Dear Locus:

I returned from Leningrad and hurried to write you. As always I stayed in Repino, at the House of the USSR's Union of Cinematographers .... Lord, I started to write these words and suddenly remembered - right away I had made at least three serious errors! There is no Leningrad any longer, it is now Saint Petersburg, there is no Repino - almost, at least, since pretty soon it will be Kuoklana, there is no USSR Union of Cinematographers, because there isn't a USSR.

Sf writers are always writing dystopias, attempting to warn mankind of the terrors which threaten society if this or that goes on. But as a rule, these dystopias are composed under relatively peaceful circumstances, in comfortable offices, surrounded by an abundance of food. Zamyatin wrote We when the Civil War in our country was already ended and hopes had appeared that the peace which had set in would bring well-being as well. Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-four when the worst for England was already over. And even classic writers such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were able to theorize in the presence of fresh cream. One could extend this list down to the present day. One may suppose that even the worst of contemporary American dystopias are written by prosperous, sensible people who know that empty store shelves and lines extending a kilometer or more, where women write numbers on your palms, are only the musings of sf writers, and of course never happen in reality.

I also wrote dystopias, in this or that form. And this was back when life was far from ideal, life in a state which I did not love under a regime which I could not stand, but which was after all in power, established, organized and which looked like it would last, if not forever, at least for quite a while.

I am writing all of this in order to understand the phenomenon which has taken place in sf in our country, for one can hardly find another such successful example in the history of literature when the forecasts and fears of sf writers have gone awry and become the everyday existence of our gloomy reality. I am deeply convinced that this catastrophe, the death of a state and the death of a theocratic Imperium. with all the confusion and disruption this process has entailed, has proven to be a knockout blow for my country's science fiction. However paradoxical this may sound, in the long run one must admit that sf writers were prepared far less than other writing people for the changes of certain of their assumptions and predictions in reality. When I write about three-legged green aliens, this does not mean that I believe in their existence - on the contrary! If you showed me such an alien, I would take him for the delirium tremens of my vodka soaked imagination. And if you were to bring one to a lecture hall for the nearly inevitable questions about flying saucers and life on other worlds, the audience would react with disbelief and even take offense at your assertions.

I am completely convinced that subconsciously, the events of the last few years and especially the last few months, have produced a definite shock of disbelief in even the bravest of us, as though one of my little green men were really to show up at my door.

Up until our events (which were beyond my power, naturally, to for see and predict) 1, like the majority of Russian intellectuals, assumed that our timidity in comprehending the tragic future of our system lay in repression, both external and internal, beaten into our heads in childhood, so that we have an internal censor. The moment you removed the repression, then sf would flower and grow. Well, it hasn't happened.

The repression came tumbling down, along with the system, and now all you have to do is fork over rubles to your neighborhood Gutenburg and your masterpiece will be in your hands a week later. They sell these books and magazines by the subway and railroad stations, where there are now special corners set aside for purveyors of pornography, mysticism, girls, and the devil alone knows what. The titles of the books are kept simple: Space Hooker is typical. But if one talks about real fiction, where is it? What happened to it?

The number of sf publications, the number of books, collections, magazines, has grown a hundredfold, as well as the translations from English as a rule badly pirated editions. But when you examine what sf writers are writing about, you find yourself dumbfounded: it's as though they have not noticed the cataclysms that have taken place, or how the boat has been rocked. True, there are exceptions, there are one or two writers who have thought about them, along with a number of journalists, for example A. Kabakov, who wrote the story "Nevozvrazhchenets" [The Defector], just about the time the events came to a head, and who has become popular because his story predicted the rightist military coup attempt. But in general, our sf reminds me of a maiden aunt who has seen a naked man and dropped her jaw in surprise, and there she stands with her mouth open

Sf is addicted to literary fashions, and we are seeing an ever-greater percentage of fantasy with attempts to root itself in Russian folklore. We today are like ants dragging various leaves toward their colony, not noticing that the heel of the boot has already started to descend, blotting out the sun. I don't know a single significant work of sf at the present time which attempts to predict the path our society and world are taking now. And even more, there is no one who might attempt to speculate in an sf text, which today is already understood by politicians and futurologists, that the failing Soviet imperium might, under the right wrong conditions, pull all mankind down into the abyss to destruction along with it. We are silent because we live too close to the epicenter of a beginning explosion. We are silent because of confusion and because it is frightening even to consider tomorrow.

And how are things in America? Today? They're exactly the same. Only the rules of the game are different.

I've been getting a number of new books in the mail; the covers shine, they glisten with knights and dragons, princesses and evil dwarves. American sf writers play the game: "I'll tell you a tale, you pay me the beer money."

The apocalyptic 1950s are out of style. On the Beach is on TV, turn it off! Let superkid staying Home Alone on Christmas defeat the two incompetent burglars and all will be well. They won't touch us Americans.

But here, not too far away on the other side of the world, I can turn on the TV and see Armenians and Azerbaijanis killing each other because one side is Armenian and the other Azerbaijani, and in Tiumen they're now killing each other for places in the bread line, and you know what? I suddenly feel myself to be somewhat American; after all, Tiumen and Armenia are terribly far away from Moscow, and I can forget how in August tanks rotted through the center of Moscow and I myself stood beside one, feeling the cold armor plate, in order to convince myself of its reality, because 1, the sf writer, know what one can think up, what is not possible....

Hopefully I belong to the last generation of writers in this country who will have to divide their output into: a) this will pass the censors; b) this will not pass the censors; and c) this would be total madness to show anyone at all,

And if you were determined to continue to live within the borders of the Soviet Union, if you lacked the dissident's valor, but from time to time your pen started to creep beyond the permissible, you were forced to fill boxes or cases or bureau drawers and let your own manuscripts just sit. Put them down with your own hands, and know that you were destroying them, because even ten yearsago Iwastruly convinced that nothingwas going to topple the state and the ruling party in my lifetime: like the overwhelming majority of sf writers, professional fortune tellers, card readers, and seers, I lackthe ability to predict the future.

In 1969, when I had been writing professionally for all of five years, I found myself entangled in the sham "Numismatists Affair," and I was expecting a search of my apartment. I figured I had about a few hours left before the police came (it turned out to be more than a day). Do you think I started to hide or destroy my collection of medallions and military awards? Certainly not: I destroyed, hid, or circulated among friends the various forms of samizdat that filled my house. Among them were any number of my own works of a suspect nature. As a result of this judicial farce. my first collection of my own suspect prose almost vanished totally.

Afterwards, I set about producing more.

Now, having found the time, I have conducted a serious search of my own, not with the intent of finally destroying my literary slanders of the Soviet state, but out of curiosity. Over the past decade I had simply forgotten what it was my hidden nooks and crannies contained.

From under the table, and from under the dresser, I excavated a number of dusty folders. They were filled with paper rubbish, which I no longer needed, but which hadn't been tossed out because it might prove useful later on. Among the yellowed summaries, outlines, notes, plans of started and abandoned books, I found a number of unpublished completed works as well.

Some of them are just curiosities. For example, the story written at the end of 1967, during the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Great October Proletarian Revolution, which describes how the powers that be in Leningrad decide to stage a re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace (and there were proposals to do just that at the time). To defend the Palace they recruit a woman's battalion from among the employees of the Hermitage Museum (the Palace's current occupant). At the decisive moment of the storming, the defenders, being Soviet Patriots, decide not to allow the advancing columns of revolutionaries, portrayed by drunken volunteers, into the museum for fear they would damage or steal the national treasures, not to mention force their attentions (to put it politely) on the members of the women's battalion. Everything gets out of hand - rather typical for Russia - and the women hold the Winter Palace, causing the fall of Soviet Power.

Certainly it would have been far too early to print this story in 1967, orfor that matter the story dealing with the forgotten concentration camp out on the Taiga inhabited by the likes of Beria and others. But the majority of the stories I found proved to be utterly guiltless in an ideological sense, not only from the point of view of today but from the point of view of 20 years ago as well. And yet every one of them was shown to an editor who read them and replied in horror: "Are you out of your mind?! You knowwhat that alludes to!" Or they were not shown, because my internal censor would not take the chance.

One piece of news to pass along: On 24 December, 1991 (Christmas Eve in Russia is celebrated in January according to the Orthodox calendar), a new program, The SF Library, premiered on central television. Each episode, thelength of a featurefilm, concentrates on a particular major sf author. The first film, written by thewell-known TV commentator Svyatoslav Belza, was dedicated to the life and work of Ray Bradbury. Beginning with a series of documentary stills showing America in the 1920s and '30s, as the background against which the author's growing years were described, the show made extensive use of scenes from the numerous films made from Bradbury's stories in our country. In all, I am told by Umuta Kemelbekova, one of the active members of the Union of Friends of Ray Bradbury, such films number about 15.

[Later Letter]

The powers that be are continually promising to sign the Berne convention, but it's all empty talk. There is just no money in the country, and all accounts anyway are in rubles. They have already issued new bills with 500- and 1,000-ruble denominations; by the end of summer they should be printing 5,000- and 10,000- ruble notes. They keep saying that it's for our own good; that way there will be enough money to go around.

I recently spent three weeks in a home for the aged veterans of the film industry, where oncefamous actors and directors no one else remembers anymore live out their last years in small rooms, being fed and attended to by doctors and nurses or were doing so. The situation in the country has been getting worse daily. Because the Union of Cinematographers, which has always had responsibility for the establishment, has already collapsed in a state of bankruptcy, new retirees are no longer accepted, and the rooms freed by death are now being rented out for hard currency to Americans and Germans in Moscow on business -the estate is only half an hour from the center of the city by car. It's impossible for your simple [former] Soviet writer to get in there. They charge Americans $120.00 a day, which isn't all that bad compared to what the real hotels are charging Russians.

Guests have been coming through town. During the course of the past week, I've had a threesome of numismatists from the US, my former editor at Macmillian, English and Italian journalists who used to work in Moscow and who just returned to see that we were still alive, and a number of emigree friends who returned after a decade's absence in the US who came back to show how rich they've become (by Russian standards), much like Turkish Gastarbeirerer in Germany who go back to their home village to show off their BMWs. Oh yes, and another friend who's now settled in Israel.

Meanwhile, the situation in publishing has gotten worse. The cost of paper and of publishing services has risen so much that the price of books is beyond the average person's means; people's eyes have turned from literature to bread. Like a big wheel turning, inflation has gone up and living standards havegone down. Inequal reaction, the level of social rage has gone up. This government will shortly fall from the accumulation of distrust and resentment and hatred, both social and national. This may be why science fiction writers have been dealing less and lesswith the real worldj ust now; we canjust look around and see the festering ulcers left over by the fallof communism. Today Yugoslavia and the former USSR, tomorrow Czechoslovakia and Rumania....

We have recently seen the flourish and fall of the American sf bookboom here. The writers, of course, got nothing out of it but the (perhaps) psychological satisfaction of finding new fans. As a rule, the publishers only dealt with books from before 1973... As a result, the readers are now familiarwith virtually all the sf published in the US in the late sixties and early seventies [before copright protection].

And many of the publishing houses have proven to be more ephemeral than the books. In fact, although there are some notable exceptions, many of the publishers chose to spit on all rights and conventions; they published and ran, and you can't find them now to sue them.

My favorite example of this puts me in the starring role.

About six months ago, a fellow called from St. Petersburg, saying he was the director of a publishing house there, which, as I recall, was called "Skif" [Scythian], and asked permission to reprint my old book Poslednaja Vojna [The Last War]. I told him I'd rather not; I wrote the book more than 25 years ago, parts of it could be politely termed archaic, and I was in fact re-working it for another publisher. He then said, "But we want to publish your book just as you wrote it in a special limited edition for your fans." Oh, what the hell, I thought, and said, "Then why don't you come around or send someone around and we'll talk it over and see what happens."

After that I heard nothing from them for half a year. I had completely forgotten about it when I found myself in the former Leningrad this spring and, lo and behold, I found the book being sold by street hawkers. What is more, there was a "foreword" attached in my name, saying that I had allowed the publishing house to print this special, limited edition.

I grew interested. Now what? I had received from them neither money nor free copies, nor were they selling the book in stores, just on the streets and at 40 rubles! (Originally $45.00 at the "official" rate, now $0.40 at the free market exchange rate, but still a hefty sum here.) And the book's print run carefully indicated with all the other required publishing information on the back page, was "300,000 copies." There are rumors to the effect that, in America, a writer who has had 300,000 copies of a book printed would carry away from the deal a substantial sum of money. And I thinks to myself. "Ah-ha! How do I get something out of this?" So I write to the publisher and I get the letter back from the post office with "Ain't no publisher here! " written on it.

People who have been through this before me explained how the scam goes. The publishing "house" is formed just to publish one or two books. It consists of two or three people, however many are needed to serve as director, scrounge the paper, and deal with the printers. They print a popular book and then sell out to a wholesaler. They then split, liquidate the assets, and if I should want to find out what a judge thinks of it, I do have some chance that, maybe, after many years of litigation, I'll get something. If I can find these hoods. And then I might not....

So you can see the problem an American writer will have ingetting anymoney, if such things happen to the locals. We live at the dawn of the post-Soviet book Klondyke!

-Kir Bulychev

-John Costello, trans.