note: At the time I made this translation I was a graduate student in Anthropology at Penn State University (THIS IS NOT A RECOMMENDATION!), having studied Russian at UMASS Boston under Anny Newman, Diana Burgin, and Maya Berlina, and once a month I would head over to Patee (the library) to dose myself with Literaturnia Gazeta, Around the World, and the other Russian magazines and newspapers, to get as far away from Anthropology and Archaeology as possible.
LitGaz in 1985 was running a series of articles on Soviet SF and its prospects. Of all the articles, Bulychev's was the one that did not need every other sentence footnoted. Also, I had developed a taste for his fiction. He was one of my favorite Russian writers. Another one was I. V. Mojeiko, who had written a lot of travel pieces about Burma and Archaeology for Around the World (Patee's collection went back to the 60s!) I had just gotten ahold of two of Mojeiko's books, one about Pirates, the other about the Wonders of the World.
Around that time, Boris Zavgorodny, mentioned in a Locus article that Bulychev, the pseudonymous writer, had been outed: the was in fact a historian who wrote books about Pirates in the Indian Ocean and the Wonders of the World, and Burma.
Hmm.
[Note: the following article originally appeared as part of a general debate on sf ("fantastic literature") in the weekly Literaturnava Gazeta during two months last year. It is reprinted with permission from the Soviet copyright office.]
Impelled by good intentions, and in the interest of the readers, a discussion is taking place about fantastic literature. The participants have expressed their hopes, identified dangers, and asserted their claims.
But in Sumatra, in the wild forests whose area is steadily diminishing , lives a Rhinoceros. Rhinoceri are so few they cannot establish families. The last possible bride is awaiting her suitor from a hundred kilometers away, but he hasn't any idea in which direction he should head , At the same time, staid scientists are discoursing on -the forms of these animals' ears and horns and are trying to decide once and for all to which subspecies they belong. And indeed, if they are rhinoceri at all. For some reason, to a real scientist, it is more interesting to write a paper than to go to Sumatra and trample through the jungles to find our Rhino his bride.
It seems to me that we have something like this going on in the realm of fantastic literature.
Let us analyze, all the same, the question: "Just what is fantastic literature?" Critics quite frequently call it a genre, which, in my view , does not quite correspond to reality. Contemporary fantasy exists as a species of literature including within itself, as does realistic literature, all genres. One remembers the epics of Efremov and Asimov, the pamphlets of Vonnegut and Boule, the parables of Gennadi Gor the humor of Lem and Kuttner. By rights as a species of literature, fantasy successfully execytes the grotesque, the hyperbolic, the allegory and poetic metaphor, satire, publicistics and, however paradoxical it may sound, especially realistic depictions of other worlds and times.
But it is worthwhile to look at fantastic literature in its capacity as a genre placed, so to speak, on the same shelf as mysteries, as we begin to speak of it here, but only as a label.
When they say "science fiction writer" or "fantasy writer," they imply something on the order of: "He's a dancer all right, but not from the Bolshoy. He tapdances."
In that blessed time when the meaning Of fantastic literature was not synonymous with science fiction, writers wrote whatever they pleased. No one even guessed that Balzac's "Unknown Masterpiece" was sf. No one scolded Wells when he violated physical laws or "dealt with technology in an extremely thoughtless and dilettantish manner," or ignored "natural conStants." Writers created literature and wrote not about constants or physical laws, but about man.
In the twentieth century the world was swept up in the technological revolution. Science, which earlier had been held a boon, became for many incomprehensible fearful, all-powerful. Interest in it grew strongly, especially in our country, which was completing a sharp industrial and technological leap. A demand for the popularization of science and prognostication developed. Specialized popular science magazines were created. It was in these that science fiction writers were developed. Still, then these were less fiction than scientific popularizations. Open the magazines Knowledge is Power, Technology for Youth, and Around The Worldfrom the 1930s and you will uncover numerous articles on scientific and technological novelties where the storytelling is limited to the relieving dialogues. Even such a talented writer as Aleksandr Belyaev came out with articles while calling them "stories' or 'tales" with the proclaiming subtitle "A Science Fan tasy". But mostly these works were compiled by people without the least writing talent and their names, therefore, are justifiably forgotten.
The names are forgotten, but the title remains, and worst of all, we are left with a reputation and the stereotyped perception of fantasy.
When you try to see the world through the magnifying glass of imagination, when the everyday world suggests to you a picture of tomorrow, when a personality opens to you its own unexpected possibilities, a fantastic story is born.
But what happens afterwards?
Obviously, you offer your story to the editorial board of a popular science journal or an editor in one of the publishing houses which bring out fantasy works. Because of their specialized nature, the popular science magazines usually make the demand that the story carry some specific scientific or technical information. If the story does not fall within the limited category, it will most often (especially if the writer is unknown) be rejected. In this regard, the accepted meaning of science fiction forces the editor to use popular science criteria in judging a literary phenomenon. The result is that when we speak of science fiction and print it, we are demanding not literature but popularizations.
So I will not be without evidence, let us turn to a recent issue of Sovietskaia Rossia (26 June 1985) where A. Kazantsev, one of the senior Soviet sf writers, quite categorically "does not agree with those who hold that fantasy should be free from what they teach in institutes of technology and become 'simple fantasy' or 'fairytaleish.'" Fantasy should be diverse, including among its possibilities the scientific, armed by a knowledge of technical detail (if it is literature and not a science text), but I think to demand from a writer a knowledge of everything that is taught in technical schools simply will not work, if only because that would exclude from the field of fantastic literature the majority of our recognized and favorite writers.
Authors, made wise by experience, are obliged to choose one of two routes The First Route: The author finds an appropriate subject proven by time and creates his successive variant, using cast and accoutrements garnered from Space Opera and popular science articles, with a garnish of newfangled words.
The Second Route: The author, being inclined more toward literature and wishing to write science fiction as literature, as art, declines the title (and at the same time debars himself from the popular science magazines), declaring himself a "Non- fantast." He might call his work "Contemporary Fairytales," "Phantasy," or "Allegories." "Stories" is better, but better still is to leave dubious fantasizing and limit oneself within the frames of strict reality.
The world of readers is divided into partisans and opponents of fantastic literature. It would be unthinkable to meet a person who would not accept the legitimacy of realistic or, say, historical writing. There the borders are drawn by the criterion of quality: people love the good literature and do not love the bad. It is simple.
In regard to fantastic literature, the borders are drawn on different grounds. Either it is greeted ecstatically or it does not reach into the soul. And because the majority of sf's partisans are young people whose imaginations have not been suffocated by everyday cares or transformed into defensive reactions against everything new and unusual, they are not among those who will decide if sf is to be or not to be.
Both extremes are dangerous. An ecstatic regard for fantasy is uncritical. They will snap up everything with the title. This enables the flourishing of literary hacks who manufacture stereotypic drivel. The deplorable state of sf blocks the road to talented newcomers and deprives sf of the possibility of developing. In such circumstances a person, indifferent to sf, who quite justifiably has pointed to its low literary level, is more easily reconciled with the commonplace stereotype than with the attempts to throw off the title.
If you ask about Soviet fantastic literature of the 1960s -- who epitomizes it?, where are its heights? - you will name Efremov, the Strugatsky brothers, and a half dozen names more. Specific successful stories have appeared, even books. But, unfortunately, they are exceptions, and signal no development. People tell me, "Read such and such; it's interesting." The story might be interesting, but the writer still isn't. And more often than not his work is limited to that story.
And our Sumatran Rhinoceros, growing old in his bachelorhood, wanders through his isolated valleys. Why is this happening? The present kind of demand for sf brings to the field imitators and popularizers, and not writers. Their production is of such a low quality that it quite justly exasperates those people who value the title "author" and the goals of literature highly. Fantasy is similar to a strange monster who has one enormous foot and a dwarfish body. Imagine for yourself a situation in which realistic literature was limited to tales of village life, or to the feuilleton article or serial], yet which claimed to be the beginning and end of literature. For example, Iu. Shkolenko severely castigates the stories appearing in the magazine Iskatel. He creates he impression that our science fiction in general, is terrible. In vain would one respond that this is but one approach to sf, the "titled" kind.
Far from all publishing houses will ague science fiction. Oblast' publishers are practically excluded from the possibility of publishing sf works. One fiction magazine (and not a magazine per se but the fiction supplement to the travel magazine Around The World) Iskatel sets aside a few of its pages. Sf, it seems, turns out to be a type of literature for which the demand strongly outruns the supply; well, where there's a deficit the reader will take anything be can get. As they say, Among the blind .... Sf books "for adults," which might take on serious problems, can be published only on the condition that they aren't called sf. This was the case with V. Orlov's THE VIOLINIST DANILOV and A. Kim's THE SQUIRREL. And at the very same time, in this country we have hundreds of writers who have tried their hands at sf.
However, when the final lines are drawn at the end of this or that year, but suddenly becomes clear that the business of publishing sf isn't quite hat bad. Some tens of books have come out. Aside from those tens of books, they are constantly reprinting millions of copies of THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, AELITA THE INVISIBLE MAN, and THE AMPHIBIAN. The runs of these reprintings exceed by many times the numbers of new books, and in sum it is thought that they are printing sf.
The State Publishing House is preparing to issue a thirty-volume Library of Soviet Fantasy. It might appear the ice has broken! Alas, no; at the present moment this Library is planned as a twenty-four volume publication including the works of Jules Verne, Wells, and Belyaev, as well as contemporary foreign authors such as Carsac [French, the paleontologist Francois Bordes-JHC] and Weiss [Czech-JHC]. At the very best, four or five volumes will be devoted to contemporary Soviet sf writers. But this Library will be issued nearly to the end of this century, and on account of its "Academic" volumes the amount of contemporary literature to be published ill be diminished further.
Fantastic literature has the capacity to respond to the newest tendencies in the life of any society, or for the human race in general. it can respond in advance to problems that have just been noticed, that have hardly begun to develop a social manifestation, yet sf can examine their futures. And although sf solves the problems placed before -it by specific techniques, that to say, with the aid of paradox and hyperbole all these arise from those human relations, from the real world self.
estuzhev-Lada fears that the fancy for sf will pass, like those of Romanticism and Naturalism (LG 7 August 1985).However, he is not speaking of as a species of literature, but of one of its crystalizations -- the dregs. He forgets that in the first half of the nineteenth century there existed a Romantic sf. Romanticism died but sf did not perish, because it is a creature of a completely' different order.
Never before has sf been so needed by society. This is a reflection of progress. This is a reflection of the complexity of our world; it responds to a desire of the reader to find an answer to the questions: Who am I? that will happen tomorrow? What is waiting for me as a person, and for mankind? In turning our backs on sf, we lose the ability to see the world in perspective. Go out onto the street and ask any young person if he likes sf. Almost certainly he will answer, "Yes, but where can I get it?" I will not speak now about just what he understands by sf, what he wants from it, what he has already read and how much he has looked into the literature. That is a theme for another discussion and, quite possibly, for specialized research.
Any discussion is the event that there exists material for controversy. I fear (and the majority of participants in this discussion, it seems, agree with me) that the material we have is yet insufficient. Well then, perhaps, by our common efforts, we might despite everything attract attention to our Sumatran Rhinoceros, who is trudging sadly along through his valley.
--Kir Bulychev [trans. John Costello]