Thread: Russian Science Fiction - Recommended books?

The problem with the strong Sci-fi is that most writers don't know or don't quite understand the latest ideas in physics and other fields of science and most scientists cannot write good literature. The gap is widening. In the times of Jules Verne a futuristic prediction would turned to reality in several decades and that case lasted approximately for the 30s decade of the 20-th century. Then the exponential development of science and technology took off and got such an acceleration that technical novelties became to be introduced before they could have been predicted. Interestingly, though, that some scientific ideas were primarily invented by sci-fi writers and only then became adopted by physicists. Such a thing has happened with the idea of relativistic space-time. The Einstein-Minkovsky concept is that time is just another dimension of relativistic space-time unity. But this idea was elaborated by H.G. Wells in his "The Time Machine". I used too think that Wells wrote that novel under the impression of relativistic ideas of Einstein, but in reality, the book was written a few decades before Minkovsky and Einstein developed their time-space concept. And the book was based on a short story published even several decades earlier than the novel. So it looks like Wells knew intuitively about time-space half a century before scientists did!
Most writers of nowadays don't understand the last ideas in science though, I think. It seems, they are just interested in selling the possible biggest number of their books. So they elaborate on adventure, sex, violence and other eternal human emotions just in a slightly different imaginary context. At best they try to pose some sociological questions, as brothers Strugatsky did. Nobody could predict IT breakthrough, even the appearance of the Internet and the social changes that followed. And it's certainly a shame, because sci-fi writers abandoned a great mission they had, that is to predict the ways of the human society development and make people mentally and psychologically ready for the approaching changes.
Now it's happened that sci-fi became so uninteresting that some physicists took pen and began to popularise the unknown aspects of today science knowledge. And there are a lot of wonderful things. For example, the mystery of time. There is a British physicists Julian Barbour, who strongly believe that time doesn't even exists. His book "The End of Time" is a very interesting reading. There are also such problems as the enigma of human's consciousness and personality, the problem of the possibility of creation of artificial intellect, the problem of the possibility of trans-humanism, the problem of the existence of parallel worlds and so on.


(Moderation comment: further discussion moved to the new thread.)