(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: ominous swirling synth)
Arelsky biography, non-spoiler discussion
Hello, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. This section is part of a host choice episode, which covers Harry Martinson's "Aniara", Graal Arelsky's "Tales of Mars" trilogy, and Renato Pestriniero's "A Night of 21 Hours". This segment focuses on the Arelsky stories.
Graal Arelsky, also known as Stefan Stefanovich Petrov, was born to a peasant family on December 9th. 1888. During his education at the Karl May School, which he graduated from in 1909, Arelsky became involved in politics. He joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1907, the activities of which led to his first arrest the same year he left Carl May School, spending a few months in Kresty Prison.
After this, he studied astronomy at St. Petersburg University. He was, though, expelled by 1914, having only completed five courses. Before this occurred, however, Arelsky published his first poem, "Vashka", in a publication called The Universe, in 1910. Around this time, he also met other poets, including the leader of the Russian ego-futurism movement, Igor Severyanin, Alexander Blok, and Ivan Ignatyev.
In 1911, Arelsky published his first book of poetry and published his manifesto, "Egopoetry in Poetry", the following year. 1913 saw the publication of his second book of poems, including ones dealing with scientific themes. From 1915 onwards, Arelsky appeared to have published little poetry and only began publishing any works after the Russian Civil War. During the war period, he was arrested two more times, only one of which he was jailed for.
In 1923, he published a few more poems, as well as a drama in verse called "The Nymph Ata". In 1924, he turned to fiction, starting with the three stories we'll be looking at tonight. He wrote three other sci-fi stories besides these, "Citizen of the Universe" in 1925, "Gift of the Selenites" in 1926, and "The Man Who Visited Mars" in 1927. While the former of these three stories was in a publication known as Historical Youth Story, the other two were published in the Soviet Union's longest-running pulp magazine, World of Adventure.
In 1928, Arelsky published a historical fiction novel called "The Enemy of Ptolemy". However, after the revolution, he continued having legal problems. For the party he was a member of before the revolution, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, had split from the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. He was therefore arrested for anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation, and sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp in 1935. Unfortunately, Arelsky died during the sentence on April 15, 1937.
The first of our three stories by Arelsky, all part of a loosely connected trilogy known as "Tales of Mars", is "Professor Dagin's laboratory" published in the May to June 1924 issue of the magazine Man and Nature, and the second story, "Two Worlds", was published in the July to August issue of the same magazine. These two stories were included with the last installment "Towards A New Sun" when it was published in 1925. And I think that the stories definitely get more elaborate and more detailed as they go along.
JM:
Yeah, it's really interesting to me how the stories were written, obviously, or at least published, very close together and in the same magazine, but they all have pretty distinct tones. They're kind of different from one another in that sense.
And you can kind of feel how each one kind of fits into a certain trope of science fiction, I guess, even from back then. And they feel a little bit ahead of, especially the second story, I think. It feels a little bit like something that you would see 25 years later in a lot of the American magazines, not to say that there weren't, and we're definitely going to be covering some very special authors from that scene yet.
But it's just really interesting to me how, Nate, you compared it to "The Martian Chronicles" earlier, and you kind of see a little bit of that. Although the stories do get more detailed, and the third one is almost, it's like the most fascinating and intricate, but to me it was also kind of the most disappointing. I think it just seemed like he kind of just ran out. Like he ran out of something, I don't know, time or ink or paper. It just kind of like, he introduced all these situations and characters and conflicts, and then he didn't really do anything with any of them, and something happens to main protagonist, and that's it. We don't know how anything resolves, and I don't mind ambiguity. I like ambiguity, but I don't know. It just felt kind of like something just stopped properly. It's just such an interesting setup, and I was like, yeah, this is the best of the three, right? And I'm like, oh, but it's also kind of the most disappointing of the three because it did.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, the one thing I wanted more from these is just more. I think these all could have easily been standalone novellas, if not a full-length novel in the case of the third one, because it does have several characters and plot points that probably could have sustained itself for a good 50, 60,000 words, but it's only roughly 9,000 or 10,000 words, so it's quite a small fraction of that.
It is interesting in relation to the American magazines, the nature of these three stories are all different from one another, and in a sense, it kind of reflects the Soviet pulp magazine landscape at the time. They didn't appear in World of Adventure, but since World of Adventure was the most popular and longest-running magazine, publishing this kind of fiction, it kind of, I guess, set the standard and model for all the other magazines to follow, and it did publish a lot of the non-science fiction adventure stories, like there was a lot of caveman, weird dinosaur stuff that appeared in World of Adventure that probably came into Russia through the Argosy-type pulps, you know, Burroughs and people like that doing that kind of sword and planet, you know, lost earth, lost race kind of fiction with weird reptile creatures that merge into a more science fiction direction in the American pulps later, but I think around 1924 they were more of a primordial mess rather than any kind of specific strain of genre, though these stories and certainly a couple others that we'll be covering at a later point are definitely more science fiction-y in tone. It's kind of interesting to see how the, especially "Two Worlds" plays out as it does feel like a more deliberate fusing of the two genres, the weird caveman stuff and the futuristic society.
JM:
It's even got, like, a fight with a beast and everything and, like...
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
...and a tribe of women with arrows and...
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It's got all those things. And the first one is, like, this melancholy catching a glimpse of a lost race, kind of like an almost weird tales-esque kind of thing. And then, yeah, the third one is this, like, worker's revolution story. Yeah, it's definitely a really interesting mix of moods and overall I really liked them. I just, yeah, it seemed like there was a lot of cleverness too in the way the second and third story were tied together, I thought.
Gretchen:
Because there's different moods and stuff, you do sort of wonder at first how they might be considered like a trilogy. And when it comes to the connection between the first and second, it really feels more like there's one very specific paragraph that if you miss, you kind of don't realize that they could be related. But then, like, yeah, the third story really ties things together.
Nate:
Yeah, it puts an interesting spin on the second story because at first when I read the end of "Two Worlds", I didn't really know what he was getting at, but then you read the third story and it kind of makes it clear, despite the fact that none of the characters of "Two Worlds" are mentioned by name and "Towards a New Sun". And the stories presumably take place, like, millennia apart from one another. The timescale is kind of hard to figure out exactly. I was placing the first story in, like, 1950 or something like that, still roughly within the timeframe of the Russian Revolution, but with the human technology set, like, slightly forward and a little bit more advanced than existed in 1924.
Gretchen:
Yeah, especially since they do mention, like, the effects of the Russian Civil War and stuff.
Nate:
Exactly, yeah. But the other stories are like centuries, if not millennia, past that.
JM:
And the other stories are not concerning humans either, really. Yeah, so, I mean, they seem to appear human and they do a lot of human things, including drinking alcohol again. That's a thing.
Gretchen:
And they do refer to themselves as humanity, except there's something very interesting. There's one part where they refer to something as a marsquake instead of an earthquake, which was just a fun little moment.
Nate:
Yeah, the word for "Mars" in Russian is the same as in English, and that was part of the text, which I thought was a clever thing that he did.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And I think it is very interesting that the first story is, like, the one that features Earth and people on Earth. And then it sort of establishes the frame. And we go into the more elaborate pieces on Martian culture.
JM:
Yeah. And it's cool because you don't, like, see that there's necessarily going to be a sequel at first. Like, oh, that was an interesting melancholy science fiction story about a dying race and, you know, thinking, oh, that's cool. I'll never see them again. But then it's like, then he brings in the second one. And then I won't get into specifics now until we talk about specific plot elements. But there's a thing at the end of a second story where I was like thinking, I was disappointed, but not in the same way as I was in the end of the third story. It was more like, oh, he's going there with it. Like, why would he say that? And it was like, it actually bugged me a bit.
And then I read the third story and I'm like, oh, I get it now. I get why the characters were talking like that at the end because that's the way they are, in fact. And you don't see that quite in the second story because you see it's somebody looking for their daughter and somebody else looking for their husband, right? And that's like a thing that every human can sort of identify with, right? And so you don't really think a lot about where these characters come from and the society they live in and what means anything to them, right? And then at the end, you catch a glimpse of it and it's a little bit ugly and you're like, oh, really? That's what you're thinking about. I'm sure you guys know what I mean and we'll get to it.
Nate:
And I mean, that's one thing I liked about this, even though it does have its flaws that are very apparent. The more I think about it, the more I like it in that it does present complex, flawed and sometimes unlikeable characters that are well written and have their place in the universe. They're not like just villains or flawless heroes, though we do get a couple flawless heroes more in the third story, a lot of the characters feel more complex and real than something you'd get in a lot of the American pulp magazine type stories.
I mean, it presents a darker shade on a lot of the characters and makes them, I guess, flawed humans rather than a spaceman with a laser gun or something like that.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, you definitely did see stories like that in the American pulp too, but they may have been more of an exception than the rule. There was a lot of stuff that was not like that. And that's what most people remember them overall as being like, even if it's usually the other stories that are anthologized. I think we'll be getting to some of those writers next episode. But for now, yeah, this is like, and this is earlier too, this is like 1924. So it's pretty early for these kind of, it really feels like the second story is a first contact story, right?
And it does remind me of not only William Burroughs in that there's like the cavemen in the fight with the beast and stuff like that, but also like something like Star Trek maybe or something like that where there's a group of people and they're trying to make contact with an alien culture for the first time and they don't really know what to do. But there's some in story two and three, there's some extreme time jumps. And it almost feels like what you were saying, Nate, there's room for more in all of these, right? And almost feels like there's chunks missing, right? And you just kind of all of a sudden you're like quite a bit forward in time and things have changed quite a bit. And you're sort of playing catch up. And Arelsky is kind of telling you about it, but you kind of wish you'd seen a little bit more of it firsthand. I think, I don't know, that's kind of how I felt.
Nate:
It does make me wonder how much more of their might there be. I know "Two Worlds" when it appeared in the magazine, not in the final book form, was apparently quite abridged. And when I was initially going through another story that appeared in World of Adventure, Vladimir Orlovsky's "Steckerite", the version that appeared in World of Adventure initially was heavily censored. So I wonder if, since Arelsky had problems with the authorities, basically his entire life, I wonder if he had longer versions of these stories that got clipped by the censors in some way before it made it to publication.
JM:
I mean, it does seem possible. Considering how clever a lot of the stories are, I just kind of feel like, I mean, I like short stories. And we're going to talk about one soon that's very short as well. And that I think also maybe could have been longer. But yeah, here it does kind of feel sometimes like something has been excised. Like something's not quite there. And we've been told about things after the fact that like between one chapter and the next, a whole lot of stuff has just happened that could have been part of the narrative and it's just not, right? Like, I don't know, I just kind of wonder, I guess we may never know.
Gretchen:
Yeah, because even you had mentioned the kind of ambiguity of the end of the third story, but they all kind of have these pretty ambiguous endings that, and it feels like maybe there could have been like a fourth story that kind of fills in a little bit more of the last one. It almost feels like it's kind of, you left feeling like it's ambiguous until you get like another piece in the next story. It is one that you can see continuing.
JM:
We were reading Vladko last time and it seemed like he had actually expanded that short story into something longer or at least used bits of it for something longer. And it seemed like this could have been that too. It could have been like, this really does remind me of what became like the fix-up novels in American science fiction. And a lot of the time in those, depending on the author, but like the one by Clifford Simak "City" especially, he did a lot of additions for the book publication so that it was more like a coherent single story and filling in different things that were not in the magazine publication. Whereas you get something like "The Forgotten Planet" by Murray Leidster, which I kind of read most of a little while ago. I didn't read the last story yet, but I probably will someday, because it's a fix-up with three distinct parts that are obviously written at completely different times. But there's also a prologue that kind of ties everything together, and in general, it feels like there's kind of separate stories that were written during different times, which they were. All these stories were published around the same time, so I kind of wonder maybe he was planning on another one, like he could have written another one in short order, I guess, if he'd wanted to.
Nate:
He does have another story about Mars. The description makes it sounds like it's more Earth-based. It's very short. I think it's roughly somewhere between the length of "Professor Dagin's Observatory" and "Two Worlds". It's only like 3,000 words or something like that. So I don't know, maybe I'll take a look at that later down the line. The other science fiction story by him, "The Gift of the Selenites" I was able to find online, sounds almost like an unofficial sequel to H.G. Wells' "First Men on the Moon". And that the plot description made it sound like it almost takes place directly after the events there. It's kind of interesting. I wonder what he was reading. It probably wouldn't be too out of the question that he would have been familiar with H.G. Wells, as I know he was widely translated in Russian.
JM:
Yeah, Wells seemed to have been popular in Russia for sure.
Nate:
But I mean, yeah, they do feel like an early fusion of what was appearing in stuff like Argosy at the time and what we'd later get in Astounding and Planet Stories a couple decades later. And this is 1925 when the book version came out of all three of them together, which was like a softbound version. I was looking online for any original copies and I stumbled across this Russian auction website that went for like the equivalent of, I don't know, $75 or so a couple years ago.
But yeah, it doesn't seem like it's too easy to find a good condition copy just because it was softbound and presumably was meant to be sold at like newsstands or railway stations or something like that in the same way that a magazine would.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
But yeah, interesting set of stories. It would be neat to have more. "Professor Dowell's Head" was another one that was expanded out throughout the years. So it would have been cool if Arelsky had lived further and revisited these and expanded them a little bit. But the fragments of what we do have here and pictures of this world, I think are really cool even beyond historical significance as they do present an interesting view of humanity and how class relates to itself and how that can be expressed through these science fiction tropes.
JM:
Agreed. This is translated into house. So tell us about the translation experience before we get to the individual stories.
Nate:
Yeah, I thought Arelsky was a pretty easy author to work with as far as the translations go. The most difficulty I had was a couple bits in the third story where there's a lot of very Soviet style abbreviated acronym words that are kind of clumped together. So I was just thinking of, well, what's the best way to translate this into English? But I kind of notated my thought process as I went along for any, I guess, involved decisions just to give the reader a sense of what the original appears like. And there really weren't too many of those notations in the first two stories. It's kind of more limited to the third.
But no, I thought generally translating this was a pretty fun, enjoyable experience. And he gets kind of poetic with some of his descriptions of nature. I think it comes out of his earlier poetry work, which seems to be what he's mostly known for in the English-speaking world. But the descriptions of the trees in the first one, when the pilot is kind of descending into this thick forest, he talks about the green wool of the vines coming up of the earth in the third one a fair amount of times. Some interesting word choices that Arelsky uses for that kind of stuff. I wish he would have done more with that stuff and filled these out with some more of that poetic description throughout some of the other parts of the novel.
JM:
There's a lot of that in the first two, I think. And then the last one is very urban. This is the futuristic grinding society that we now have. I don't know, maybe that's... I don't really know. It seems like he got into a lot of trouble. Anti-Soviet propaganda. I mean, I definitely don't see any of that in these. I mean, maybe they're not as jingoistic as Vladko, but they're pretty... I don't know, they're pretty like worker solidarity.
Gretchen:
It does seem to me like there's a couple of kind of appeals to Soviet readers with...
Nate:
Definitely.
Gretchen:
Well, of course, the worker's revolution. But even during "Two Worlds", there's talk of religion and it's like, no, we don't, it's all nonsense. It keeps making very, very insistent asides, like this is all nonsense. They are completely primitive in thinking about this, kind of making very clear to all the readers out there.
Nate:
In these enlightened communist times that we now live in, that thought is of a well-gone primitive era. Yeah, definitely. His notes are pretty funny to the modern reader, especially as he gets into some of the details of Deimos and Phobos' orbits and how far they are away from Mars and all that stuff.
JM:
Cool. Well, why don't we get into the individual tales then and what happens in those?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
(music: droney spacey synth)
"Professor Dagin's Observatory" spoiler summary/discussion
"Professor Dagin's Observatory" starts with another Dagin, a pilot, rapidly descending after his engine breaks down. Surrounded by forest, he manages to land upon a rock formation that rises above the mass of trees. The area, the name of which I will not say as I will butcher it entirely, is familiar to Dagin, who lived there with his father before the former moved to Leningrad.
His father, an astronomer, had previously lived in Moscow but moved to the area Dagin now finds himself in so he could work on his own project, a new refractor design. He had remained there after Dagin's move to Leningrad and they had lost touch with each other. While Dagin is looking for a way to descend the formation, he is astonished to find a building, one so high up. He enters the building and inside finds a vast room containing telescopes, various papers, and an old man who looks to have died recently sitting in a wheelchair.
Among the papers is a diary which Dagin leaves through coming to the realization that this is his father's observatory and the dead man was his assistant and the writer of the entries. He starts to read through it.
The entry starts with the old man saying his mentor, Professor Dagin, died a few months ago at the time of writing, dying from radium rays accidentally sent from Mars and claims that the refractors can only be used safely by wearing clothing of lead rubber and masks of lead glass. He also encourages the reader of the entry, the one who discovers the observatory, to deliver the professor's last letter to his son, something the old man is no longer capable of doing as he too is dying from the radium rays. He then details the professor's discovery and how his death came to be. Professor Dagin's refractors no longer needed the body of a telescope, instead tunneling a cylinder into the rock, placing lenses and eyepieces to the openings. The observatory was built over two years and once they had finished it, they were able to make numerous observations, the most significant of which were of Mars.
Through the refractors, they could see cities of Mars along the planet's canals, as well as vehicles that took inhabitants across the surface, as well as from Mars to colonies on their moons Phobos and Deimos. The man and Professor Dagin called the two major cities they observed, the City of the Sun and Nilosyrtis. As the moons were close to Mars, one of them, Phobos, started to fall towards the planet's surface. This resulted in not only Martians from cities in danger of being destroyed, but Martians on Phobos to evacuate to the City of the Sun, which was overwhelmed by refugees. As more aerobiles, overtaken by inhabitants from the moon colony, approached Mars, the city sent out radium rays to destroy them.
One of them was unintentionally directed towards Earth and hit Professor Dagin. Shortly after, once Phobos had destroyed life on the northern hemisphere of Mars as it crashed, Professor Dagin lost his life, succumbing to the effects of the ray. His assistant, writing the entry, concludes it by confessing a similar mark the professor sustained hearing upon himself, condemning him to the same fate.
Once finished with the diary, Dagin also finds and reads the letter his father wrote to him. A deep melancholy falls over him. The story ends with his thoughts.
"Life is a violent whirlwind of frantic movement, countless, incredible, incomprehensible combinations of life. Hurry up and get ahead in life. If you fall behind for a moment, you'll never catch up with life. You'll never come back. But if you overtake life?"
So, yeah, starting off with one of those kind of ambiguous endings there.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I mean, it also leads to the practical thing of, well, how is Dagin, the pilot, now going to get down from this strange observatory 5,000 feet up in the air with his craft busted? Is he going to just die and rot like his father and his assistant?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And it seems like he was putting a moral slant on it at the end. And I don't quite understand what his moral, like what the moral just of that is exactly. I mean, I kind of get it. Like he's referring to the lost civilization and how I guess you need to take life by the horns because you never know when you're right. And it's kind of, I don't know. It's just, it was kind of weird. Like, I don't want to say it was tacked on, but it was kind of like, I don't really need you to make a moral out of this. Like, it's a kind of a cool melancholy tale again of like, I don't know, almost like one of the catastrophes that we saw in "Aniara", right? But yeah, this time experienced through a weird telescopic device, right? It's another world.
Nate:
Yeah, it was very cool sci-fi gothic imagery of the dead man in the chair in this huge observatory with all the kind of futuristic telescope astronomical equipment lying around.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I thought that was pretty cool scene. I also like the world building element of the fact that the Martian civilization uses these holographic projections of newspapers. And whatever is, I guess, messages need to be communicated in a similar fashion that we saw in "Fortune from the Sky".
JM:
Yeah, I thought of that, too.
Nate:
And instead of here, they're using it for like actual useful information.
JM:
And the paparazzi are gone into a little bit more next story. The rich and upper class have interesting methods of avoiding them.
Nate:
Yeah. But I mean, it's one thing where I guess the professor and his assistant are able to presumably learn so much about Martian culture is, I guess, they somehow deciphered the Martian language and can read about the newspaper events that are happening as the panic is unfolding and what the Martians are actually doing to maintain control, and order of the society, even though it all kind of collapses and falls apart into total chaos. Yeah, it's an interesting subtle touch that he doesn't really dwell too much upon, even though the holographic newspapers are, I think, mentioned in all three stories.
Gretchen:
Yeah, they are mentioned at the beginning of "Two Worlds".
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I believe they are. I can't remember exactly where in the third, but I'm sure they're mentioned there as well.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I'm surprised that they didn't mention anything about some of the future characters using them as advertisements.
Nate:
Yeah, I know. I guess that has not entered the Soviet mind.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Selling things and making a profit doesn't seem like something that the Communist Party would be too interested in.
JM:
No, no, no, not at all.
So somehow the Martians' communication rays are lethal to humans?
Nate:
Yeah, so I think they have two kinds of beams, like a communication ray and a weapon.
Gretchen:
Yeah, because they attacked the squadron that was coming from the moon. I think to prevent more refugees from coming. And I think one of those, those are the rays that hit the professor.
Nate:
Yeah, and it's interesting, shaky science, because I don't know if he's implying that it was just like a real lucky freak shot, that this accidental beam happened to hit the exact observatory where they were standing, or if he's meaning to imply that the telescope somehow refracted the rays onto him and that you need like a protective suit to shield yourself from the telescope amplifying harmful radiation.
It's not really gone into that much, but either way, the science is a bit shaky on that point.
JM:
But it did definitely remind me of like some Clark Ashton Smith's science fiction stories. You know, he has a few different modes, and he wasn't alone in writing these kind of melancholy sci-fi stories where a person gets a glimpse of an alien culture, and it's really awesome, and he likes it a lot. But then it gets destroyed somehow, and he can't go back there, and now he's like miserable for the rest of his life, because it was so good and awesome, and they respected him and humans don't, right? So it was just kind of interesting that it gave me that kind of reminiscence.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
A few of stories like that, even though it wasn't quite like that, because he was really just looking at it through seeing a picture of it as it happened. But yeah, interesting, definitely, on its own, maybe quite minor seeming, but in the, again, connected with the other two tales, they all form something pretty cohesive, I think.
Nate:
Definitely.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and like I mentioned, I like that there is that Earth framing. We see things from a human's point of view before going to the Martians. Establishes something familiar before we turn to something that may be less so.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
It's definitely a good setup of how he frames the next two stories as far as the events that have long lasting impact in this world and how society would perhaps react to those events and what would happen in other elements as far as biological evolution and social evolution.
JM:
Yeah, and it seems like he planned how the society was going to be up top right from the beginning. But he didn't tell you about it right away. I don't know. Again, like, it does make me wonder how the censors responded and how the editorship responded and what they cut out for that other publication that was censored, right? And what might have been even cut out in this magazine publication.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I have had very little luck in finding original scans of the magazines that these appeared in. Like the texts themselves are in digitized plain text, like Project Gutenberg style all over the internet, but I haven't found any like actual like scans of the magazines with the original type setting and any potential advertising or columns, even the bigger magazines like World of Adventure. Like a couple of sites will have the covers posted and maybe like a photograph or two of like a couple pages, but nothing like Amazing or Astounding or any of the other American pulps, which are pretty much all available on various places online in their entirety, you know, scanned in high quality and all that stuff.
So it's a little disappointing because we can't really get at the answers to those questions easily. I think somebody would have to do original research inside Russia to track down those kinds of answers. And it doesn't look like even in Russia, Arelsky is really that recognized of a figure, especially for these science fiction stories. I think like in the English speaking world, he's mostly recognized for his earlier poetry stuff inside Russia.
So I mean, it's a bit hard to get at the answers of some of those questions, which is in a way a little frustrating, but at the same time kind of mirrors some of the other American pulp authors we covered of, you know, like Nictzin Dyalhis or we're wondering, you know, who exactly was this person that wrote these weird stories.
Yeah, in Arelsky's case, it definitely seems like it was planned out from the beginning as far as how these stories go. I mean, we've read stories on the podcast before where the author is clearly just winging it as they go, and these do definitely not feel like those kind of stories. It feels like every piece is deliberately inserted in here as far as its place in the whole saga goes.
Gretchen:
It's possible that, I mean, it seems like maybe "Dagin" and "Two Worlds" might have been written immediately like side by side because they were published one issue apart, so maybe he already had them both ready.
Nate:
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure of the timing on when these were written again. The Russian language sources are pretty brief as far as what they cover. I don't think anybody's done like an in-depth biography on him or study on his works, but yeah, it definitely seems like they were written roughly around the same time when he started writing again after the Civil War ended.
(music: sparse and mysterious synth delay)
"Two Worlds" spoiler summary/discussion
"Two Worlds" starts with the Dr. Ni-Astu-Sol calling his daughter, Gi-Sol, asking her to meet him. He also requests that she bring her husband and newspaper editor, Anu-Ala-A, and the engineer, Ok-Ya-Gi, with her. When the three arrive, the doctor speaks of his trust in them, including "Ock"-Ya-Gi, "Oak"-Ya-Gi? because...
Nate:
The Martian names are pretty ridiculous.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I assume "Oak"-Ya-Gi..
Nate:
Yeah, "Oak".
Gretchen:
Бecause he is engaged to his other daughter, Ni-Sol, who has recently disappeared. When the other man reacts to this, Ni-Astu-Sol tells him to be patient, then speaks of the tragedy he experienced when the city he was born in was destroyed due to the falling of the moon Phobos.
It is the area that was destroyed, the northern hemisphere of Mars, that the doctor wants to discuss. Despite the complete desolation there, new life started to emerge, prehistoric life, that included Martians who resembled distant ancestors of the Martians on the southern hemisphere. Though there have been movements to destroy this new life, the doctor and others in the Martian government have decided against such actions, instead sending out an expedition to study these emerging Martians. The first expedition was led by Ni-Sol, but she has not returned.
So Ni-Astu-Sol has been able to prepare for a second expedition to search for her, which will consist of the present company. After getting confirmation that Ni-Sol's life is not in danger due to a letter the doctor has received from her, the others prepare to start their search the next day.
The story focuses then on Kri-Sharptooth, one of the inhabitants of the northern hemisphere. The spring that his tribe relies on has dried up, which they take to be a sign of displeasure from their god, a black stone by the spring. Kri wants to offer a shell to the black stone as an offering, something that came to him in a dream. However, as he does this, a Ka, which is a bear-like creature, approaches him.
As the creature is sacred, believed to carry the spirit of the black stone, Kri does not shoot arrows at it, but he is saved by another being which kills the Ka. He calls the figure the God of the Mountains.
The God of the Mountains turns out to be Ni-Sol.
It was she who initially caused the spring to dry up, diverting the water to the cave she was working from. When she saves Kri, the latter tells the rest of his tribe about the God of the Mountains, which gets him exiled for the blasphemy against the black stone.
This did not stop, though, doubts towards the black stone's true power from growing among the group, as hopes of the spring returning dwindled. When Kri, still in exile, offers a gift to the God of the Mountains instead, Ni-Sol sees this and finds him beautiful and his devotion powerful, so she decides to answer his prayers and return the spring to him.
Before this happens, though, Kri meets with Obinpuru, his lover, who, though she had been visiting him in the night before returning to the tribe, resolves to stay with him from then on, desiring to be his wife, even though her father wants to find and kill him. Kri tells her that they should move away, that her father and the black stone have less power than the God of the Mountains.
Not long after Obinpuru falls asleep, Kri sees that warriors from the tribe have found them. Kri fights them, and so does Obinpuru when she is awoken by the situation. Kri kills most of his assailants, except Obinpuru's father, who flees, but he loses Obinpuru, who had been shot by an arrow in the chest.
Kri believes that she can be resurrected by the God of the Mountains and takes her body to the spring, which he sees has returned.
Coming back to the doctor's expedition, he reads to the others the letter Ni-Sol had sent. In it, she wishes for future scientists observing the prehistoric life to be more adventurous and tells him of her dwelling in a cave near the Martian tribe, watching them through the use of an invisibility suit.
They also discuss the area, with Gi-Sol bringing up the idea of it as a paradise, a concept the doctor instantly dismisses, speaking of the cruelty and struggles in the place they are heading to. While journeying through the forests, they encounter a giant creature, which they kill with their weapons, and then are surrounded by a group of the prehistoric Martians.
When the group sees how they have handled the dead creature, they drop to their knees, chanting "Ni-Sol!, Ni-Sol!".
The Martians then lead the expedition to their village, where Ni-Sol greets them. Later that evening, Ni-Sol tells them that she was initially captivated by these people, by their view of her as a God, but that she has come to find the difference of time between them unbridgeable. She doesn't think they can be of any purpose to the other civilization of Martians, not even as slaves, since their mechanical workers are much more efficient. Then she embraces Ok-Ya-Gi and asks, "do you know what is permanent and eternal? The feeling of love."
Nate:
Yeah, it's definitely a weird down-ending on this story that I didn't know what to make of at first.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And when it ties into the third story, it kind of makes it clear.
JM:
I was almost going to go into this big like, hey, wait a minute, like is this where the Soviet propaganda comes in? We're like only seeing people in terms of their utility and like, you can't work then you're pretty much... Yeah. It was unexpected, and it was a little like, yeah, I really, I mean, the last scene, and I knew it was going to be the last scene, because I knew there wasn't much left. And I'm like, okay, so now they're going to reflect. It's just going to be like the last scene in one of those Star Trek: The Next Generation and episodes where Picard is talking to Riker or something. And he's like, well, an interesting culture we've just experienced. How do you think this like, and it seemed like it was going to be all friendly. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's like, what can I gain from these people?
Nate:
And I mean, it did really remind me of a "Star Trek: The Next Generation" Prime Directive episode. There's so many episodes of this where they contact a primitive civilization and they ponder upon the ethics of what it would be like to make contact with them and sometimes somebody does out of a rash impulsive decision.
Generally speaking, the morals of Star Trek and the crew are positive where we're really not supposed to like Ni-Sol. Like she's a pretty crappy person. She just uses the tribe for her own gratification and just gets bored with playing God a couple weeks later.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And the fact that she's engaged to be married, the tone of the relationship she has with Kri almost takes on a sexual nature with how she feels towards him worshipping her. Like she's definitely like getting off on the whole situation.
JM:
This strong, primitive man is worshipping me. It's so great.
Gretchen:
Yeah, because I mean, even the others remark like, I wonder if she's fallen in love and they're like, that's so stereotypical. That better not be the case.
Nate:
You get the sense that she does this all the time. And it's contrasted with the fact that she's a very bold, strong, capable scientist who in any other way is like the hero of a Jules Verne novel, courageously plundering into the jungle and conquering prehistoric nature and all that other stuff. I mean, she deserts the rest of her party because she feels like they're a bunch of gutless wimps and they need somebody with the courage and strength to get real science done.
We just don't encounter a lot of women characters like this in a lot of the early science fiction stories we've read. And in addition to Ni-Sol, we get a couple characters in the next story, but the weird underlying thing of Ni-Sol is, yeah, she's kind of a crappy person. And I think in a way she's kind of the main villain of this entire arc, even though her direct actions don't really have any long lasting consequence into the third story, the way the cavemen evolve into the characters we meet in the third story is a really interesting way on how it ties together.
JM:
Yeah, definitely. And despite what I said about the time jump, sometimes being a little distracting in these stories, like there's two that happen, one right at the end of this one and right at the end of the next one, right? And I think in this one it kind of works though because like she said, well, during this moment she cared nothing for her people. And like, you know, she didn't want to be found. She didn't want to be rescued.
But then as soon as they came, we jumped forward at time. It's been a couple of weeks and like she's tired of the whole thing. She doesn't really want to be gone anymore. It's like, get me out of here. I want to go where I can have a shower and nice clean clothes.
I don't know. It's interesting. Yeah, it was unexpected because I guess not really having a handle on the psychology yet being that it was such a short story and it kind of gets brought home to you at the very end. But it's kind of like, I thought, oh, maybe she'll, yeah, maybe she'll decide to stay with them. Like, I didn't know what was going to happen.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And yeah, it wasn't like that at all. And the people that said they knew her, I guess really did know her. And she's kind of fickle.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Embracing her fiance when you're like thinking about how there is that relationship she had with Kri and you're thinking, oh, okay. Well, that didn't seem to go anywhere.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, she gets his girlfriend killed and gets him expelled from the tribe and he almost is killed by his warriors and she just kind of doesn't care. And she, I don't know, brushes the whole thing off. And the only reason they're in this mess to begin with is she wanted to get water easier.
JM:
Yeah. I mentioned "The Forgotten Planet" by Murray Leinster earlier and like that's basically about this world that gets sort of half terraformed, but something goes wrong and the planet gets abandoned. And so the last stages don't happen. And like, so all these out of control mutations happen with the insect population and they become like giant sized and stuff. And then just the prologue takes place over several thousand years. So then this ship from Earth crashes on the planet, which has been forgotten because it's "The Forgotten Planet", obviously. And the descendants of the people who crashed on the ship are now primitive tribes who have to fight these insects. And so the main characters of the first two of the three-part fix-up novel are slowly evolving, I guess, people who have descended into barbarism and who have no choice but to live on the edge and constantly have to battle these giant mutant insects and stuff like that.
And it's very pulpy, but it reminded me of that. And there's the scene with the beast and obviously in all these tribal stories, there has to be the dangerous totem animal. If you come into contact with it, you'll probably die, but you also worship that animal in a way. And I don't know, but it also reminded me of "Hard to Be a God" by the Strugatsky Brothers, which is, yeah, it's a pretty similar idea in a sense of like some, you know, kind of a more supposedly advanced culture and how they interact with a human branch or human evolution that developed in a different way on another planet. And it's kind of more sophisticated than this. It's very philosophical, like a lot of their works. But yeah, like this one has a nice sting in the tail, I think, and it progresses well into the next story.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, it doesn't feel formulaic in that way, even though the influences of some of the stuff that did appear in the Munsey pulps like Burroughs and Merritt were both translated into Russian. So I'm sure Arelsky was familiar with them.
It does feel like a precursor to a lot of stuff that did come later. And the idea of, you know, a future primitive society and what that would mean, I think, has gone into more than a lot of the later science fiction stuff. And this does feel like an early iteration of that.
Gretchen:
I did mention that there are those asides that feel sort of like pointed in the way they're trying to support certain Soviet ideas, specifically towards religion. It does feel kind of like overall this might be a jab at that Soviet idea of utility and the way that there's a focus on the mechanical over the natural and the kind of more spiritual elements of it. Because it does seem in the end that you are supposed to side more with the primitives than those, you know, stuck up, quote unquote, civilized people that come in and just ruin their lives for no reason and then get bored.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, that was a big part of Arelsky's earlier poetry stuff and the whole egopoetry thing is the contrast between man and nature and it's more desirable to return to nature, or more live in one with nature than I guess the modern world was progressing and would progress even further in by the 1920s. I guess the Soviet Union was still reeling from the effects of the Civil War and the forced industrialization hadn't really happened on the scale in 1924 as it would in the next couple decades. But I think there was still some of that stuff going on inside Russia at the time.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and it also might cast the whole like, last part of the first story, the whole, if we overtake life, you know, that kind of plays more of a role here and in the next story.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
Gretchen:
And should I move on to....
Nate:
Yeah, let's see how this thing ends.
JM:
Let's move forward a couple of thousand years or however much it has been several generations anyway.
Nate:
Yeah.
(music: mechanical driving rhythmic synth)
"Towards a New Sun" spoiler summary/discussion
At the time "Towards a New Sun" begins, the surface of Martian cities are facing immense cold, gradually losing the light of a fading sun in an effort to escape freezing inhabitants have moved deeper into their cities and workers have been moved underground.
At a government meeting and engineer by the name of Ro-pa-ge explains their present catastrophe. He speaks of how their ancestors have predicted the time of their sun's death, which had been prolonged by the use of radium. However, they can delay it no longer. Instead of accepting death, though, Ro-pa-ge announces the completion of apparatuses at their planet's pole, ones which will use the force of explosions to break Mars from the sun's gravity to find a new sun.
He predicts they will arrive at a new sun within two years, but that they must perform the breakaway immediately. After a brief moment of communication, the orders are executed and the planet begins its journey.
Ro-pa-ge returns home satisfied that the action is underway. His ancestor was involved in the creation of the solar engine, the aerobile that allowed interplanetary travel. After its creation, Mars made contact with Earth and the aerobile creator founded the solar engine society in charge of factories producing aerobiles.
It is a society that Ro-pa-ge is now leader of, though with a dying sun, the society had fallen apart. Now, though, Ro-pa-ge considers his future. With the success of their breakaway and quest for a new sun, he may be able to regain his prosperity and the society can rise again, aerobiles once again in production. His daughter, Me-ta, though, is not as satisfied. She speaks to Reil, an engineer and Verne, an astronomical scientist, against her father.
She worries about the influence her father's party has over the public and wants to establish relations with and support from the workers who are treated like slaves. The two men listening agree, and Verne also shares the news that, according to his own calculations, Mars will enter the new sun's gravity several months earlier, with more violence than the government is suggesting, a shock that could destroy buildings, factories and machines, signaling a new life to the trio.
Me-ta also begins to discuss plans when she visits the engines at the pole with Ro-pa-ge. She later comes to him and requests Reil come along with them, to which he concedes.
We then shift to Magir, a worker at the pole who enters one of the cafes built to entertain the workers when they aren't on the job. Some of the other workers gathered around him to ask questions, and he reveals to them the news he's heard from the engineers that they will arrive at the new sun in six months. The other lament that they will still be in the same positions, working away underground, not able to see the sun like the people on top, but Magir implies turning against them. He then further reveals that they have supporters among the people on top, and that he knows the factories and buildings will collapse due to a Marsquake, leaving the upper class powerless.
After his discussion at the cafe, he leaves to find the woman Arri, who he runs into singing of the new sun. They go to a theater which no longer uses props and scenery, but projected onto the stage, and the inner thoughts of the characters are projected as well.
JM:
This was a really interesting and cool story within a story, kind of weird depiction that seemed like it wasn't necessary, but it was a really cool addition. I mean, I guess maybe it's just because the story seems so short and so many plot threads were left angling that it sticks out a little more that it doesn't belong, but it was also really cool to get that kind of cultural background.
Gretchen:
Yeah, a little bit of world building.
The play is SonOrgInterplanecom. All one word. That's almost as difficult as saying the other Russian area that I did not decide to say.
Nate:
Yeah, I tried to look that up and that doesn't seem to be a real place, though the triangulation of the rivers are like actually real, but that city, I think he just made it up for the story.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I did also look it up and I did not find it.
Nate:
Yeah, but yeah, the fake, I guess, Soviet abbreviated terms that this is clearly making fun of are pretty funny. I mean, looking at some of the Soviet organizations and governmental bureaus, they all have absurd names like this and this is obviously played out for a comedic effect, but...
JM:
So maybe he would have gone along better with Bulgakov than we would expect.
Nate:
Possibly. Yeah, I mean, they both had troubles with the law for being the wrong kind of, I guess, political thinker.
Gretchen:
But yes, SonOrgInterplanecom is the romance that ends with the projected message, "keep working hard, we will soon see a new sun. Don't forget that you're doing a great job saving life and civilization. Long live the Interplanecom Council. Long live Ro-pa-ge."
So no propaganda there.
JM:
Yeah, very dystopian.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And I guess it should be noted that the word "council" in Russian is "soviet", which is where we get Soviet Union from. So when it's translated into English as Soviet, it has very specific connotations of being tied to the Soviet Union and that form of government, which is why I translated as "council" because obviously the Soviet government wouldn't be established on Mars millions of years in the future. And it is how we would use the word.
JM:
I think for something like Vladko, it makes more sense to use like very literal translations like that because like it was very obviously a piece of Soviet propaganda, really. And it was meant to take place in America in the 1920s probably ish.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And this is something otherworldly. So I don't know, I just maybe maybe that's bias on my part, but I think it was a right decision to change that.
Nate:
Definitely. And I think Interplanecom, though, with that in mind is seems like almost a satirical take at Soviet bureaucracy and the party leadership, even though there's obviously pro-worker sentiments throughout this entire story and a general sympathetic cause with the revolution and the working class rising up and all that. I think he is making some jest at the Soviet party structure and power system with this.
Gretchen:
It is kind of like, we're supposed to see that Ro-pa-ge is kind of a capitalist figure.
Nate:
Right.
Gretchen:
And it's kind of transposing the capitalist ideals that obviously the Soviets would be against, but also still mocking the Soviets through that. So I can see maybe why he might say some of this could be anti-Soviet propaganda.
Nate:
Yeah. And since this is relatively early as far as his fiction goes, I'm not exactly sure what his later works were in tone. I'm not sure how much there's room for anti Soviet propaganda and a historical fiction work about Ptolemy, but certainly his other science fiction stories could explore those ideas a lot more if they do indeed do that.
JM:
And who knows historical fiction could still be used.
Nate:
Yeah, it's true.
JM:
In fact, sometimes you can get away with things in that you couldn't get away with later on in Russia. Like, they don't want people making like fantasy films, but it was okay if it was like a Russian folk legend, right? You can do all kinds of fantastic stuff.
Nate:
Everybody loves Pushkin.
JM:
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. So yeah, Me-ta, she's not exactly like what's her name in the second story, I've forgotten her name.
Gretchen:
There's Ni-sol and Gi-sol, but Ni-sol is the one that's the scientist.
Nate:
Yeah, the Martian names are, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, I have trouble remembering character names when they're like Bob Johnson.
This is... Yeah, she's not exactly like that. But I think in a way, it's interesting the choice that Arelsky makes, because it feels like she's pretty destructive too. And she's, again, she's tearing apart the love of these two people, right? These two, in a relative innocence, although I don't think he's that much of an innocent compared to the tribal caveman guy.
But like, he's still kind of maybe a little bit more naive and she's pretty saintly and she obviously loves him very much. But, you know, this Me-ta, she's like the upper class, I guess, ally who sort of has all these plans and knows what she's doing. And she's really admirable and he can't help but be more drawn to her. And it's kind of like, you don't really know what happens to her at the end, I think she's probably going to be, she probably has a better chance than a lot of the other characters will, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Getting through all this alive, because she still has a position in everything, right? We don't know what happens with her father either. Like, that was one of the other dangling plot threads that sort of, it was weird because he has that last scene where he meets with the awesomely named Verne. And then they like have a discussion and at the end, he seems very thoughtful and I'm like, oh, he's planning something. What's he going to do? And I mean, just never like the next chapter, you find out that he died somehow and he never shows up again.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know.
JM:
So I don't know. I just, I liked the way this one was going. I liked how much he was cramming in there. And that's kind of why if I had to pick between all three stories, I would say the second one was probably still the best one, because I feel like this one just had so much going on and didn't resolve most of it.
It hinted at all these interesting things, like a doomed love triangle and the relationship between father and daughter and workers revolution. How's that going to pan out and like moving planet, like moving the planet to a different sun? How's that going to pan out? Like, yeah, it's just, holy crap, there's so much in here.
And I love short stories, 90, but I don't know, maybe not 90%, but like a lot of what I read are short stories. And even like, you know, we were talking about the what we're reading and I forgot to mention all the short stories that I read. And it's of course, you know, there's just too many of them and whatever, right? But sometimes you do kind of think more would be nice here.
Nate:
Yeah. This one, I think, especially could benefit from being a 60,000 word novel instead of a 10,000 word short story.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
I mean, the characterization that we do get here is pretty cool. Like I like Me-ta as a character and she does come from that rich upper class activist mold, but she's got some pretty smartmouth one liners to her father. And I like the kind of caustic relationship between the two of them or father just kind of expects her to be this fiery character. And he's like, all right, whatever, I'll go along with whatever you're saying just to appease you.
But he does seem to sincerely care about her and her well being, even if he hates what she stands for and all that. It's an interesting contrast between the two of them that we just don't really get that much of a resolution to.
JM:
No. And it looks like a really interesting like it's burgeoning into something really interesting. And like, I thought at the end, at least they would have a confrontation. And again, he's not a one dimensional character. Like you kind of feel like he could be reasoned with, right?
I mean, he is kind of the evil capitalist overlord, but he's portrayed with enough personality and nuance. And, you know, he really does care about his daughter. And he's kind of like joking with Verne almost when they're talking, you know, and it doesn't seem like super threatening. But at the same time, you're like, yeah, he could kill me, right? Like if he wanted to just snap his fingers. But he doesn't quite seem like that kind of person. And so I just kind of, yeah, there was so much more that could have happened. And when I got to the end of the story, I kind of like had to do a double taken like, wait, that's it. I thought there was a little more. I didn't realize.
Gretchen:
Magir's mind, however, was elsewhere during the production, thinking of the work that awaits them the next day. However, he agrees to go with Arri to the dance hall. After dancing a while, he leaves her and comes across a few drunk men who mock him. Egged on by the group and slightly intoxicated himself, Magir goes up to one of the men and pushes him down forcefully enough to break the chair beneath him. He then feels depressed, wandering out into the deserted street and walking until he reaches a bench.
Arri appears, catching up with him and expresses concern to which Magir replies by asking if she will be with him and help them become free.
We return to Me-ta, who was able to contact the workers through Reil, the one she meets with ends up being Magir and agrees with Reil's opinion that he should be the leader of the rebellion. They begin meeting regularly to discuss plans. And as they do so, Magir starts to feel an affection for Me-ta. One of these meetings, though, delays a visit to his mother, Maita, who, they really had to make the names very similar.
JM:
He's really trying to confound us.
Gretchen:
Ni-sol, Gi-sol, Me-ta, Maita.
JM:
And it's so funny because it's the opposite of the problem in the next story, which I'm sure will have something to say about, which it's just really funny to me. Something the Italian movies do as well. Anyway, that's so funny.
Gretchen:
Yes, Maita, not Me-ta, is in a hospital after working herself to sickness. When he arrives, he finds out she will die soon and has something to tell him. She speaks of a time she was on the surface as a child and saw a painting of a lush green landscape, an image she now dreams about frequently. She wonders if this could be their possible future, to which Magir agrees, revealing to her the coming revolution.
Maita then tells him of a secret society his father was a part of that dreamed of a similar future and where he can find the laboratory they set up and dies soon after.
The next time Me-ta comes, Magir relays all of this information to her and they find the lab together. It contains a receiver that allows the two to see the surface of the planet and they see that they are approaching the new sun.
Me-ta, at this point, recounts the story of Magir's ancestors, thus explicitly connecting all three stories. She says that after the moon Phobos destroyed one half of Mars, a new prehistoric society eventually emerged from the area. The people of this society were enslaved by the other, more technically advanced Martians, as they needed manpower when the growing cold destroyed many of their machines. She concludes by stating they must win, that the two peoples can merge into one, aided by the living conditions promised by the new sun.
The two then embrace.
Later, as Magir sits alone in a worker's cafe, Arri finds him and warns him that he is going to be arrested. They see soldiers looking for him as they leave the cafe and make a run for it.
He takes Arri to the laboratory and when she questions his recent distant behavior, he exposes his worries about his own will, his desire for the new sun and the future, and his meetings with Me-ta.
Arri tells him all she needs is her love for him, nothing else, and the two leave the laboratory once it's safe and part ways.
The story focuses back on Ro-pa-ge, who has learned of the planned uprising among the workers. He discovers that Reil, Verne, Magir, and his daughter are involved, and that Verne has been arrested while the others have not yet been found.
He is not surprised that Me-ta is part of this plan. He decides to see Verne and ask about her. When the man appears in Ro-pa-ge's office, he asks Verne if he would really betray his society now that they have come to the new sun and can continue their way of life.
Verne affirms this, declaring the society as a parasite, expressing his anger at how they have treated the workers. Ro-pa-ge responds with doubt that the workers will really be any different if they are given power, but then asks Verne where Maita is, to which Verne only says she is safe. He tells Verne that he will be convicted of treason, which will lead to his death and has him taken away.
As the planet begins to orbit the new sun, a part of the lower mines is destroyed, which Magir and the others, in favor of the rebellion, use to encourage the workers to head to the surface. At the same time, the guards watching over the workers abandon the mines and close up their gates, setting fire to the factories before they do.
Knowing that the fire, reaching gas tanks, will destroy the mines, Magir asks for help to extinguish the fires, and Arri comes forth, wanting to go herself so Magir can survive and lead the rebellion.
Magir receives a message from Me-ta who tells him to use the trains in the mines to break down the gates. The workers in a panic first block the train's path, but they calm down once Magir speaks to them. As he approaches the gate, Magir tells Me-ta that she will lead the rebellion in the event of his death. He pulls the lever of the train, crashing it into the gates, and the sun's rays fill the mines. As the rebellion rages around him, Magir dies, succumbing to his injuries.
And that's the end of the story.
Nate:
Noble self-sacrifice for the rights of the workers from both Magir and Arri.
JM:
From the couple, they don't even get to die in each other's arms.
Nate:
They do have a pretty tearful and moving emotional goodbye, but they both meet their deaths separately.
JM:
So they figured out how to use them. That's a big revelation, right? Well, no wonder we're like this. We've been slaves for thousands of years or something, right? So enough's enough, right? It's getting nothing but worse, and now they're flying off into space, and who knows what's going to happen, right?
So I don't know. It's such an interesting set of things all happening together. It's you almost feel like it could be about one or the other if it's that short. I think "The Runaway World" did an interesting job of telling a story that was about the planet being relocated. It wasn't certainly as involved with social issues, although there were some hints of that. And there's certainly a lot less to chew on than this, but this is, yeah, it's almost too much.
It needs more filling out the gaps, right? I don't know. I liked what he was setting up so much, right? And I don't know. All these relationships don't really come to what you would expect or anything. So I don't know. It was good, though. It was a really interesting set of stories, and it's definitely better read as a trio.
Nate:
Oh, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Oh, I remember when I was taking notes for doing the summaries, I had already read all three, but I read the first one first again, "Dagin's". And then I read the last one and I read "Two Worlds" after just because I wanted to get the first story and then the longest one out of the way first. But when I returned to "Two Worlds", I enjoyed it more knowing what happens in the third and having the context and realizing just how well they fit together as they're the same story.
Nate:
Yeah, it's cool how they all relate to one another and the events of the first story lead to the second story, which leads to the third story. And you don't really see a lot of these kind of shared universe type stories in 1924, 1925 in the science fiction genre.
JM:
No, they're definitely, they're definitely coming around. And like one of the things I've been kind of getting into lately, again, is the Van Vogt stories. And she definitely does that with a lot of his stories. He does like sort of end up tying them together. And it's subtle enough that, well, as subtle as Van Vogt could be anyway, that when you read an individual story, you don't necessarily feel like you're missing stuff that much, but, you know, it all comes together. And now, of course, that's a huge thing. Everybody wants that, right?
But yeah, back in 1924, you didn't see it that much, I don't think.
Nate:
Yeah, because I mean, these were initially published in separate issues of a magazine. So I don't know what to deal with the third one was if it was published in a magazine or not. Again, the information on Arelsky and the original magazine publications is kind of sparse, but presumably they were meant to be read as somewhat standalone in a rather disposable format of a softbound magazine, or even the "Tales of Mars" itself was softbound. So I guess it lends itself more to the format of needing to make them separate entities rather than a serialized publication, though some of those magazines did do serialized novels across some of the issues.
JM:
Yeah, a lot of the SF magazines did serial novels. Weird Tales did them.
Nate:
Yeah, World of Adventure did in Russia. So I mean, I guess it wasn't unheard of, but the chance that you're going to get somebody for one issue is going to be more likely than getting somebody for six issues in a row.
JM:
Right.
Gretchen:
Though they are works that could potentially be read individually. It is just that they work so well together that would be kind of less interesting to read just one.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, they are standalone tales though, like they are millennia apart, perhaps even in the case of the second two, perhaps millions of years apart. Again, the timescale is kind of hard to get ahold of, especially because the Martian lifespan seems longer than humans. I think the doctor from "Two Worlds" said he'd been alive for a thousand years or something like that.
Gretchen:
He also does mention that the Earth's moon had crashed into Earth. So it's been long enough that the same thing happened to Earth that happened with Phobos on Mars.
JM:
Yeah, and we have dangerous mines again, of course. But yeah, I think if any of them works well on its own, it's the first story, like that one. It's sort of connected to what came after, but it doesn't really have to be. Right? Like they could be considered that the second one is a reset if you wanted to.
But I think if you just read that one on its own, you would probably be still left wondering about that nasty taste at the end or what that means, right? It would kind of put a damper on it and then you read the next one and you see what he was planning all along and it makes the whole thing better. But again, I think I might be a little more forgiving of the last one because it was part of the trilogy, right?
Like I said, I do have problems with it. So yeah, but I don't know. This was a really interesting set and never translated in new English before, we believe.
So I enjoyed these. Sometimes with the newly translated stuff that we do, it's a little bit touch and go. Sometimes what it's going to be like, like I had a hell of a time with "Senor Nic-nac".
Nate:
Yeah, I kind of want to revisit those early works like those weird 19th century Russian chapbooks and "Nic-nac" because that was some of the first translations I'd done. And I think with those, the temptation to go for a more literal translation presents itself rather than something that's a little more readable. It was kind of hard to strike that balance with those odd 19th century works that are kind of in archaic language to begin with.
Like a lot of the spelling and "Nic-nac" isn't how you would spell something in modern Spanish. And the Russian language itself was fairly different in the 19th century, in that when the Soviets came to power, they modernized the language and got rid of like three letters and, you know, change the spellings of a bunch of words and things like that. So the Russian used in those stories is also archaic.
So again, it's hard balances to strike. But fortunately, the 1920s stories that appeared in magazines are a bit easier and more straightforward. And I think present themselves more to straightforward, readable in modern English translation.
JM:
Yeah. And we think maybe these are not literary masterpieces, but I don't really know that they were to begin with. And I seem quite readable now. So I think if people were really curious about some quite obscure Soviet science fiction from the early 1920s, they should go to our blogspot and they should read these stories.
Nate:
Yeah. And we have some other ones up there posted. I posted Vladimir Olavsky's "Steckerite" as well as N. Pavlov's "Chicks", which are both from the magazine sphere in the 1920s. "Steckerite" is much better than "Chicks", though "Chicks" is not a bad story. "Steckerite" is probably the, I think my favorite out of all the 20s Russian stuff I've looked at so far.
So definitely check these out, check those out if you're interested and certainly give us any feedback on what you think about the stories and the translation, because I think they've been a lot of fun to do. And it's rewarding stuff to get through, especially as they haven't been translated into English before and are relatively unknown authors in the English speaking world. I think the, again, only English language mentions of Arelsky's work are the egopoetry stuff and maybe like a cursory mention of the science fiction stuff, but certainly nothing in depth from any of the sources I was able to find anyway.
JM:
Yeah, well, Nate, that was definitely a worthy endeavor. Like I was saying, I do think that I enjoyed these quite a bit. And Gretchen, this was really cool, really cool talk. And I think that definitely people should read these and decide for themselves what Arelsky was, how he might have carried it on, I guess, if he'd gone on for another tale, because I think he could have, most definitely. There's so much unresolved in the last one, but certainly an intriguing setup, lots of interesting cultural background. And yeah, it's shockingly dystopian at times, but it's not in a way that subtle enough that when you first start, you don't necessarily realize, you know, like, you don't know what you're really in for.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Even saying that, though, the villain of the last story is not that villainous. Like, it's kind of like a little bit of a little bit of a character, even a little bit of a joker. And I don't know, I really like the description of him sitting there basically in his like bathrobe or something like that. In the last chapter where he appears and he's just like, lounging around and I can't remember exactly how he's described, but it's just very like, decadent, but done in a way that's kind of admiring, almost like you can feel Arelsky was kind of thinking about himself as he's writing about this, this dictator guy is like sitting there in his bath clothes and just kind of thinking about his daughter and thinking about the troublemakers and I'm going to see this Verne guy have a little chat with them. I like that.
Gretchen:
I was expecting someone who is definitely a much more like evil capitalist caricature that you might see, but it's not he is kind of...
JM:
More like Jonathan Govers.
Gretchen:
Yeah. It is it's similar kind of to Chefone, you know, the way that he's kind of, there's a more more nuance to him than I would have expected. In fact, the last story was similar to "Aniara" in a few different ways, I was expecting the the two to dance the yurg at the dancehall.
Nate:
Yeah, their dancing isn't really gone into that much but there are some nice other subtle world building touches throughout the entire saga, as well those nice flashes of characterization that do try to present these more as people and not one dimensional heroes or villains even though some of the characters in the third story are, Arri's pretty much saintly and flawless and Magir is our heroic revolutionary leader. They I guess feel a little more grounded than some of the other characters that they could have been, like in the Vladko story of the over the top villain and our heroes that are deferring to the Soviet ideology and Soviet technical engineering wizardry to solve all the problems. I mean the engineering problems here they get them out of a very difficult situation, with the sun going out and what that would mean for life in the solar system, but their technical solutions at the same time cause destruction and death for everybody in the lower classes, and it's kind of an interesting balance they have to try to strike between that secrecy and order in society before the whole thing kind of erupts into chaos in a similar fashion that mirrors the first story.
So I mean while these stories are definitely flawed and not perfect, I think you do get a lot of flashes like that that make these really interesting reads beyond the fact of their early historical significance and the fact that you know really see a lot of these stories in 1924. I think they have a little bit more going for it than just being old and from an obscure source of a Soviet pulp scene.
JM:
Cool, well I think then we'll close the chapter of Mars, and travel to a far distant sphere in a solar system, far, far away and a haunted planet.
Bibliography:
Imperia Auctions, Auction 95, Lot 220, June 24, 2022 http://www.auction-imperia.ru/wdate.php?t=booklot&i=79580
Kons - "Stefan Graal Arelsky", Laboratory of Fantastika https://fantlab.ru/autor12055
Nikolskaya, T. L. - "Graal Arelsky: Biographical Information", Library of Maxim Moshkov, http://az.lib.ru/g/graalxarelxskij/text_1994_bio.shtml
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