doomed City is way deeper than "criticisms of communism". People literally wake up in The Doomed City when the pandemic has started in 2020, for example.
- elgenie 3y agoTechnically, 'The Doomed City' was released in Soviet times, not in the post-Soviet one, as a result of Glasnost'/Perestroika. It was published in serialized form in "Neva" magazine in '88-'89, then in book form, while the USSR would still be a going concern for a couple more years.
- pigscantfly 3y ago"The Dead Mountaineer's Inn" is a fairly unique sci-fi noir also from the Strugatsky brothers that was my first introduction to their work. It interested me enough that I read all their other books afterwards -- worth checking out! 1. https://www.npr.org/2015/03/19/392634682/mountaineer-is-a-must-read-of-soviet-sci-fi https://www.npr.org/2015/03/19/392634682/mountaineer-is-a-mu...
- karaterobot 3y agoErr, that's just a regular detective novel, no SF elements at all, you must be mistaken (nudge nudge)
- Mikhail_Edoshin 3y agoFor specifically Soviet look for Ivan Yefremov, "The Bull's Hour". Other interesting authors could be Genrich Altov and Sever Gansovsky.
- jvb1000 3y agoKurt Vonnegut was accused once of ripping off George Orwell's 1984 with Player Piano. He responded by saying that he and Orwell had both just ripped off Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. Yevgeny Zamyatin was a Soviet author who ran afoul of Stalin and wrote We inspired by his perspective of the revolution.
- thriftwy 3y agoI saw a We play a year back, and it was highly contemporary with its office-style glass walls, mixed-use spaces and complex rituals around dating.
- jvb1000 3y agoThat's probably a testament to the criticism. Interesting that what Yevgeny Zamyatin presents as a clear, almost too on the nose dystopian satire has been repackaged as a desirable work environment.
- jvb1000 3y agoFor those not aware, despite it seeming highly contemporary, the first English translation of the book was published in 1924.
- winrid 3y agoThe Inhabited Island is an amazing book with a great ending. SF, government conflict/war, weird and fun machinery, etc. Others are suggesting Hard to Be a God by the same authors, which is an okay book, but it's not really SF as most people think of SF IMO.
- allarm 3y ago> it's not really SF as most people think of SF As well as the Roadside picknick, the Doomed city, A billion years before the end of the world, the Ugly swans, etc etc - really most of their books - it’s a good literature and not a sf in its usual sense.
- CuriousCosmic 3y agoOne example would be "The Invincible" by Stanisław Lem [1]. Worth noting that a video game [2] based on the novel (which looks very well produced) is releasing in November. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo7Ca6kXz08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo7Ca6kXz08
- troupo 3y agoLem's Invincible, Solaris and Eden form a trilogy of "what if we meet a civilization so alien to humans that we can't establish a contact with them"
- oceanofsolaris 3y agoAlso „Fiasco“, which is depressing and great. For a more recent take on a similar theme, see also „Blindsight“ by Peter Watts.
- inkcapmushroom 3y agoHere is Blindsight, free to read online from the author (and with PDF/ePub versions): https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
- totetsu 3y ago"the heart of a dog" is quite a good example of sci-fi as social critique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog_(1988_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog_(1988_film)
- worrycue 3y ago> SF is pretty much always about the current day. SF is often speculative fiction that extrapolate current trends into the future - frequently taking them to their logic conclusion - to explore and critique. Good SF anyway.
- throw1234651234 3y agoIs it even worth reading? Genuine question. I thought it was campty sort of satirical old-timey stuff, but I never read it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- piperswe 3y agoAre you talking about Soviet sci-fi or speculative sci-fi? If the latter, there's plenty of speculative sci-fi worth reading. I'd recommend giving "I, Robot" a read - much of it is about reasoning through a sort of moral philosophy, through the lens of robotics.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoSci Fi is often a way to talk about the present without getting bogged down in the minutae of accurate facts and "what's realistic" for critics. Whether that's worth reading depends on you. It's a big genre too, different authors and works don't all cover the same themes. If you want to see someone experience about what it's like to be a foreigner in a racist society, Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series explores that. If you want to read an optimistic vision of how computation could look and what ethical implications follow from that (set against a massive backdrop of geopolitics), read Ian Banks's Culture series. If you want to read a discussion of how society shapes our thoughts and beliefs, read pretty much anything by Ursula K. Guin (though The Dispossessed comes especially to mind). If you just want to explore the implications of different physical laws, Greg Egan. And of course, there's plenty of the campy stuff too. You don't always need to read high-minded narrative philosophy with sci-fi if you don't want to.
- Mainan_Tagonist 3y agoWell, for the soviet equivalent to James Bond, look no further than Vsevolod Vladimirovich Vladimirov, better known as Max Von Stierlitz. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stierlitz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stierlitz
- orbital-decay 3y agoStierlitz is a typical noir character, entirely different from Bond. The entire premise of the James Bond series and of course Bond's lifestyle were completely incompatible with the ideology, so no real equivalent was possible.
- rexpop 3y ago> SF is pretty much always about the current day. I can't comprehend this. Scifi is famously occupied with the future, and not the current day. Space travel, advanced technologies, artificial intelligences, and generally things that don't yet exist are par for the course. Most of SF is literally not about the present. Do you mean to say that SF's subtext reflects the zeitgeist at the time/place of its writing?
- anon25783 3y agoSF is set in the future. But its meaning is more directly relevant to the time in which it is written than the time in which it is set. Take for example, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. If people in the actual literal 25th century are able to read about Buck Rogers at all, they will probably be reading it to better understand the 20th century, not their own.
- hotnfresh 3y agoOne of my favorite examples is Black Mirror’s “Fifteen Million Merits”. Read as a prediction of the future, it’s kinda shit. Unremarkable at best. Read as a way to show us the time when it came out (roughly now—it’s not so old) from a perspective skewed enough that it might prompt us to re-evaluate our own normal, it’s pretty damn good.
- totetsu 3y agoA good demonstration of this is the differences present in any sci-fi that got a remake 10-20 years after it was first written. The setting may well still be the far future .. or long long ago.. but that future has changed to match the present. The foundation TV series comes to mind. it's veeery different from the original novels.
- the_af 3y agoIt means the future elements in scifi (when it is about the future at all; some scifi doesn't even pretend to be futuristic) are an extrapolation of the current time and used to explore an idea about today. An author's scifi "gimmick" (it can be a technology, a societal norm, an alien encounter, etc) is often the way in which the author develops and extrapolates a preoccupation about the real world, be it war, or invasion, or social alienation, or consumerism, etc. The most obvious (but least interesting) example of this is how all those "Mars attacks" / alien invasion / body snatcher stories really were about the Red Scare, basically "what if Communism was infiltrating our society!"
- failuser 3y ago“The air seller” by Belyayev reminded me a lot about the more wacky side of James Bond. The protagonist is not glamorous, can’t do that in USSR. But it does have a villain that tries to take over the world with revolutionary technology from his evil layer. The villain captures the protagonist to boast about his evil genius. Even a final battle between marines and henchmen is there. Could have been adapted into a golden-age Bond movie by adding a couple of tropical locations. “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” has a similarly grand super-villain scheme. And with more locations and glamor.
- NumberCruncher 3y agoWhat a surprise to see “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” being mentioned on HN. I read some Soviet SF as a kid, unfortunately this is the only one I can recall by title.
- p-e-w 3y ago> SF is pretty much always about the current day. I'm not sure that's true, although in the past two decades or so it may have been. But going back to the classics of 1960s and 1970s SF, I just don't see it. Sure, The Forever War is a thinly veiled allegory of Vietnam, but how are Lord of Light, Dreamsnake, The Left Hand of Darkness, or even Dune about their "current days"? Dune seems prescient today because of its focus on natural resources, but back when it was written (long before the Oil Crisis) that wasn't really a political hot topic, or even something that most people thought about at all.
- ShinTakuya 3y agoDune very much commented on the contemporarybproblems of its day. A big theme was around the scramble for Africa which, while over, was still affecting the continent in various ways as decolonisation continued. I agree that the extent of the commentary varies, and Dune is light handed in terms of political hot topics, but it was certainly there.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago> A big theme (of Dune) was around the scramble for Africa An extractive industry moves into in the desert for an extremely valuable substance that is vital for transport, while the indigenous inhabitants are overlooked. Religious fervour and holy war. I think that the Middle-east and oil are the most obvious parallels. It is indeed "commenting on the contemporary problems of its day".
- weregiraffe 3y agoIn The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai is at one point sent to a prison camp, in what is basically a communist country by a different name. Basically gulag, in Siberia.