These articles appeared in the January, 1991 Locus magazine and deal with the immediate aftereffects of glassnost and perestroika in the then existing Soviet Union. Within six months after their publication the Communist Party would attempt a coup against Gorbachev and the Soviet state, Yeltsin would defend the Russian White House, the Soviet Union as we had known it would break up altogether, and the more than 70 years of CP domination of Russian society would come to an end.

Pity Norman Spinrad. Whatever he wrote in Russian Spring was bound to be alternate history!

In honor of Arkady Strugatsky reaching his 65th birthday on August 28, 1990, Knizhnoe Oborenie [Book Review] devoted a page of its 31 August'90 issue to the brothers, prepared for the newspaper by the fan group "Homo Ludens," including a brief interview with Boris Strugatsky, a review of the special issue of Izmerenie F [Dimension F devoted to their work, and a statistical analysis of their published output. It reproduced a "2 Strugatskix" note, one of a series of fannish monies.

They also published a facsimile of the Soviet Academy of Science's confirmation by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory of the naming of minor planet 3054 "Strugatskaia." Orbital details were not given.

Boris Strugatsky noted that their father had died wh i le both were young, and Arkady, as the senior by eight years, took the role of father to his younger brother until they were separated by the war and Arkady's service in the Far East ".,.And when we began to write together, he was already an experienced author (having published Bikini Dust in 1956)... We are two halves of a single whole. Such (hat readers consider us one person, the author of Snail on a Slope and Roadside Picnic. And that's not too far from the truth of the matter."

The statistical summary listed some 24 Major publications from 1958 to the present, divided into 1958-1988 and 1988-1990, More than 14 million copies of their works have appeared, most in the last two years as the barriers have come tumbling down.

In the earlier period, the most oft-printed works were Monday Begins on Saturday, The Road to Amalthea, Hard to be a God, Paren' iz preispodnej [The Youth from the Underworld], Far Rainbow, Beetle in an Anthill, The Waves Beat the Shore [America n title: The Time Wanderers], The Country of the Violet Clouds, Noon 22nd Century, and Roadside Picnic.

The last two years have added several books and altered the sequence: Monday Begins on Saturday retained its number-one place at a total of 1.4 million copies in print, followed by Hard to be a God with 1.2 million copies, and the new Grad obregchennyj [The Doomed City] with 1 million (all in the last two years). Attempt at Flight is fourth with 855,000 copies, The Road to Amalthea fifth, Roadside Picnic sixth, A Billion Years to The End of the World seventh, Beetle in an Anthill eighth, Paren' is preispodnej [The Youth from the Underworld] ninth, and Far Rainbow tenth. Inhabited Island [American title: Prisoner of Power] is tied with several other works for nineteenth, with a mere 300.000 copies in print in Russian. This does not inagazine variants or foreign translations.

In honor of Arkady Strugatsky's birthday, Izmerenie F [Dimension 11 published a special issue dedicated to them, with articles by other writers, a previously unpublished story "Bespokoistvo" [Anxiety], and an evaluation of Arkady Strugatsky's work as a translator. The issue had a print run of 100,000 copies.

The 1990 Aelita awards were held May 24 to 27th in Sverdlovsk. Some 620 representatives from

Soviet and Bulgarian sf clubs made it for the fest- ities, Which included panels and seminars on st, fandom. the fan press, the Association of Computerized Fans. bibliographers, and young authors' workshops.

Authors included Kir Bulychev, Viktor Babenko, Boris Shtern, Oleg Korabel'nikov, Andrey Stolvarov. Gennadi Prashkevich, the critics S. Kazantsev and V. Gopman.

The meat of the get-together were the awards: Oleg Korabel'nikov won the 1990 Aelita for Na Vostok ot polunochi [Eastwards from Midnight]. Andrey Stolyarov won the prize as best young author, and Viktor Babenko received an award for best SF propaganda. Awards from the readers went to Stolvarov for lzgnanic Besy [The Exorcism]. Snail on a Slope by the Strugatskys was declared the best work to come out that year (because of political content, it has only recently been published officially in the USSR).

For the last 70years, public access to means of reproducing print in small and medium quantities was severely restricted (as well as access to presses in general); the changes which followed the disaster at Chernobyl (an event which, more than anything else, seems to have spurred on the changes lumped together as glasnost and perestroika) forced Soviet fans to make the jump straight from carbon-typed samizdat to offset.

Under the new conditions. it's possible (and may in fact entail less labor and cost) to put out fan- and semiprozines on one or two sheets of newsprint, and charge 35 kopeks (at which price it certainly makes sense to include fiction or translated foreign fiction), in the knowledge that Russians in general still read, that sf is extremely popular, and the "deficit" or unmet demand for reading material still remains very real. The new (newsprint version) Izmerenie F [Dimension F) has a print run of 70,000, and sells for 35 kopeks. Galakticheskie Novosti doesn't list its print run, but it's on newsprint as well.

Sergei Berezhnoi of Sevastopol, one of the founders of 0versun, responded to the professionalization of his fanzine -the loss of his youth and 'innocence with a new fanzine, Fenzor [Fanviewl. The pretruer issue runs 117 pages, offset with reduced type, the size of a small paperback, with two-color illustrations. It includes Alfred Bester's "The Men Murdered Mohammed", translated into Russian by A. Berest. A Russian translation of the story had previously been published in abbreviated form in 1970, and this is its first complete edition. A brief bibliography of Bester and bibliography of his Russian editions were also given. Other articles included a study of the "Amber" novels, reviews, and two articles on the recent (April 1990) All Union Efremov Readings in Leningrad.

Robert Silverberg, whose complaint about being printed in the USSR and Eastern Europe without compensation was published in Locus

358, is not the only American author to find unauthorized editions released to an eager Russian public. A brief list. compiled from information sent by Gelios [Helios] and Boris Zavgorodny, includes:

Heinlein Robert. The Door Into Summer, Saratov Book publishing, 240 pages. 25,000 copies.

Bradhurv. Ray. The Sound of Thunder, Baku, 32 page,,. Contains "The Sound of Thunder ... ... The Veldt". and "Death and the Virgin".

Asimov, Isaac. "A Child's Best Friend" (?) in Krylia Sovietov [The Wings of the Soviets], a newspaper in Komsomolsk-Na-Amure,

13 for 1990.

King, Stephen, "Eyes of the Dragon", in Sovremennai . a Literatura za rubezhom [Foreign Literature Abroad]

1, 1990, a Summary.

Around two years ago, the liberal editor of the then-prestigious literary newspaper Literaturnaia Rossia [Literary Russia] was sacked by the owners, the Union of Writers of the Russian Federation, for the temerity to demand the Union stop interfering in the day-to-day operations. The succeeding editorial board won a reputation for nationalism, antisemitism, and general narrow-minded ness. The number of sf (and adventure and detective) stories in the paper declined precipitiously.

Things at Literaturnaia Rossia may be looking up: Over the summer it published articles bylined Tel Aviv, as well as pieces by members of ethnic minorities on their problems in the USSR. In the September 29 issue, it published its first foreign sf story in quite some time, Harlan Ellison's "Do You Hear Me?" [title retranslated, in their centerfold. Translation by M Cherniaev

And yes, lest he feel left out, in its 16th issue for the year, it published Silverberg's "...in Babylon."

This information from various issues of Gelios [Helios], published by M. A. Abramian, 4 'Poste Restante,'Tbilisi-79380079, USSR -John Costello

In the last two years, sf in the USSR has experienced a tremendous upsurge; the numberof printed books (including translations) has increased substantially, while the types of publication have become more diverse. In many cases, the sharp rise in authors' output is due to readers finally receiving novels and stories written as far back as 10-15 years ago, but never published because of ideological pressures.

The sensation of the season has been Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Grad obrechennyj [The Doomed City], written in 1974. The action unfolds in a world artifically created by the mysterious Mentors for conducting their grand Experiment. Its characters consist of Earth people of different countries removed from the period afterthe Second World War: the Russian Andrej Sorokin from 1952, the American Donald Cooper from 1968, and Unteroffizier of the Wehrmacht Fritz Geiger from 1944. The goals and questions of the Grand Experiment are unknown to all; the victims simply find themselves living in an enormous City of a million inhabitants perched on a five-km ledge between an endlessly high Yellow Wall and a bottomless Abyss, underneath an artificial sun. Gradually, the Mentors lose control of the experiment.The philosophical and ethical conceptions are complicated and will not submit to a short summary; the novel seethes with images and metaphors and is superbly written.

Talented Leningrad writer Vyacheslav Rybakov published his first story in 1979. He soon became well known as the coauthor of the script for the sf fi I in Letters to a Dead Man - the first picture of a nuclearwar in the history of Soviet film - forwhich hewon the State Prize of the Russian Federation ' In the past couple of years, he has published stories "Doveria" [Trust] and "Ne uspet" [Can't be Done], and the novel Ochag no bashne [Hearth in the Tower.] As for his literary quality, the "fat" literary magazines (Neva, Zvezda, Ural, Prostor) (the equivalent of the "slicks" in terms of prestige, but also considered the highest in terms of intellectual and literary quality), which tend to look on Soviet st with disdain, eagerly publish his stories.

"Doveria" begins as a communist utopia which, for the "best of reasons" (the World Soviet hide from the populace of the Earth the possibility the sun will explode), is turned into a totalitarian dictatorship. In 1976, the first version of "Doveria" was confiscated by the KGB, and Rybakovwas forced to reconstruct the manuscript from memory. "Ne uspet", written in the lastyear, is a straight extropolation of the present situation in the USSR extended into the nearfuture: because a cumbersome totalitarian state cannot risk supporting radical changes, thecountry faces an economic catastrophe - and the people, worn out by the 70-ycar experiment, rise up against their mentors. Ochag na bashne is an sf tale of love, contrasting the traditional sf motif (the miraculous scientific discovery) with the gritty realworld of today's life in the USSR. Like Kim Stanley Robinson, Rybakov is a gifted mainstream writer forwhorn sf is merelyone step to more important things.

Another Leningrad writer also working in the subgcnre of "speculative fiction" is Andrey Stolyarov. The plotlines in Stolyarov's works may vanish and reappear, literally cut off in mid-syllable, and his stories are more often mosaics of protagonists, events, and ideas (though in entirely original and sufficiently intact pictures) - stylistically like cyberpunk. "lzgnanic Besa" [The Exorcism] produced the impression of an exploded bomb in 1988 and won the "Great Ring" (the closest Soviet equivalent of a Hugo), and the collection of the same name has already garnered two professional literary prizes, the Aleksandr Belyaev Medal and the "Start" [Blast-Off] (awarded for best first book by an author over the past year).

Boris Shtem, one of the most popular sf authors from the Ukraine, began with very successful novel ettes. He recently produced quite a stir with the novel Kto Tam? ["' 'ho's There?], an uproariously funny parody of space opera which suddenly be comes a serious philosophical tract about the connection of man with God. Shtern manages to get away with it, unexpectedly and very interestingly. Although I have not, alas, read Rudy Rucker, judging from comments of American observers, these two writers are similar.

The husband-and --wife team of Lyubov and Evgcny Lukin from Volgograd have been writing sf for ten years, but only recently published their fir-st book, Kogda otstupaiut angeli [When the Angels Depart], primarily already published stories. A]most simultaneously, "Missionery" [The Missionaries], came out in the magazine Iskatel. In "Missionery", European explorers approach a tropical archipelago, planning to conquer it and convert the natives to Christianity. The tattooed aborigines meet them with rockets, napalm, and military aircraft which they have been using for some time in intertribal conflicts. A young couple from another time had decided to prevent the barbarous "Christianization" and put the natives on the path of independent technological progress. Ibis couple by now extremely elderly - watch helplessly as their students easily deal with the invaders' flotilla and prepare for the colonization of backward Europe....

Moscow author Vitaly Babenko, a superb satirist, caused a stir in 1985 with "Igoriasha - Zolotaia Rybka" [Izgoriasha - the Golden Fish], where he ridicules contemporary psychology. In 1990 he published his first collection, with the original story "Zemlia" [Earth], which belongs more to experimental literature than to sf - it is presented as several streams of consciousness, existing in diverse fantastic realities

Vladimir Pokrovsky also made his debut in the middle ofthe 1980s. "Parik-maxerskierebiata" [The Hairdresser's Children] confirms his devotion to psychological drama. Earth is overcrowded and the onlv solution is the settlement of more worlds throughout the galaxy. On each such world, "Hairdressing Teams" "style" the planets' biospheres to the terrestrial norm, alter the ecological balance, and mercilessly destroy the local species. Such methods produce protests from a number of terrestrial groups, leading to a situation where only the morally questionable fill the teams. Understanding Pokrovsky's prose requires serious cultural baggage: There are references to the works of Dostoyevsky, Melville, and others. Insf, theclosest story that comes to mind is Richard McKenna's "Hunter Go Home!".

Other superb sfwriters haveemerged recentlyas well: Andrei Lazarchuk, Irina Tibilova, Nikolai Yuanov, Sviatoslav Loginov, Eduard Gevorkian far too many to enumerate here. And this inspires us with the hope that the USSR will (if the economic crisis permits) join the ranks of the sf superpowers in the near future.

British and American sf comes from many publishing houses in the USSR, but its appearance tends to be episodic. There are a number of publishers series - the equivalent of imprints in the U.S. where sf books are published, but only one is dedicated entirely to foreign sf. "Zarubezhnaia Fantasfika" (ZF), issued by Mir Publishing House (Moscow) since 1965. In 25 years, the series has published a little more than a hundred books.

During its first years, Mir issued seven or eight books annually, but in 1973 the Soviet Union joined the International Copyright Convention, and the publishing house was forced to curtail its sf series because of a lack of convertible currency. Up to 1986, they managed to issue only two or three books per year.

The ZF series has printed authors from many countries in Europe, America, and Asia, but the great majority have been from English. The publishing house especially loves Clifford Simak, with five books in the series: Charm (1967), All Flesh is Grass (1968), The Goblin Reservation (1972), The Worlds of Clifford Simak (1979) and Ring Around the Sun (1982.) Second place is occupied not by an American, but by a Pole, Stanislaw Lem, with four books: Hunt on Centarus (1965), The Invincible (1967) andthecombined editions of Navigator Pirx/Voice of the Sky(1971) and Solaris/ Eden (1973). ZF has three books by Isaac Asimov The Martian Way (1966), The Gods Themselves (1976)andTheThree Laws of Robotics (1979). Ray Bradbury also has three volumes: The Martian Chronicles (1965), Dandelion Wine (196'~"),,.and Cold Wind, Warm Wind (1983). Arthur C. rke has as many: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1970), Rendevous With Rama (1976) and The Fountains of Paradise (1981). Robert Sheckley hastwo, Pilgrimage to Earth (1966) and The Worlds of Robert Sheckley (1984), as do Sakyo Kon Hunters of Past Days (1970) and Dragon (1977), and Christopher Priest, with The Space Machine (1979) and The Inverted 'World (1981), The following authors have had one book each: Chad Oliver, The Winds of Time (1965); Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth,The Space Merchants (1965); R. Wormser, Pan Satyrus (1966): Fred Hoyle and John Elliot, A for Andromeda (1966); Martin Caidin, Marooned in Orbit (1967); Henry Kuttner, The Robot Thinks for Himself (1968); Andre Norton Sargasso of Space (1969); Michael Frayn, The Tin Men (1969); Harry Harrison, Training Flight (1970); Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain (1971); Hal Clement, Mission of Gravity (1972); Jack Finney, Time and Again (1972); Eric Frank Russell, A Thread to the Heart (1973); Fredric Brown and William Tenn, The Star Carousel (1974); Kit Pedlar and J. Davis, Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater (1975); Ursula K. Le Guin, Planet of Exile (1980): Ben Bova. The Weather Makers (1991); John Brunner, The Squares of the City (1984); Bob Shaw, Wreath of Stars (1989).

Other than the above, a number of collections of novelettes and short stories have come out, usually of a thematic character. For example, anti-war sf (Peace to the Earth, 1988), robot stories (The Joker, 1971), and so forth. One of the more successful anthologies was Lalangamena (1985, reprinted 1988), showcasing a number of authors never previously printed in the series: Roger Zelazny, Gordon R. Dickson, Robert Silverberg, Lisa Tuttle, George R.R. Martin,Joe Haldeman, etc. Lalangamena was the only book to come out in the series after a hiatus of several years.

As you can see, a number of masters are missing: Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Jack Williamson, Theodore Sturgeon, J.G. Ballard.These authors are very weakly represented in the anthologies as well. The perversion of ideological publishing policies under Brezhnev hit sf fairly hard: it was impossible to publish Tolkien's trilogy, and Dick was nearly banned outright, not to mention George Orwell.

However, for now, ideological motivations have taken the back stage; the profit motive and business principles are playing a greater role in Soviet book publishing, and readers' opinions and interests are taken into consideration. One can hope that ZFwill delight Soviet fans with Herbert's Dune or Zelazny's Lord of Light, and - most unbelievable of all Asimov's Foundation as well.

Arthur C. Clarke is one of the most popular foreign sf writers in the USSR, and a large number of his stories and novels have been translated. Back in the 1960s, there were separate editions of A Fall of Moondust, The Sands of Mars, and Dolphin Island; The Deep Range came out as part of the prestigious multi-volume "Library of Contemporary SF."

Clarke's stories started to run into trouble at the end of the 1960s, when Molodaia Gvardia [Young Guard) published the famous 2001: A Space Odyssey. The magazine's editors concluded that the prologue and a number of the novel's later chapters "do not correspond to the materialistic world view," and Odyssey was printed without them. In 1970 the novel came out in Mir's series "Zarubezhnaia fantastika" [Foreign ST]. The prologue was returned, but the conclusion was simply thrown away. In place of the ending, the readers were forced to content themselves with this incomprehensible judgment: "The conclusion of Clarke's novel is unsuccessful and does not live up to the general artistic conception of 'the Odyssey." The novel has not been printed in full in the USSR to the present time.

Clarke's popularity, however, grew. In 1976, the same series published Rendezvous with Rama. "A Meeting with Medusa" came out in the anthology Brat'ia so razomy [Brothers of the Mind] in 1977, also in the ZF series.

Tekhnika-molodezhi (Technology for Youth], one of the most popular monthlies in the USSR, regularly published Arthur C. Clarke in its pages over the course of the 1970s. The editor, Vasilij Zakharchenko, had become friendly with Clarke and, learning about the publication of The Fountains of Paradise, asked the author's permission to print a translation in the magazine. Clarke agreed and even offered the publication a foreword, in which he distressed his Soviet readers with the declaration that this novel would be his last.

The Fountains of Paradise enjoyed enormous success with Soviet readers, and the editors at Tekhnika-molodezhi decided to publish the translation of Clarke's next novel, 2010: Odyssey Two. This decision showed considerable courage -1984 had come. Sakharov was in exile in Gorky. and publishing a novel dedicated to him entailed considerable risk. Naturally, the editors attempted to minimize the consequences: they dropped the "anti-Soviet" dedication and substantially trimmed the text. Despite this, because of a thundering cry from the Party On High, publication was stopped halfway through Vasilij Zakharchenko was fired. [The names of the Soviet cosmonauts in the book are those of well- known dissidents JHC] Chernenko would have "fired" Clarke as well if he could, but his reach didn't stretchthat far. They were perforce limited to "bibliographic repression": all Clarke's works were dropped from the recommended lists for young readers.

Simultaneous with the "repression" of Clarke, the sf clubs were repressed as well. In many cities, the clubs lost their premises: thev were dissolved under various pretexts, turned into sections of the Book Lovers' Society, placed under the harsh control of local Party and Komsomol authorities. In some places, the KGB even got into the act - fans were almost declared traitors to the Motherland. The year 1984, the year of Orwell, remains a black date in the history of Soviet fandom.

But 1985 brought new words: Perestroika, Glasnost... A little sanity began to appear in the Soviet Union: one after another, the most idiotic bans began to be lifted. And Clarke's works began to appear in the pages of the magazines again. In 1996 Khimia i Zhim' [Chemistry and Life] delighted its readers with the publication of Childhood's End, and in 1989 The City and the Stars appeared in Prostor (Scope] from Alma-Ata. Both were printed with considerable cuts, which wasn't as important as their appearance in the first place. The ice had broken.

The apotheosis was the publication in Tekhnika Molodezhi of the complete text of 2010: Odyssey Two, which became a symbol of the restoration of justice. The novel is being printed with its sequel, and Andrei Sakharov was able to hold the first part, which came out last November, in his hands. Unfortunateiv, he will never see the conclusion.

The serialization has yet to run its course. But fairly soon, Soviet fans will come to the words "The End," argue endlessly about Odyssey 2 with their friends in the clubs, and inevitably find themselves asking: "And what else do you have in store for us, Mister Clarke?"

Sergi Berezhnoj,

trans. by John H. Costello