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Path Into the Unknown: The Best of Soviet SF

McGibbon and Kee, 1966, 185 p No translator’s name given.

Path Into the Unknown cover

The first story in this collection, The Conflicta by Ilya Varshavsky is dedicated, To Stanislav Lemm (sic) “in memory of our argument which will never be resolved”. It focuses on a mother distraught at the affection in which her child holds the robot household help, an extremely intelligent machine but not without its own emotions.

A household robot also features in Robbyb again by Ilya Varshavsky. This one becomes increasingly cantankerous as it tries to apply logic to everything.

In Meeting my Brotherc by Vladislav Krapivin a young boy sees himself as the brother of a cosmonaut on a mission from long ago. When the mission returns his wish is fulfilled in a roundabout way. This story is less focused on the SF set-up than Varshavsky’s two, and more on human relationships.

A Day of Wrathd by Sever Ganovsky sees a journalist go seeking a group of artificially produced reasoning creatures called Otarks who may be more intelligent than humans but uncompassionate.

In An Emergency Casee by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky a spaceship returning from Titan to Earth is plagued by an infestation of eight-legged flies.

Arkady Strugatsky’s Wanderers and Travellersf features a scientist investigating a new type of cephalopod who meets a spacefarer who in turn has become the source of radio signals.

The Boyg by G Gor is the tale of an unusual school classmate whose father claims to have found evidence of aliens on Earth in the Jurassic period, one of whom may have survived to the present day.

In The Purple Mummyh by Anatoly Dneprov, said mummy is an artefact convolved (printed) from radio signals emanating from across the universe – its colour a manifestation of the Doppler Effect – and (barring a reversal of internal organs,) an exact replica of the narrator’s wife. This is taken to be proof of the existence of anti-matter worlds.

Reading this was a strange experience. Whether any infelicities are due to the nature of Soviet SF, to the translation(s) or to the times in which the stories were written is difficult to discern. It was interesting though.

Pedant’s corner:- patronymics are throughout spelled with “ich” at the end, the modern style is “ic”. Otherwise; aStanislav Lemm (now more usually written in English as Stanislaw Lem,) bDescartes’ (Descartes’s,) “watching the telly” (felt far too prosaic for the rest of the narration; “watching TV” might have fitted better,) paperbooks (paperbacks is the accepted term.) c”too late for Alexander to change their plans” (yes it was the group’s plans but the construction feels clumsy,) an ice-locked land, devoid of any life” (yet it has a breathable atmosphere? That requires oxygen – which requires …. life. Later we find it has plants – of a sort. But still one of the cosmonauts says ‘if it wasn’t for the sheet of ice there would be life here,’) milleniums (millennia,) one of them refers to himself as an astronaut (he seems to be Russian so would be a cosmonaut.) dTranslated into USian, “there was not a single trail of chimney smoke or a stack of hay” (nor a stack of hay,) sprung (sprang,) sybernetic (now spelled cybernetic,) staunch (stanch,) Nubio (context implies Nubia.) d“the spaceship lost speed and deviated from its course” (??? Not in any kind of orbital mechanics that I know,) unvoluntarily (involuntarily,) one end quote mark was missing. “.. go round sprinkling them with alcohol. Then set fire to them.” (deliberately set a fire? On a spaceship?) f“your onboard wireless” (reads very oddly nowadays; radio is referred to later,) ampule (is this USian for ampoule?) “the less chances there were “ (the fewer chances.) gseomthing (something,) “part were very much in doubt” (part was,) prgramme (programme,) “things that that there weren’t the slightest mention of in our textbooks” (that there wasn’t the slightest mention of,) a missing end quote for a piece of direct speech. “Everyone he had ever known were all here” (everyone was all here,) philosophere (philosopher,) “hydrogen links” (may be a direct translation from the Russian but the term in English is hydrogen bonds,) “a dinosaur which had small front teeth with very stressed grasping functions and no teeth” (small front feet.) Whether I could stomach him or not?” (That isn’t a question so does not require a question mark,) “the diing room” (dining room.) hparallelopiped (parallepiped,) radio-eradiation (seems to be a somewhat clumsy attempt to render into one word the radiation masking caused by a Faraday cage even though eradiation has an opposite sense.)

2014 in Books Read

The ones that stick in my mind most – for whatever reason – are:-

Signs of Life by M John Harrison
Mr Mee by Andrew Crumey
Be My Enemy by Ian McDonald
The Deadman’s Pedal by Alan Warner
A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon – but in especial Sunset Song
The Moon King by Neil Williamson
The Dogs and the Wolves by Irène Némirovsky
The Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani
HHhH by Laurent Binet
That Summer by Andrew Greig
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Way to Go by Alan Spence

Four SF/Fantasy novels, six Scottish ones (eight if the trilogy is separated) and no less than five translated works.

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Gollancz SF Masterworks, 2012, 210 p (+ v page introduction by Ursula Le Guin.) © Arkady and Boris Strugatsky 1972. Translated from the Russian Piknik na obochine by Olena Bormashenko.

This novel is apparently the book on which Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker is based. Not that I’ve ever seen it, I don’t go out of my way to view SF in its moving picture formats, either in film or television.

 Roadside Picnic cover

Aliens have come – and gone; their landing sites spaced over the Earth in a perfect curve. Each of those Zones is deserted, a repository of hell slime, death lamps, shriekers, black sparks, lobster eyes, rattling napkins and strange containers known as empties; not to mention the elusive Golden Sphere, said to grant human wishes. Stalkers illegally brave the dangers to retrieve Zone artefacts for the money they will bring. Scientific institutes study these to try to find uses for them – or even what they are. The scientists studying it are more scared than the rest of the populace because they understand how much they don’t understand. As one of the characters points out, such attempts to gain insight suffer from the flawed assumption that an alien race would be psychologically human. We don’t know what intelligence is; it can’t be defined. In the same conversation the possibility is raised of the stuff in the zone being just detritus, left behind after the aliens merely stopped for a picnic.

Yet the Zone has effects beyond itself. Despite there being no detectable radiation nor mutagens in the Zones, Stalker’s children have weird mutations, emigrants from the areas that became the Zones seem to cause disasters of various sorts in their new locations; corpses are reanimated, the dead return to their homes.

The book follows the evolution of stalking over a few years from an individual – or perhaps team – pursuit to remote probing by robots mainly through the experiences of Redrick Schuhart, a stalker in Harmont, which seems to be in the USA (a father aspires for his son to be President one day.) In our first foray into the Zone the descriptions of its outer edge are eerily premonitory of Chernobyl, its strangeness also prefigures the event site in M John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. In the concluding section Schuhart muses while finally seeking out the Golden Sphere, “What man is born for I have no idea.”

There is a temptation either – as according to Ursula Le Guin’s introduction many US SF writers did – to consider any Soviet era fiction to be ideologically based or else to see it as critiquing the system in which it originated. (US writers of course could not possibly be subject to either of these strictures themselves.)

In an afterword Boris Strugatsky says of the brothers’ battles with Soviet editors that (the editors) thought language had to be as colourless, smooth and glassy as possible and certainly not coarse; that SF had to be fantastic and have nothing to do with crude, observable and brutal reality; the reader must be protected from reality. Unsurprisingly you might think, I’m with the Strugatskys on this one.

Roadside Picnic, even forty years after its conception, still stands out as a compelling piece of written SF, well worth its inclusion as a Masterwork. As I hinted earlier its influence can be traced down through the years but merely imagining this scenario as written by a US practitioner of the genre – where a military sensibility may have prevailed instead – underscores its subtlety.

The otherwise excellent translation is into a robust USian: fair enough given its apparent setting but a few infelicities intruded:- “had probably stuck his freckled mug inside, frowned, and went off.” “(His face) hurt. His nose was swollen but his eyebrows and eyebrows were intact.” A “lighting” bolt.

View From Another Shore – European Science Fiction. Edited by Franz Rottensteiner

European Science Fiction Liverpool University Press, 1999, 256p

 View From Another Shore cover

This is a 1999 reprint of a collection first published in 1973. Rottensteiner’s introduction for this volume bemoans the fate of SF in Eastern Europe since the Berlin Wall came down and the fact that non-Anglophone SF (even Australian SF) does not get much of a foothold in the world markets. It then goes on to discuss non-British European SF with respect to its main standard bearers, Stanisław Lem and the Strugatsky Brothers, heaping praise on the latter (comparing them to Philip K Dick) but tasking Lem for poor characterisation, misanthropy and misogyny. Yet the book fails to include a Strugatsky story and opens with one by Lem!

It is now almost 15 years since that introduction and Rottensteiner’s complaint still holds good. Very little SF written in other languages appears in English translation. For a genre which claims to operate over the whole of space and time that is a shocking indictment. But the fact remains that SF is primarily a US form and the US on the whole isn’t outward looking. Plus the costs involved may not return a publisher’s investment; certainly in Britain.

The content of View From Another Shore embodies a wide sweep of the continent. (I note, here though, that none of the contributors is female.) Rottensteiner argues that unique Europeanness cannot be attributed to these works of SF, no common characteristics that set them apart; arguing for only one literature since each writer is an individual. I don’t entirely agree with this view as it is possible to discern over a body of a national literature – even within SF – certain recurring themes and preoccupations (though some writers will of course transcend this.)

If there is such a thread in this book it is that the stories tend to didacticism, in general shy away from human interaction, are more interested in the situation than the people affected by it. Perhaps this distancing is an artefact of translation though.

A short comment on each story is below.

In Hot Pursuit of Happiness by Stanisław Lem. Translated from the Polish, Kobyscze, by Michael Kandel.
Yes, there is a dry quality to Lem’s writing. His fiction is more in the nature of thought experiment or philosophical tract than stories in the true sense. To expect rounded characters is to miss the point rather. A similar complaint can be made of Olaf Stapledon, after all. Yet has he been criticised for poor characterisation et al? Without the thread of empathy/sympathy it does make the reading harder, though.

The Valley of Echoes by Gérard Klein. Translated from the French, La Valleé des échos, by Frank Zero.
Explorers on Mars look for evidence of past alien life.

Observation of Quadragnes by J -P Andrevon Translated from the French, Observation des Quadragnes, by Frank Zero.
The Quadranges in question are humans, snatched from Earth by an “Extractor” to be studied by aliens. Cue much ado about sexual behaviour.

The Good Ring by Svend Åge Madsen. Translated from the Danish, Den gode ring, by Carl Mamberg.
A farmer picks up a ring which pulls him into a different reality where advanced creatures show him what his life would have been like on parallel Earths.

Slum by Herbert W Franke. Translated from the German, Un den Slums, by Chris Herriman.
Humans have taken to sub-ocean habitats. An expedition to the surface finds remnants of humanity scraping a living there.

The Land of Osiris by Wolfgang Jeschke. Translated from the German, Osiris Land, by Sally Schiller
Everything north of sub-Saharan Africa has been devastated by nuclear and biological war. In the Muslim dominated liveable regions of the continent mutants or the light-skinned are persecuted and killed. A foreigner (Master Jack) from southern Africa takes our main narrator, Beschir ibn Hassan el Sadun, as a companion to investigate strange occurrences in the dangerous reaches of the Nile. This setting is fascinating and well-handled but the story takes another tack as their journey unfolds and connections to ancient Egypt are made.

Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure by Josef Nesvadba. Translated from the Czech, Posledni dobroduství­ kapitána Nemo, by Iris Urwin.
A spaceman called Nemo (because his craft is named the Nautilus) is sent on a time-dilation journey to investigate what seems to be a systematic extinguishing of stars. In style this is very reminiscent of R A Lafferty’s Space Chantey.

The Altar of the Random Gods by Adrian Rogoz. Translated from the Romanian, Altarul zeilor stohastici, by Matthew J O’Connell.
The survivor of a once-in-the-lifetime-of-the-universe sequence of accidents limps into the presence of three cybernetic “gods.”

Good Night, Sophie by Lino Aldani. Translated from the Italian, Buonanotte Sofia, by L K Conrad.
A star of Oneirofilms – immersive dream experiences that are better than reality – tries in real life to interact with the customers for her performances.

The Proving Ground by Sever Gandosky. Translated from the Russian, Poligon, by Matthew J O’Connell.
This story features an ultimate weapon, a mind-reading tank, and shoots at an easy target, military commanders.

Sisyphus, the Son of Aeolus by Vsevolod Ivanov. Translated from the Russian, Sisif, syn eola, by Adele L Milch.
A warrior from Ancient Greece is on his way home when he encounters Sisyphus. This story is myth or fable rather than SF.

A Modest Genius by Vadim Shefner. Translated from the Russian, Skromnyi genii, by Matthew J O’Connell.
A prolific inventor diffident about promoting his inventions stumbles through life.

Boris Strugatsky

I’ve just checked out Locusonline and noticed a link to Boris Strgatsky, who it turns out has died. This is a curious conicidence in that I am at the moment reading an anthology of Science Fiction by European writers hailing from beyond the Anglophone community.

Strugatsky was a Russian national (who co-wrote with his brother Arkady, who in turn died over 20 years ago) and one of the few non-Anglophone writers to achieve translation and gain some recognition in the “wider” SF world – a difficult feat due to its insular English-language-centred nature – particularly with the novel Roadside Picnic (filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker.)

Boris Strugatsky: 14/4/1933 – 19/11/2012. So it goes.

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