Thread: Russian Science Fiction - Recommended books?

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Shumil - very sharp and exact technichal and logical descriptions. No contradictions and baby-talk in technics (especially computer technics) if you know what I mean. Though some major fails in psychology and ethics IMHO. The main character usually is too masculine... Though female characters around are able to make fun of him even if unable to resist his charisma.

Scheglov - his Panga series is an example of sci-fi\fantazy mixture - very natural. The idea of magic describes a perfect user interface of a powerful high-tech device, doesn't it?

Rudazov - easy reading. Travels between worlds and adventures. Particularly good in comedy situations and charachters' banters. Start with Archmage series from the beginning. Later it goes worse.

Lazarchuk - «Иное небо» - an alternative history. Intellectual and rather complicated... Actually can't recommend reading in foreign language. But it is in my short list.

Max Frei - a woman actually. No SF though. "Labyrinths of Echo" series is a Harry Potter for grown ups with a very specific view of life and philosophy, which you either adore of hate.

Kamsha - two epic sagas in fictional medieval-to-renaissance-like worlds with mystics, magic and intensive eschatology. No one is completed up to now. No problems with credible female charachters as she's a woman. She's a fan of GRR Martin and her sagas resemble his one but they are way not so cruel and way more romantic.

Bushkov - mainly known for his action but has a nice series of SF\fantasy "Svarog". A lucky idiot in a Boschian world. First three novels are readable then he sold his name to publishers and now they publish garbage by shadowwriters in that series.
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Originally Posted by it-ogo

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Bushkov - mainly known for his action but has a nice series of SF\fantasy "Svarog". A lucky idiot in a Boschian world. First three novels are readable then he sold his name to publishers and now they publish garbage by shadowwriters in that series.

Oh, Bushkov! I'd like to say a few words on him.
He seems to be a graphomaniac and the most of his publications is junk and garbage. But he wrote two such excellent novels, I can't help respecting him.
These novels are Лабиринт and Провинциальная хроника начала осени. Their genre is not SF, fantasy or action but more like a fable with profound ideas on meaning of life and what human beings are.
I heartily recommend everyone to have a look at them. They are relatively short, so that doesn't take much time.

Originally Posted by it-ogo

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Shumil - very sharp and exact technichal and logical descriptions. No contradictions and baby-talk in technics (especially computer technics) if you know what I mean. Though some major fails in psychology and ethics IMHO. The main character usually is too masculine... Though female characters around are able to make fun of him even if unable to resist his charisma.

Scheglov - his Panga series is an example of sci-fi\fantazy mixture - very natural. The idea of magic describes a perfect user interface of a powerful high-tech device, doesn't it?

Rudazov - easy reading. Travels between worlds and adventures. Particularly good in comedy situations and charachters' banters. Start with Archmage series from the beginning. Later it goes worse.

Lazarchuk - «Иное небо» - an alternative history. Intellectual and rather complicated... Actually can't recommend reading in foreign language. But it is in my short list.

Max Frei - a woman actually. No SF though. "Labyrinths of Echo" series is a Harry Potter for grown ups with a very specific view of life and philosophy, which you either adore of hate.

Kamsha - two epic sagas in fictional medieval-to-renaissance-like worlds with mystics, magic and intensive eschatology. No one is completed up to now. No problems with credible female charachters as she's a woman. She's a fan of GRR Martin and her sagas resemble his one but they are way not so cruel and way more romantic.

Bushkov - mainly known for his action but has a nice series of SF\fantasy "Svarog". A lucky idiot in a Boschian world. First three novels are readable then he sold his name to publishers and now they publish garbage by shadowwriters in that series.
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Wow, what a great summary with the hyperlinks. I think this thread may be worthy of becoming a sticky, at this rate.

On the female character aspect. Yes, I absolutely don't need feminist heroines who kick butt and are action heroes.
All I ask is that they have more than one brain cell and are in the book for some other purpose than a sexy distraction.

One of the reasons I like to watch Soviet films once in a while is because they have interesting female characters of all ages. Not feminists, beauty queens or female action heroes, but regular women with an interesting story and a bit of personality. Don't know if that was deliberate, but it's very noticeable. Another reason is that I prefer a slower development of the plot, and I'm fine without brutal violence and sex scenes.
Would be interesting to know if sci-fi written during the Soviet era has similar characteristics.

Modern Russian sci-fi interests me more though, and anything older than 20 years is probably risking being a bit dated unless is strictly philosophical.

The question is whether I am able to read in Russian at this point. It's one thing to skim through the odd comment on Masterrussian where I can cheat and look things up. It's quite another to read a book.
I listen to audiobooks a lot (lets you do other things as you "read") - and I think I understand spoken Russian a bit better, possibly.

I wonder if I'd be able to follow an audiobook? I'm on a break in my Russian studies at the moment, to be resumed next year.



I totally forgot that Goodreads have book lists for everything. They say:



They seem to be counting the same books multiple times in different languages ?! Polish, or something.

I don't see the point in searching for "unrealistic" details in SF. Do you really believe that it is possible to describe (and explain "scientifically") ALL aspects of common life and technology in a far future? "Orwell did not predict cell phones OMG He's so outdated!!!" - This way? I don't think that even pretending to the realistic description of everything is not very wise because it means obvious and predictable epic fail.

For me the difference between the truъ and would-be SF is the main purpose of the author. If the purpose if to predict\warn\admire about something new that comes out with a sci/tech (and connected social) progress - it is truъ. If the main purpose is to entertain/stylize/escape-the-reality/get-the-profit/whatever else - it is would-be SF. That is subjective of course (as everything) but I believe that the criterion is clear enough for the most.

Also I believe that the main purpose of SF is a social aspect rather than technical. Fiction literature is a humanitarian tool and solving technical problems with it does not look like a good idea. Can you name a single technical prediction of Jules Verne that does not come out as obvious fail? Submarines? Hey, sample submarines existed before Jules Verne. Jules Verne is about the spirit of the modern age, not about the particular technics or physical laws.

Originally Posted by it-ogo

Also I believe that the main purpose of SF is a social aspect rather than technical. Fiction literature is a humanitarian tool and solving technical problems with it does not look like a good idea. Can you name a single technical prediction of Jules Verne that does not come out as obvious fail? Submarines? Hey, sample submarines existed before Jules Verne. Jules Verne is about the spirit of the modern age, not about the particular technics or physical laws.

Я придерживаюсь точки зрения, что хужественная литература в первую очередь для развлечения читателя. То есть опция "поднимать серьёзные и неоднозначные вопросы" — не умолчательная. Если, например, здесь будет топик типа "литература, которая заставляет задуматься", тогда конечно в нём будет важен именно аспект "гуманитарного инструмента".

Но поскольку этот тред о развлекательной литературе, то для неё важны иные критерии. Люди обычно любят книги, схожие по сеттингу. В этом плане классификация фэнтэзи — мягкая НФ — труЪ НФ имеет практический смысл, т.к. помогает ориентироваться.

Originally Posted by it-ogo

I don't see the point in searching for "unrealistic" details in SF.

Well, it depends on how you define "unrealistic." Old sci-fi which assumed that Venus is covered with swampy jungles is "unrealistic", but not "unrealistic" in the same sense as modern sci-fi which assumes that spaceships will someday be able to travel through Einstein-Rosen bridges, aka wormholes.

After all, early sci-fi about the "Swamp People of Venus" did not actually contradict the scientific information about Venus that was known at the time -- rather, the authors took advantage of the fact that there was practically NO scientific information about Venus back then!

On the other hand, today's real-world physics predicts that IF Einstein-Rosen bridges actually exist at all, anything much larger than an electron would be crushed into "singularity" while attempting to pass through the wormhole. So, science-fiction which depicts ships going back and forth through wormholes is essentially "stealing" a valid concept from modern physics and using it in Magical and unrealistic way -- they might as well forget any pretense of science and solve the problem of interstellar travel by using the Floo Spell from Harry Potter!

On the other hand, there's nothing necessarily wrong with this sort of unrealism. The classic Mote In God's Eye uses a variation on the wormhole so that ships can travel between stars instantly, but this "magical" premise is simply an excuse to bring humans into contact with extraterrestrials who are biologically, psychologically, and culturally very different from humans. In fact, the rather unusual sex lives of the aliens -- they're sequential hermaphrodites -- has played a major role in shaping their history and culture, and so you could argue that the novel is "hard" sci-fi from a socio-biologist's point-of-view, even though a physicist might consider it "science fantasy" or "soft."

Do you really believe that it is possible to describe (and explain "scientifically") ALL aspects of common life and technology in a far future? "Orwell did not predict cell phones OMG He's so outdated!!!"

If I were going to criticize Orwell for anything, it would be that he did not predict hackers! (In other words, he assumed that the two-way "telescreens" were, and would remain, under the permanent control of the totalitarian government, and that dissidents would not find a way to exploit the technology for subversive purposes.)

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.)

It does not qualify as Russian SF, but:
I just want to add, that Lem is better translated to Russian, than to English in my opinion. Possibly, word play is easier to translate due to similarity in Polish and Russian (I mean words like "электрыцарь" ).
Lem is probably my favourite SF author, and I highly recommend everybody to read him. My personal favourite novel is "Эдем". It is about spaceship crashing on a planet with highly organized life forms and the problems of contacting and understanding them.

(Moderation comment: partially moved to the new thread.)

Well, unlike faster-than-light travel, it doesn't blatantly violate known laws of physics

The problem is, the impossibility of faster-than-light travel is not explained by any known law of physics. It's postulated "as is" and the whole physics theory is built upon that postulate. It's overall accepted, it's proved by innumerable experiment and observations but it never has been plausibly explained.

On the other hand, today's real-world physics predicts that IF Einstein-Rosen bridges actually exist at all, anything much larger than an electron would be crushed into "singularity" while attempting to pass through the wormhole. So, science-fiction which depicts ships going back and forth through wormholes is essentially "stealing" a valid concept from modern physics and using it in Magical and unrealistic way -- they might as well forget any pretense of science and solve the problem of interstellar travel by using the Floo Spell from Harry Potter!

I agree, but please remember, that however modern and strange and complicated the relativity may seem in fact it is a classical physics theory in the sense that it isn't a quantum theory. So nowadays it is perceived as outdated and needs to be redesigned in order to be built in the modern quantum perception of the world. As for the quantum theory, it opens doors to almost boundless flight of fantasy and speculations.

I think, Strugarsky's books is very close to soviet regime. To understand it, you must understand sotivet regime. So, I can't recommend it to everybody.

Another names of russian SF - Vyacheslav Rybakov (Вячеслав Рыбаков), Ilya Varshavsky (Илья Варшавский).