Both anthologies Soviet Science Fiction and More Soviet Science Fiction appeared in English in 1962, at the height of the Cold War, with each featuring an introduction by Isaac Asimov. These were not the only anthologies of Soviet SFT during the 1960s, however; we also have Destination: Amaltheia (1963), which is named for the Arkady and Boris Strugatsky story that is included; Last Door to Aiya (1968), and Path Into the Unknown: Macmillan Best of Soviet Science Fiction (1968). During the 1970s and 80s, Macmillan put out a series called “Best of Soviet Science Fiction,” edited by Theodore Sturgeon, with novels and stories by the Strugatsky brothers, Kirill Bulychev, Vadim Shefner, Alexei N. Tolstoy, and others. The flood of Russian-to-English translations of science fiction in the 1960s and 70s can be explained by the USSR’s political and social liberalization at that time, as well as the rise in English-to-Russian translations of Anglo-American science fiction. The Moscow-based Foreign Languages Publishing House (which would be split later into Progress and Mir) enabled authors like Ivan Yefremov, Sever Gansovsky, and the Strugatskys to be read by millions of Anglophone science fiction fans. Magazines specializing in science fiction also provided markets for authors that hadn’t existed before.
But back to the first anthologies. In Soviet Science Fiction, readers can find stories about brain transplants (from a human to an elephant), Martian visitors to Earth, robots gone berserk, and more. “Hoity-Toity,” originally written in 1930 and the first story in the anthology, begins when a young apprentice scientist dies and his mentor decides to keep his brain alive until he can find a good host for it. What follows is a complicated and detailed story about an expedition to Africa to find an elephant whose brain cavity can hold the apprentice’s brain, and what happens once the elephant/scientist realizes that he must now try to navigate the world in a radically new way. The Strugatsky brothers story “Spontaneous Reflex” (1958) features a giant robot that has been programmed with an insatiable curiosity, specifically designed so that he and others like him can successfully explore new plants that are unsafe for humans. This curiosity leads the robot to break out of his room and rampage through a nuclear facility, threatening to cause massive destruction if he isn’t stopped. Both of the Alexander Kazantzev stories—“A Visitor from Outer Space” (1951) and “The Martian” (1958)—focus on the hypothesis that life exists on Mars and that Martians have actually come to Earth to find more water for their planet. To test this theory, a group of scientists travel to the Arctic Circle to study a landscape that may be similar to Mars’s own.
In More Soviet Science Fiction, we get six stories edited by Asimov. In his introduction, Asimov wishes that the stories included are representative of a hope that the Cold War will ultimately dissipate. Here we have “The Heart of the Serpent,” which calls out Murray Leinster’s “First Contact” (1945) for its belief that only suspicion and fear would come of aliens and humans meeting for the first time. Yefremov imagines an alternative in which the two races would be inspired by one another. In a similar vein, Valentina Zhuravleva’s “Stone from the Stars” (1959) explores what happens when a giant brain arrives on earth as a messenger from another planet. Other stories involve machines able to program themselves, viruses kept for study, and neutrino acupuncture.
The 1960s to 1970s were considered the “golden era” of Soviet SF, when writers could use the freedom of the genre to explore philosophy, ethics, dystopian/utopian ideas, and other topics otherwise forbidden in the USSR. Have you read from any of these writers? How relevant do you find these themes from yesterday to the worlds of today and tomorrow? Let’s discuss in Seattle.