(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: "Chrononauts" main theme)
introductions, background and history on 1920s Soviet magazine science fiction
Gretchen:
Hello everyone, welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast.I'm Gretchen, and I'm joined here with my co-hosts, Nate and J.M.How are you both doing tonight?
Nate:
Doing pretty good.It's certainly starting to get a little warm here.
JM:
Yeah, it's definitely warmed up.But yeah, doing pretty good.Working a fair bit, busy, and yeah, looking forward to this pretty special edition of Chrononauts.
Gretchen:
Yes.
Nate:
Yeah, a lot of cool stuff coming up and a lot of original stuff coming up that you could read all these stories on our blogspot.But I guess before we get into that, why don't we figure out where you can find us on other places?
Gretchen:
Yes.You can find Chrononauts on all major podcast platforms, Spotify and Apple.We have a blogspot at chrononautspodcastblogspot.com where you can read a number of the texts and translations, including the ones we'll be talking about tonight.You can also follow us on Twitter @ChrononautsSF and Facebook at facebook.com/chrononautspodcast or email us at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com.
Nate:
And we've also been posting our stuff on YouTube as of late.And thank you all for listening on that platform because it's definitely grown our audience quite a bit more than we expected in these last couple months.So we really appreciate all you sticking around and listening to what we have to say on these weird obscure science fiction stories.
Gretchen:
Yes, definitely got quite a number of views recently, which is nice.
JM:
Leave comments and subscribe to our things and feel free to review our podcasts and all that other good stuff.
Gretchen:
Yeah, drop a like down below.
Nate:
We definitely would appreciate it.But tonight we're going to be talking about the more weird and obscure end of the science fiction spectrum.So over the last five episodes, we've largely been focused on American science fiction, some of it being quite well known and acclaimed.But one of my main personal aims with the podcast is to highlight the international contributions to science fiction, as the genre didn't just happen to develop in America and the United Kingdom.But also to fill in some of the gaps where we can and talk about these more obscure texts that really haven't been highlighted elsewhere at all.
So this month that's exactly what we're going to be doing and we're going to be talking about Soviet science fiction from the 1920s in magazine form.Stuff that was being published the same time that the Munsey pulps were still going when Weird Tales and Amazing were being launched.And all that fascinating stuff that we've talked about in previous episodes was going on in America.
So was there a Soviet science fiction magazine like Amazing?
The short answer is "no", but there was an Argosy-like magazine that towards the end leaned heavily into the science fiction imagery on its covers.So in my opinion, they got about 95% of the way there.And over tonight's episode, we're going to present you that story and cover some of the more interesting sounding pieces of fiction to come out of the 1920s Soviet magazine sphere, which we've translated and posted on our blogspot.So it's going to be four stories from Russian and one from Ukrainian, which have not previously been translated into English before.
I want to start off this segment with a quote from Anandita Banerjee in her book, "We Modern People,; Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity." And she says, "early Russian science fiction is accessible to English speaking readers only in a fragmented selective way", which is certainly one of the truest statements we've encountered on the podcast thus far.And it's not only true of the stories themselves, but also true of the scholarship and coverage of the Russian/Soviet science fiction stories in that almost nothing has been published about early Russian magazine science fiction in English.
JM:
Yeah, I was actually surprised the Fantasy Lab had some reviews for some of these stories even in Russian.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah.So one of the main websites that we're going to be talking about later because they were a major, major help and pretty much an instrumental reason why we're able to bring this episode to you at all is the website Laboratory of Fantastika or fantlab.ruWhich if you're familiar with the ISFDB, it's more or less like that except geared to a Russophone audience. So while they do catalog a lot of American and British stories, the prime focus is really cataloging Russian and Soviet stories and how they piece together in the magazines.And it functions very similarly to ISFDB where you can browse by publication and all that. And it's just really, really extremely useful for putting together bibliographic information and just figuring what's out there.But one component of it is, yeah, these reviews. And for all the stories, well, all the stories that are cataloged on there anyway, the Ukrainian story we covered isn't cataloged on there, which we'll get to when we cover that, but for the four Russian language stories, they all have user submitted reviews on them. It seems like that this whole genre was obscure in Russia to some extent until the modern scholars of the last 20, 25 years have been excavating this stuff in the way thatEnglish-speaking people have been doing it with the American and British pulps from the same time period. So I think a lot of people are thinking along the same lines. And it's one of the aims that we have for this episode.
JM:
Now, of course, there has been some definitely coverage of Russian stories from the 1950s onwards, at least a little bit, to anthologies added by Isaac Asimov and I think the 70s and 80s of Soviet science fiction.But I don't think any of it goes back that far.
Nate:
No, I don't believe so. I've seen a couple of 60s and onward anthologies of Soviet stuff. And, you know, obviously some of the more contemporary authors are much more well-acclaimed and mapped out than early stuff.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, I don't think any of it goes back as far as the 1920s, like pretty much post-Stalin era, I guess.
Nate:
Right, yeah, yeah, especially a lot of that stuff being translated at that time. Some modern anthologies like "Red Star Tales" have some early stuff that we pulled, especially in those early episodes when we deal with like weird utopias and moon voyages and stuff that came out of anthology.And there's like one or two stories from this era in there, but it's really not that much that's just covered in anthology form, reprints or the scholarship at all.So again, that's one of our aims of this episode is to kind of bridge that gap and to fill out some of these pieces.A lot of the coverage about Russian science fiction, early Russian science fiction, you'll see is focused around a handful of novels like Evgeny Zamyatin's "We", Alexander Bogdanov's "Red Star", Alexey Tolstoy's "Aelita",and two that we've covered previously on the podcast, namely Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog" and Belyaev's "Professor Dowell's Head".
But I, and perhaps you guys will also be on board with this, subscribe to the Ashleyean view of science fiction history, in that it's great to look at the individual works and the themes presented in the individual works and all that,but to really get at the heart of science fiction as a phenomenon, as a cultural movement, or as a fandom, or genre, is just really so much than the works in themselves.And I think that's why Mike Ashley's work and approach is so important and pivotal to my understanding of all this stuff.
Mike Ashley, of course, is a prominent science fiction scholar who has written a lot of really excellent books on magazine history, and he's an author we cite and come back to a lot.And I think what one can take from his work is that to really measure the character and totality of science fiction, or its health as a scene, that you not only have to look at what the authors are writing and why,but also how the readers are reading and how.Magazines are the real backbone for that, especially in the early half of the 20th century, publishing not only short stories, but novels in serialized form and providing for more opportunities for interaction with other readers and authors,and generally speaking in greater circulation numbers than individual book sales, although there are some obvious and non-obvious blockbuster exceptions like Marie Corelli.
As such, I want to compare the Soviet magazine science fiction scene of the 1920s and how it develops with Hugh Gernsback and Amazing, which we talked about at length several episodes back.So to condense that into a very, very brief form, Amazing Stories is generally considered to be the first science fiction magazine in that it was most likely the first magazine in the world that published solely what we consider "science fiction".This development, that is the desire to apply a label of science fiction to a body of literature and dedicate a magazine to publishing solely that, grew out of the fiction side, which is genre fiction magazines like Argosy, All-Story, etc.,and the science side, or Hugh Gernsback's massive publication empire of initially electrical experimental magazines, but then pivoting to amateur radio a few years later when that becomes more of a thing.So Gernsback's radio magazine started publishing fiction and he spins off Amazing to concentrate solely on that kind of fiction and the rest is history.
And we touch upon this briefly of the Amazing episode and briefly in the radio episodes, so I want to touch upon it briefly again here, that the 1920s and radio in particular is where what I'd call "science fiction imagery directly" comes into the home.And I think it's justified in calling it that and that we have these amazingly awesome looking futuristic new high tech devices with their big antennas and tubes and these other electrical components, all working together in a system that can do what only a few years prior would have seemed like magic.And certainly the design of radio devices and larger electrical apparatuses, I mean, for an example just take Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island, it would really influence the aesthetics of science fiction both prior and after this point.Electrical tinkering as a hobby was certainly a thing before radio, but radio makes it incredibly popular with the hobby often being sold to kids and teenagers.
Part of why I think it was so popular was the novelty but also it really was the first high tech futuristic looking device that you could work on in the garage.It's not like you could set up a hydroelectric generator in your garage, radio equipment was small enough where it could be reasonably and safely handled by one person.But at the same time, radio equipment was large enough where a 13 year old kid can operate it with their hands not like the billions of semiconductors in computer chips that we have today which can't be manipulated at the hardware level by hand tools.Coding and software and all that stuff is certainly popular these days but at the same time it's a little more abstract and less tangible than something you can hold and directly see in front of you.And it's probably not a coincidence that the rise of pulp science fiction in the 20s mirrored the proliferance of radio and especially amateur radio where these kinds of futuristic looking devices were more and more present in everyday life.
JM:
We covered an example of a very early radio story. I guess it's arguable whether you'd consider it science fiction now but just the fact that right away there was always people so set alight by this concept of radio that they were writing stories where radio was a key component.Building radios or using radio to solve a mystery. Yeah, "Campfire Girls" business and all that.
Nate:
Right. Yeah. And like we mentioned in that episode, these weren't just like these obscure one off stories. There were literally hundreds of juvenile/young adult novels geared towards amateur radio that were published in the 1920s.It was just that big of a cultural phenomenon. And yeah, at that episode we wanted to get at that angle the technical angle of it of you know what were people actually doing with it as far as the fiction goes and it's just kind of fascinating how it bleeds over there.
So while there's no direct parallel with Amazing from the Soviet Union in that there was no magazine dedicated to publishing what we would just call "science fiction".There's obvious parallels to the precursor stages of Amazing's launch and the Soviet Union both in terms of general genre fiction magazines and the popularity of amateur radio.In the Soviet Union we get frustratingly close to a point where something like Amazing could have very feasibly launched, but it all stops very very quickly in 1930, and the same conditions don't resurface again for another 30 years.
What I want to do here is not only take a look at the development of that world but also take a brief look at the historiography, because as we'll see shortly, the record is woefully incomplete in English sources, as Banerjee alludes to.I think it's pretty accurate to say that in looking at the magazine landscape of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, there's almost no English language coverage on any of the stories authors or publishers, with Belyaev being the major exception for the authors.In Banerjee's book "We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity", she spends a lot of time talking about how popular science magazines, namely Nature and People and Around the World,and how they're publishing on technical subjects in plain language was instrumental in expanding technical literacy and interest in science among across Russia, and thus science fiction as a result.And I think this is an excellent point to keep in mind this entire time as this idea really ties into the amateur radio stuff I was just talking about, and I think it's also important to note that while these magazines also published some science fiction stories here and there, they were popular science magazines first and foremost.And Banerjee doesn't really spend any time at all going over the magazines that were focused on genre fiction, which are the two main ones we're going to be taking a look at tonight, namely World of Adventure, that was a fiction magazine first and foremost,and Universal Tracker, also known as World Pathfinder, which was mostly fiction, though roughly 35 to 40% or so was popular science.
The most coverage I've seen in the English language sources on Soviet magazine fiction really relates to the most prominent Soviet genre fiction magazine, which is World of Adventure.And this coverage is indeed found in Ashley's book, but we only get a paragraph there, and some of that is him issuing a correction for earlier mistakes.So in the initial version of Mike Ashley's magazine history, he quotes a Willy Ley article from the February 1963 issue of Galaxy,which mentions World of Adventure here in the closing point to an answer of a fan who asked if there was any non-British continental European science fiction.And in this article, he virtually gets everything wrong about this magazine. He says it was founded in 1903, he mistransliterates the spelling,he says the early issues were mainly Jules Verne when in reality they published at maximum one Jules Verne story, but it's possible they published none, we'll get into that more of it later. And Ley mentions "a frequent lady specializing in interplanetary romance", which I'm not even sure who he could possibly be referring to.So who knows.
But Ashley in his later version of his history realizes that the Ley article was full of errors and acknowledges that fact and at least corrects the founding date, but doesn't really say anything substantial about the magazine itself. And as I previously mentioned, the coverage of the magazine really only gets one paragraph.So that's basically all we get in English language sources, aside from a few offhand references here and there to the magazines themselves.So in order to really get a good look at what was going on, we need to dig into the Russian sources. And if you really want to get into the weeds of this thing, that's definitely what I would recommend doing.So for bibliography, the websites Laboratory of Fantastika, which we mentioned earlier, and the Archive of Fantastika to which we'll post links in the description are both incredible, incredible resources for all eras of Russian science fiction.
Before we get into this discussion, it's probably worthwhile to briefly talk about what the word "fantastika" is, which is kind of a catchall term for both fantasy and science fiction.My first encounter with the term was several years ago, through a collection of about 50 films that not only included a few of the science fiction films we've talked about on the podcast, so the "Testament of Professor Dowell" and "Heart of a Dog", but much more frequently, the fantasy/folklore type films like those done by Ptushko, who I absolutely love and would highly recommend anybody interested in fantasy or medieval folklore or anything like that.He's done a couple Pushkin adaptations, and all those films just have a certain atmosphere about them that I really, really like.
JM:
"Viy", right?
Nate:
Yeah, exactly. That's absolutely what it is. Yeah, it's great. But the more commonly used more specific term for science fiction translates literally to something like "scientific fantastika", which starts appearing in the early 1910s, referring to H.G. Wells.And it's not out of the question that it would have appeared earlier, given that we found the use of the term "science fiction" in English in a totally random text from the 1850s.But when the sources and magazines themselves talk about fantastika in this episode, that's what is meant by the term here.
So getting into the actual Russian sources themselves and those that specifically relate to the 1920s magazine scene.Valery Okulov's "On Magazine Fantastika from the First Half of the 20th Century" article, which again we'll link to in the description, is the most in depth overview of the area that I found in the Russian language sources.And it's especially interesting for the Russian perspective on how they view their own legacy of science fiction, which as we've alluded to before, the Russian language has a separate lineage for their term for science fiction than the English with respect to the genres development, in that the English term science fiction wasn't really widely used until the 1930s, as we've seen with the previous "scientific romance" and "scientifiction" labels.
So with the linguistics and hopefully most of the misinformation out of the way, let's get into the actual story, which Okulov frames as a tale of two cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, two publishers, Soikin and Popov, and two magazines, World of Adventure and Universal Tracker.
First we'll get into the World of Adventure piece from St. Petersburg, which is probably the bigger and more significant of the two as far as science fiction goes, though as we'll see I think the two are fairly close to one another in terms of overall impact.
Pyotr Soikin was born on September 4, 1862, and there's not too much information I could find on his early life, his grandfather was a serf, and his father was a freeman, presumably freed from serfdom with the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.But despite his lower class background, Soikin started a publishing shop and book selling business in St. Petersburg, the start of which would eventually become a huge empire.In addition to publishing books and pamphlets, which included Marxist writings and some of Lenin's work, which got him in a bit of trouble with the censors, he had his magazine publishing, which was by far his most important contribution to the science fiction genre.
So before we get into his magazines, though, I want to briefly go back and talk about Russian magazines in general, and a good place to start is the magazine Around the World, which started publishing in 1861.You could describe it as the Russian version of National Geographic, but a more accurate thing to say would be that National Geographic is the American version of Around the World as National Geographic in the start of until 1888.The initial publication run of Around the World went until 1868 and was brought back by a different publisher after about 20 years, namely Mikhail and Evgeniy Werner in 1885.But these two struggled greatly upon their relaunch, and the magazine was bought out by Ivan Sytin in 1891, who brought it back in a major way.And we'll definitely be coming back to Sytin and Around the World in a minute, but its revival was possibly one of the factors that inspired Soikin to start the magazine Nature and People in 1889, which was a weekly magazine and published a fair amount of fiction.
Unfortunately, this magazine, that is Nature and People, is one of the huge gaps of information that I have that I wasn't able to find any kind of meaningful bibliographic information or scans for the vast majority of the early days.But from the small amount of information I can gleam, fiction made up roughly 15 to 20% of its contents, maybe.I have the index of the full 1892-93 year, and while the index I have is possibly incomplete, but with these caveats in mind, it looks like there is a good 80% of the magazine is dedicated to nonfiction on a wide variety of subjects.So stuff like historical biography, geographic ethnography, zoology and biology, botanicals, and the very last category I have on the index scan is minerals and geology, which is incredibly short to all the others.And it makes me wonder if the index got chopped off and there would be a few other sections on engineering/technology that I'm not seeing.
But for science fiction and fantasy related content, I can definitely confirm that the magazine did publish "Stella" by Flammarion in issue number 21 of 1898. H.G. Wells, "The Treasure in the Forest" from March 31st of 1905.There was a Jules Verne story from the November 4th 1899 issue that I can't identify. The title in Russian translates to "The Lost Crown", which I can't match up with any of his stories, so I don't know. The Russian translations have a lot of these stories from their English or French originals definitely gets a little creative at times, which makes matching one to the English title a bit difficult sometimes, but Okulov says they publish Poe too, but unfortunately I can't verify or identify which stories they might have been.
While we haven't covered Flammarion yet on the podcast, and if we ever do it probably won't be for a while, but aside from maybe Mary Shelley, these four authors, that is Flammarion, Verne, Wells, and Poe, were by far the most popular 19th century science fiction authors.Though Flammarion does fall in that weird science fiction adjacent territory. I think it's important to note that they're all being translated into Russian in some capacity and appearing in magazine format early on.
Yakov Perelman serves as a longtime editor of Nature and People and wrote a fair amount of stories for the magazine himself, which is a trend that will continue later on.And it was the increased demand for more fiction, particularly adventure and fantastika, that had Perelman suggest to Soikin that, well, maybe they should split off the fiction from the nonfiction into its own separate magazine.So that's exactly what they did. And in 1910 they launched World of Adventure, which was initially a free monthly supplement to Nature and People.
The first issue has a pretty cool ominous cover, a figure with this like intense look on their face as sending a cliff or structure of some kind. It's all kind of vague and mysterious.And you really can't tell exactly what these shapes and figures are, but there is this unspecified large blaze in the background.And the first story that appears in the magazine is, of course, the first installment of a serialized version of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds".
So World of Adventure published on a monthly basis between 1910 and 1917, when it was disrupted by the Revolution and Civil War, and resumed publication in 1922, but on a rather erratic and irregular schedule until 1930 when it ceased altogether.The pre-revolution days of the magazine published mostly non-Russian fiction, and some of the issues featured no Russian authors at all.These were primarily British stories from magazines like The Strand, Pearsons, or Pall Mall, but early on there's a fair amount of French stuff, too.Later on, after the Revolution, there's way less English language stuff, a greater percentage of Russian authors, but also an increase in other European languages like Italian, German, Danish, and Norwegian.I'd say roughly two-thirds of the magazine's total content, that is, before and after the Revolution is non-Russian.
As the magazine's title would indicate, it primarily published adventure fiction, though science fiction was certainly a small portion of that.Some of the more well-known stuff that they published includes 10 stories and novels from H.G. Wells.Abraham Merritt's "The Metal Monster", Jules and Michel Verne's "The Eternal Adam", which is the one I was previously alluding to before, as this was a late Jules Verne story that was discovered by Michel Verne.It might have been one of these ones that was not written by Jules Verne at all, and Michel just wanted to attach his famous name to it to get it out there.I'm not really sure, I haven't looked into that one.But there were also a few stories from Clement Fezandié's Hackensaw character, which originally appeared in Amazing, Ray Cummings' "The Man on the Meteor", and last but not least, Doyle's "The Maracot Deep".
Doyle was by far the most prominent author to feature in World of Adventure, nearly 30 stories in total.There's also a Russian story which looks like it's Sherlock Holmes fan fiction.For the Russian authors that appear in the magazine, Mikhail Pervukhin has almost as much as Doyle, and Perelman wrote a handful too.Despite the fact that Pervukhin almost seems to have an enormous bibliography and seems recognized as one of the first and most important people to write Russian adventure fiction, it doesn't seem like anything of his has been translated into English.
From what I can tell, two science fiction stories that appeared in World of Adventure, written in Russian, that is, have been translated into English.The first is Vladimir Orlovsky's "Revolt of the Atoms", which appeared in the April 1929 issue of Amazing.And from what I can tell, this is the only Soviet science fiction short story from the 1920s or 1930s to have actually been translated into English contemporaneously with his publication into Russian.
JM:
So I would be curious to know how that came about. It's never really come across any explanation of how they got a hold of World of Adventure issue or something like that.It doesn't seem like, what was that guy's name? It was the fellow who was translating stuff from German, working on the Amazing stuff. It seems like he had some European contacts.
Nate:
I'd imagine it would have came through that. But that question, again, has fallen by the wayside very, very quickly, because as this was in Amazing, it of course has an entry in the Bleiler.And Bleiler just has like no clue. He's reposting rumors from Schwartz and Weisinger, presumably something that they put in a fanzine.And he says it was actually a pseudonym of Benjamin Block, which presumably is the person who translated it.But I don't know, we'll talk more about Orlosky in a bit, but I just thought that was a really amusing bit of misinformation because, yeah, Bleiler, I believe, started compiling his work in the 40s, I want to say?At least I think it dates back that early. And even that early on, he just has no idea about the process of how Gernsback came into this story or that it's even a legitimately Russian story at all.I just think it's like a fascinating gap of knowledge there. So yeah, there's that one, "Revolt of the Atoms", which actually sounds really, really cool.And the other story that I'm aware from World of Adventure that's been translated into English is Yefim Zozula's, "Gramophone of the Ages", which is a modern translation that appears in the Van Der Meer anthology, "The Big Book of Classic Fantasy."And if there are other translations of Russian stories out there from World of Adventure, I'm not currently aware of them.But we are very, very pleased to say that we've added two to the pile, which we'll be talking about later tonight.
It's unfortunate that it appears that some of the more interesting French and German-sounding titles that also appeared in the magazine, namely Albert Bailly, "The Alpha Ether", Octave Béliard's, "The Adventures of a Traveler Who Explores Time",and Reinhold Eichacker, "The Journey to Nowhere", have not been translated into English either.
So for Russian-language stuff, we'll be covering some of these short stories in a bit, but also a note that has yet to be translated is the novel "The Blazing Abysses" by Nikolai Mukhanov,two stories by Graal Arelsky, namely "The Gift of the Selenites" and "The Man Who Went to Mars", and a few others that Okulov explicitly mentioned are S. Kranovsky's The" Catastrophe of Space","Mr. Peaks' Things" by N. Konstantinov, and "Mortonite" by Yakov Pan.
So in preparation for doing the research of this episode, I compiled a list of all the fiction stories that appeared in World of Adventure from the Russian bibliographic sources,which are, again, mainly Fantlab and Archive of Fantastika, and I split them into non-Russian and Russian authors and tried to match the English-language stories whenever possible,mostly as a way for me to make sense of all this stuff.And while Fantlab did have a decent amount of the English titles already, a substantial chunk weren't in English, so I made an attempt to try to match them to assemble a more complete list,and it definitely was not as easy as it sounds, as in many cases the title translated into Russian of the story has no resemblance to the original whatsoever,and a lot of these early pulp authors like Fred White or Owen Oliver wrote literally hundreds of stories, many of which have very similar titles,so you'd have to do, like, side-by-side compares to get a confirmed match, something that's beyond my current ability,as I wasn't able to find complete scans for World of Adventure, I found almost nothing of the pre-revolution issues, pretty much everything I found was post-revolution.I'll post a link to the scans online, as some of the graphic design is, like, really, really awesome, but yeah, there's, again, huge holes in the information that we're just able to find on the internet here,and I think to really get at some of these questions, somebody would have to do archival research inside of Russia,but we'll post a link to all the stuff that we're able to find online.
In addition to the Galactic Central Fiction Mags Index, which is how I matched some of these two English,which is an incredible, incredible resource that tries to document every English language magazine,and as of this current writing, indexes 1,444,677 stories, over 21,360 books, 207,742 issues of 8,523 magazines.It's just an incredible volume of information.But this is the main site I use to identify story authors and titles, and it's just really, I can't stress this enough,an amazing resource that anybody not only interested in pulp science fiction magazine stuff, but magazine fiction in general,like the Argosy, the Strand stuff, should really take a look at.But more specifically, regarding World of Adventure, if you're interested in taking a more in-depth look at what they published,I posted this bibliography on our blogspot, again, broken down into the Russian and non-Russian stories,and I think it's really interesting to see who was getting published in translation and who wasn't.
So some cool things from World of Adventure that they did was they had a regular non-fiction column called From "Fantasy to Science",which are very similar in nature to what we saw in the Astounding episode,in that they just talk about popular science topics and how awesome that is.So perhaps a particular interest in the July 1927 issue is a piece called "Radio and Life",which talks about how great radio is, that it's everywhere, and now being used for everything,and of course how Popov made extremely important contributions, that is Alexander Popov, the radio pioneer,and the great Soviet engineers will continue to make important progress in the future, driving home the point regarding radio once more.
So another neat thing was in 1928 they had a monthly readers contest where they would publish the first 80% or so of a storythat ends on a critical plot decision point for one of the characters, and it's up to the readers to write the last chapter of the story.And the winner of who writes the best ending would be printed in the magazine, a few issues later that is,and awarded a prize of 100 rubles, which was roughly equivalent to an average working-class monthly wage at this point in time, 1928,though the economy was very unstable and prone to severe fluctuations.A woman named Tina Bernardovna Kolokoltsova was a three-time winner, which is kind of interesting,and that doesn't look like she wrote anything else aside from these contest entries.
Some special issues that may be of interest are the special women's issue from 1927, the January issue,that features 10 stories by three women authors, namely Isabella Grinevskaya, Evgenia Russat and Rosita Forbes.The January 1928 issue featured stories by Soviet authors not originally written in Russian, so they published Russian language translationsof two Ukrainian stories and one Belarusian story.Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Valley of Fear" fills the entire contents of the September 1915 issue, and it's the only issue to contain just a single story.And the last thing I want to mention regarding World of Adventure is the non-fiction piece "H.G. Wells in Russia",which appeared in the May 1914 issue, and it's a really charming tribute to the author, and brief enough where I want to read it in its entirety,as we all love H.G. Wells here.
So it says:
"In January, the famous English novelist Herbert Wells arrived in St. Petersburg. The famous author of 'The Time Machine' and 'The War of the Worlds' stayed in Russia for about two weeks. The Literary Society welcomed the guest writer with the following address:
"'The All-Russian Literary Society welcomes the famous writer H. G. Wells. You already know that in Russia, your works are read in Russian translation, one of which you've decorated with a preface. We would also like to speak to you in Russian and we take into account the time when, after a more or less lengthy stay in Russia, you will not be embarrassed by speeches addressed to you in Russian, and upon returning to St. Petersburg, you will again honor our society with your visit.
"'Now, let me tell you how much we appreciate your captivating works - these enchanting tales, so youthfully cheerful and so wisely far-sighted in their depth of analysis of modern social problems and social ills. You came to us unexpectedly from another world, like one of your Martians, but, we hope, without aggressive intentions. And yet you triumph with the power of your talent, which acts irresistibly on us. Let me hope that while traveling around Russia, learning about the positive and negative aspects of Russian life, you will not be in danger from any Russian microbe and will return safely to your great, free England, from which we've received so many lofty ideas, so many examples of a wise social order, so many examples of wonderful culture and civilization, unsurpassed by any other country to this day.'"
So that's World of Adventure, and a letter to Mike Ashley Sam Moskowitz compares it to Argosy, which is probably the most accurate thing any of the major English language science fiction critics have to say about it,and nicely represents the St. Petersburg and the "fiction" part of the science fiction equation.
So jumping now over to Moscow and the "science" piece, we'll go back to Ivan Sytin and Around the World, the Russian National Geographic.Sytin, born in 1851, didn't really have much of an interest in literature for the sake of the art, but rather he knew what sold well and he liked making money, so running a successful publishing business seemed like a good fit towards that aim,and as such he started including genre fiction in with the magazine when it became popular to do so, including Verne, H. Rider Haggard, at least according to Okulov, this is another one of these gaps in the bibliography that I just can't verify,but in 1908, Sytin hired Vladimir Popov, who, unlike his boss, was a major fan of literature, particularly fantastika, and he brings in more fantastic content to the magazine,and like with World of Adventure and Nature and People, spins off genre literature into its own supplemental publication, On Land and Sea, which is more short-lived existing only in 24 issues from 1911 to 1914,but like World of Adventure, also published a ton of Mikhail Pervukhin, who appears to make up roughly half of the magazine's contents.
Another short-lived spin-off under Sytin was the Magazine of Adventure, which ran from 1916 to 1917, and like with World of Adventure, the Revolution and Civil War puts everything on pause.After the Revolution, a new class of magazine, STP, or Science, Technology and Production, came about, generally nonfiction publications that would occasionally publish a science fiction story.Probably the most significant of these was In Nature's Workshop, published by Jakob Perelman from 1919 to 1929, that published a handful of science fiction stories from Amazing,namely Clare Winger Harris's "The Miracle of the Lily", and the baby enthusiast himself, D.H. Keller M.D.'s "Unlocking the Past".
One interesting crossover with these STP-type publications, and with what Gernsback was doing in the United States, is that amateur radio magazines did exist in the Soviet Union in somewhat substantial numbers.During this time period, there were a few major ones, in addition to several short-lived publications that continued to publish through the mid to late 1920s.These major ones were called Radio Amateur and Radio for All, and there was indeed some fiction published here.The largest quantity, at least title-wise, appeared in Radio Amateur in mostly 1924 and 1925, and mostly by a strangely named Gabriel Malignac, who, again, I can't tell if he was French and Russian, it's probably a pseudonym.
JM:
That's a super villain's name if I've ever heard one.He sounds...
Nate:
Yeah, but there's absolutely no information on him at all, either in the Cyrillic alphabet or Latin alphabet sources, so it's really anybody's guess, and another ridiculously obscure author mystery for you all.But whoever he is, six of his very short sketches appeared in the magazine in 1924 and 1925, and by short, I mean short by far the longest is 2600 words, and this is definitely an outlier, as most are around 1000 words, with one being as short as 600.On the longer end of things, Radio for All serialized the novel "On the Other Side", by a Vladimir Eff, which apparently involves people getting transported to another planet after tinkering with some radio equipment, and on this other planet, everything is controlled by radio waves.Unfortunately, novels are probably out of reach for us to do translations of, but there's some really, really cool sounding novel-length stuff published during this time in the magazines.
Additionally, Radio for All published Hugo Gernsback's 1925 technological forecasting article, called "Radio in 1935", in the February 1927 issue, under the title "Radio Transmission to Other Planets".And one of the shorter-lived radio magazines, called Radio Friend, published a story called "Hamilton Jones' Discovery" in 1924.So it might not exactly be the same thing as Hugo Gernsback's enormous publishing empire, starting from electrical and radio magazines, eventually morphing into fiction magazines, and him foisting "Ralph 124C 41+" on his readers.But there's definitely some interesting and noticeable and noteworthy parallels that are there, and I definitely think it's worth mentioning.
JM:
I'm definitely going to say the parallel evolution is pretty interesting.
Nate:
Yeah, and I would imagine that the parallel evolution would have continued along the same lines had the political situation not gone very, very sour very quickly in the 1930s.
So, getting back to our story, with Sytin and Popov.Sytin loses control of the reins of the publishing house after the revolution, but is still involved in the industry, in less of an administrative role.Popov, after the revolution, found himself working odd jobs for a bit, and eventually landed a spot working for the Gudak publishing house in Moscow.And in response to the growing need for these adventure stories from these STP readers, the magazine Universal Tracker is launched in 1925.
I still have not arrived at a good translation for the magazine title for Universal Tracker.The first word can easily be translated as Universal, Global, World, or whatever.And these are all fine, but it's the second word that I think poses more of a problem.When we did our "Professor Dowell's Head" segment, I believe I called it World Pathfinder, which Ashley also uses in "Transformations:The Story of the Science Fiction" magazine from 1950 to 1970.But I don't really like that either, especially as the most common use of the phrase is now something associated with the Seventh Day Adventist World Church.
The second problematic word, a tracker pathfinder, in Russian is следопыт.The Russian dictionary at grimoire.ru gives the following definition:
1. a hunter tracking an animal by its tracks, a person skilled in identifying tracks, or,
2. someone who looks for traces of past events.
And oftentimes when translating words, there isn't really a good one-to-one association with meaning that perfectly brings over everything.And I read somewhere on doing translation, it was a while back, so I forget exactly where, but it's just an idea that words aren't like a one-to-one correlation,but they're more of a spectrum of meaning, and sometimes this spectrum of meaning between two languages can be a bit misaligned.So with следопыт, I think a good example is really what we're doing with this podcast, namely in this episode.But I didn't really like any of the English options for words, none of them really fit 100%.
I don't really like researcher, historian, or pathfinder. Archaeologist doesn't really fit, but I'd say Indiana Jones is a следопыт."Hunter" is an interesting choice, as there is a Japanese metal band called Metalucifer, who illustrates this concept quite nicely with their song Heavy "Metal Hunter",as the lyrics are about collecting all the cool, obscure heavy metal records.And it even has a sequel, "Heavy Metal Hunter, Part II", which lists even more records to find.And the band from Panama, Los Asesinos del Pentagrama, did a Spanish language cover that talks about all the cool Spanish language heavy metal records you can find.So perhaps if someone continues the tradition and does a Russian language cover, they can use the word следопыт in the lyrics when they talk about all the reel-to-reel obscurities.
JM:
I didn't realize that was the subject of the "Heavy Metal Hunter" song.
Nate:
Oh yeah, yeah, like every line is a reference to a rare heavy metal record. It's pretty cool.And again, same with the Spanish language cover, they talk about like Obús and all those cool Spanish bands.
But "Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema", a critical reader, mentions the magazine in passing and calls it Universal Detective, which I really, really don't like,as when you use the word "detective" in the title of a 1920s magazine that publishes fiction, it implies a very, very specific thing, which is not what you get here.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
You know, a lot more Doyle, I suppose, will be in that one.
Nate:
Yeah, exactly. And he was definitely in the other one.
JM:
Yeah, I think one that I saw just saw is Seeker.
Nate:
Yeah, Seeker is actually the title of a later magazine, which uses a different word, but that's certainly one that could possibly be used here.Again, it doesn't really map neatly. I looked to see if следопыт referred to detective fiction and Russian language sources and doesn't really seem to be.Ashley uses the word "stalker" for the follow-up magazine Ural Tracker, which also uses the word следопыт.You know, Ashley calls it Ural Stalker, which I kind of like even less.
So I'm just going to call it Tracker for the rest of this episode.It's not perfect, but I think it fits the best out of anything I can think of, maybe.I'm still not 100% sold on it, so if any of you have any other suggestions, maybe I could like retroactively change it or something.
JM:
Well, of course, the film version of "Roadside Picnic" in English is called "Stalker".
Nate:
Right. Yeah, and the word in Russian is just like the word "stalker" (сталкер).So yeah, it's interesting how language works and all these piece together.We've been kicking around the idea of doing a linguistics episode later down the line, and I think these kind of concepts we can explore in fiction at some point,because there's really a lot to talk about with this kind of stuff.
But getting past translation issues with the title and into the pages of the magazine itself, the covers of the magazine promises us travel, adventure, and of course, fantastika.And a good chunk of the magazine, maybe, I don't know, 30 to 40% is dedicated to this nonfiction content, both in terms of the travel narrative,Mondo type content and general articles on science.So it's in here where the Gernsback Publication Empire comparison narrative breaks down a little bit in that the most important publication related to science to come out of the science fiction publishing world in America, was more geared towards these technical tinkering style publications,but this one here is more like a popular science, a general public type of magazine.
It's also significant that Universal Tracker mostly published Russian fiction, especially when compared to World of Adventure.There was not a lot of translated stuff.They did beat out World of Adventure and Around the World in finishing up the first part of Doyle's "Maracot Deep",which would certainly indicate that Doyle and "Maracot Deep" itself was a very, very popular title,as three different Russian magazines were more or less contemporaneously publishing it with its publication in English.But by far the most important legacy that Universal Tracker has on Russian science fiction is that's where a lot of the early stories by Belyaev appeared.And I think it's accurate to say that he wrote a vast majority of the Russian science fiction content for the magazine.And as mentioned before, Belyaev is one of the few widely translated and authors from this time period,and as such, a much higher percentage of Universal Tracker science fiction content has been translated into Englishcompared to World of Adventure and the other magazines who were publishing science fiction stories in the 20s.
JM:
Yeah, that's quite interesting.
Nate:
Again, it's kind of interesting how that plays out.We covered "Professor Dowell's Head", which appeared in the magazine in short story form in issues number three and four in 1925.But in addition to this, he also published around 15 other short stories in the magazine and one nonfiction piece.
Some other notable works that have been translated to English that were in this magazine, Universal Tracker,include Platonov's "The Lunar Bomb", which you can find in the "Red Star Tales" anthology,Mikhail Zuev-Ordynets' "The Lord of Sound," of course, which we'll be looking at later tonight.For the untranslated stuff, there is one cool sounding story in issue number one called "Troika Or-Dim-Stakh: Radio story of the future" by S. Grigoryev, but unfortunately I'm not able to find the original source text,so I can't really do anything with that one at the time.
But this magazine became incredibly popular, and by 1929, circulation was over 100,000.But party politics soon entered the picture and Popov was forced out of the position in 1930,and the magazine shut down in 1931 with rumors that Maxim Gorky himself played a personal hand,believing that adventure literature was harmful to young proletarians.
JM:
It's crazy how quickly all that happened.
Nate:
I know, yeah, pretty much over the course of two years, yeah.
JM:
It's like everything stopped.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Popov moved east, and he tried to start a publication called Ural Tracker,but didn't publish much in the way of science fiction, and it was mostly like local history type stuff.And this publication itself was only short-lived, it was only nine issues in total,though it gets revived in 1958 by a totally different group of people.
So the closing down of genre fiction magazines in this very, very short period of time from 1930 to 1931was incredibly common as is when the state began to seize more and more aspects of everyday life.World of Adventure gets shut down at the same time,and Soikin's publishing business gets merged in with the Leningrad Regional Publishing House in 1930when World of Adventure gets discontinued.And science fiction does continue to get published in the Soviet Union after 1931,but it typically appears in much lesser number and in these STP science technology production type publications.
And Okulov says that stories from this era, that is after 1931 to around the death of Stalin,tend to be more like future war type stories, and I'd imagine have much more of a propaganda bent to them.But still American science fiction was getting published and translated into Russian magazinesand appeared as late as the mid 1940s, notably Heinlein's,"And He built a Crooked House", appeared in the magazine Technology for Youth,and the second and third issues of 1944.But American translations became far, far less frequent after 1945,and would more or less remain that way until after Stalin's death.
Okulov mentions this one article written by a Veniamin Golant from 1950,that is quite critical of western science fiction, and I wasn't able to find the original article unfortunately,but Okulov says the article was published in the March 1950 issue of The Star,and he calls Heinlein a slanderer, and of Van Vogt he says that "he wears the mask of a friend of the working people".
So in 1961, a magazine called The Seeker would start up.This picked up where World of Adventure left off, a little bit more than 30 years after its closing, though would be a lot more restrained in what it would publish.Some of the stories that we're looking at tonight that were initially published in World of Adventurewere republished in the 1960s in The Seeker in a heavily censored form,and it would appear that by that time, like a lot of the American pulp stuff,the 1920s magazine stories had just fallen into obscurity within the Soviet Union.And I think it's just within the last 20 years or so that a great deal of work has been doneon the Russian internet in cataloging and excavating all this stuff,and without their hard work we would have no way of doing this episodeas the amount of this stuff that appears in libraries outside of Russia is completely miniscule.I really haven't encountered anything in any North American repositorythat has anything beyond like two or three microfilmed issues of World of Adventure and Universal Tracker.
After the 1960s, I think the path is a lot clearer,and there appears to be quite a bit more that's been translated into English.Certainly plenty of well-claimed stuff like the Strugatsky Brothers,and we'll be looking forward to doing some of that stuff in the future.I don't know how much we'll be doing of the 30s to 50s stuff,some of that seemed a little tedious,but I think it might be worthwhile to come back to more of this 1920 stuff in the future,as there is a fair amount of it there, and a lot of the titles sound really interesting.
Translation-wise, as far as the stuff on the "It's Possible" list goes from the 1920s, that is,I've identified about 35 stories which have yet to be translated into English,and by "It's Possible" I mean two things.So, one, I can actually find the source text, which is very important,and two, it's under 15,000 words in Russian.Russian tends to be a very terse language when compared to English,so my translations into English expand word count a lot,so 15,000 in Russian might mean like 20,000 in English.So basically I'll just be looking at shorter stories and novelettes.I think at this time a novel or longer novella might beyond what I'll be willing to commit to,as my Russian isn't perfect by any means, and the nature of the Russian language itselflends itself to more sentence resculpting than something like Spanish or Italian or German,and these two factors mean that translations just take a lot of work and time to do,but I find it to be really enjoyable work and time and incredibly rewarding,and there's still a fair amount of short stories out there, and of those 35-ish or so,most of them come from World of Adventure, though a few are from those super short radio sketchesthat I mentioned, others come from Around the World.I didn't really talk too much about Around the World science fiction contributions in the 20sas like everything else.They got put on hold by the Revolution and didn't start publishing again until 1927,which is kind of late compared to these other magazines,but they did publish a handful of stories by Orlovsky,who I think is a quite interesting author.Again, we'll be talking about him a bit later,but I think it's important to note that because of both Arlovsky and his gigantic circulationof roughly 300,000 at its peak,it was much larger than the other magazines that published a much higher proportion of fiction,so kind of an interesting footnote there,but the rest of the stories that I flagged come from these various STP science technology production type publications,and no doubt there's others floating around there that I haven't located yet,either in the form of original story whose text I'm not able to find or a story that's missingfrom the various bibliographic lists that I've been looking at for this episode,as we've seen before, stuff falls to the cracks all the time.
But digging more into that stuff will be much, much further down the roadas this episode has been about a year's research in the making.I've certainly been spending a lot of time with the Russian stuff,and one thing I like about Chrononauts is that we never stay in one place for too long,and I've discovered a few more of these untranslated and uncovered pockets of non-American science fictionthat I want to give priority to over the next year,which is namely going to be Latin American science fiction from the 1950s,and it's going to be a recurring pattern that there's these large pocketsof untranslated international science fiction out there.We've already talked about Italy, but Ashley notes that there's a fair amount from Sytin,Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Japan.I think out of those, only Japan is going to be beyond our reach, so all depends on what's out there,what we want to do really.
JM:
It would be interesting to get to a lot of that stuff.
Nate:
Yeah, absolutely.
JM:
Looking forward to it.
Nate:
Yeah, for sure.
So in regard to the 1920s Soviet translations, beyond what we're doing tonight,you can listen to two of our previous episodes where we talk about Graal Arelsky's "Tales of Mars"and Volodymyr Vladko's "The Defeat of Jonathan Govers",and there's three more on the blogspot which we'll be sprinkling around in upcoming regular themed episodes,namely Belsky's "Under the Comet", Pavlov's "Chicks", and Platonov's "Markun",so there's still going to be some upcoming discussion on these 1920s stories in the coming months.And of course, I'm continuing to post stuff on the blogspot as I go.The most recently uploaded, well, I guess it was the most recently uploaded one when I wrote this script,which was Gilda Musa's "Thirty Columns of Zeros", but I've already started the Latin American stuff,so you're going to be seeing a couple of those stories go up very, very shortly,so stay tuned on the blogspot for more 1920s Soviet stuff, more Latin American stuff, more Italian stuff.We've got a lot of plans for the future, and I think we're going to be able to cover some real neat stories.
So that's basically the deal with Soviet science fiction from the 1920s in magazines,and there's some very interesting parallels with the science fiction market in America pre-1926.You have the fiction magazines like World of Adventure,the magazines like Universal Tracker that publish a substantial portion of fiction along with a nonfiction popular science,and you have the science and technology magazines that occasionally publish a science fiction story.In addition, you also have a number of radio amateur publications, so there's plenty of technically literate peoplewho are piecing together these cool looking futuristic radio devices, which of course overlaps with fiction.
All the elements are there, and it seems like if the rug hadn't been pulled out from Soikin and Popov in 1930 by the state,that final step of having a dedicated science fiction magazine like Amazing emerge would have been totally in the realm of possibility within the next couple of years.
JM:
Imagine if the community had come together and been like, who's getting further ahead, British or Russian science fiction writers?Everybody got to comepare notes, but none of that happened in the 30s, it looked like.
Nate:
No, definitely not, and you wouldn't really see fandom really get going until the modern era more or less,just because of all the suppression and craziness that went on in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.It really didn't start to open up again until the late 50s, and like I mentioned with Seeker,we didn't really get a magazine dedicated solely to genre fiction again until the early 1960s.But yeah, if that chaotic political situation, all the Stalinist repression hadn't happened of the total control of the state over everything,who knows what would have happened? Stuff from the early days of Amazing was already being published in World of Adventure and other places,and as we've seen, the early days of Astounding would have had a lot to offer the market if it was allowed to thrive,and would have likely inspired more domestic science fiction authors within the Soviet Union.
World of Adventure and Universal Tracker at that height had pretty huge circulation numbers, especially compared to some of the American pulps.So, I mean, who knows what would have happened, really? Perhaps one of the biggest science fiction literature history's biggest "what ifs" that we've encountered so far, just because of...
JM:
Always so many what ifs.
Gretchen:
So many speculations about speculative fiction.
Nate:
I know, that's the nature of the genre, I guess, and it's a great doing science fiction.
JM:
Absolutely.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So we have five stories here from these magazines that we're going to talk about tonight,and I certainly enjoyed the process of looking into them, and I would say I definitely was reminded of a lot of the stuff that we've seen in Amazing,and not just stuff that we've done on the podcast, but stuff that I've come across from the time period in the magazines like Amazing.So it really is a parallel evolution.I'm not necessarily going to claim that most of the stories here are like masterpieces, but they're interesting for sure.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I enjoyed them for the most part.
Nate:
Yeah, likewise.I think they're all really interesting pieces.You know, some aren't great.We could even say that some aren't good, but they're all, again, fascinating historical snapshots of how the genre was evolving,basically in parallel, but in conjunction, with what was going on in the West, although the relationship seems a little bit more one-sided than most.
All right, so I guess unless you guys have anything else on the general background, why don't we get into the stories?
Gretchen:
All right.
(music: "The Factory" by Marian Koval, played on harsh metallic zither)
Alexey Matveyevich Volkov - "Aliens"
Nate:
I can find no information on Alexey Matveyevich Volkov, which is probably a pseudonym. The only bit of information I could find on him is that he died during World War II, so that makes his biographical segment very short.
"Aliens" was the only story published under the Volkov name and was published in the February 1928 issue of World of Adventure,where it made the cover of the issue, and was later republished in the March 1961 issue of The Seeker in severely abridged form, which cuts about half the text.Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a scan of the original issue of World of Adventure, but a plain text version of the original of the story appears online,which we've linked to on the blogspot and based our translation off of, not the later cut form.
So yeah, I've been talking a lot about the background. I've analyzed these stories six ways to Sunday going through them on the translation.So why don't I open up to you guys and tell me what you thought about this one?
JM:
Yeah, so I don't know. I think I think for a lot of these because they're so short, it's almost like, I don't want to say too much to start with,but I think that, I don't know, this wasn't one of my favorites, but I was definitely interested in how, yeah, a lot of the iconography,which you kind of alluded to earlier on as how it really comes into effect in the 20s.I think that in like Western science fiction, I mean, even something like Leslie Stone's "Out of the Void" and how it starts,even though you know it's a pulp story from the 20s, it still feels kind of modern in all the sci-fi trappings, the alien abduction kind of scenarios and stuff like that.This one is just like some guys are out in the bush somewhere and they meet some aliens and that's what happens.And then at the end, one decides to join them just because, it's, I don't know, yeah, if he's a dreamer or something.
I do think I would have enjoyed this story more if it were a bit more stylistic.Like, it's very dealing with some kind of interesting concepts, but I did kind of feel a certain amount of detachment from it.I think maybe because I wanted to see more internal thought process of the two characters and stuff like that,especially what's his name, who decided to go off with the aliens at the end.
Nate:
Vragin. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.It's kind of, I don't know, it felt like, I don't know, it didn't quite feel earned or something.Like, I've seen scenarios like this before, like Clark Ashton Smith has a couple of stories that are kind of like that,but because he tends to write sort of horror stories, it doesn't go necessarily so well for the person in the end.But it's just like, you get to see why they, why they would want to, I don't know, give themselves up like that.Like, I just saw the episode, "The Tin Man" from Star Trek TNG, and it's one of those episodes like, I don't know,there's a couple of the original series and even kind of like The Motion Picture where there's this weird troubled characterwho you don't necessarily quite connect with maybe, and in the end, they're so isolated from people and everythingthat they have to join with the alien entity in order to become whole or something like that.
I don't know, this wasn't so mystical and stuff, but it just kind of gave me that feeling of,okay, so this is happening, but why?Like, I don't really get it.
So, I don't know, it was an interesting story.
Gretchen:
Yeah.I feel the same way.I feel the same way about it.It feels a little...
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
It jumbled, I guess is the word.I personally feel like this is, in my opinion, this is the weakest story.There's another story that I will get to that may also not be as great, but at least it's a shorter story.This one, I'm not a big fan of.Like you said, J.M., I think there's some interesting ideas, and I think this would be really cool if this style was different.But yeah, this was not my favorite story.
Nate:
It's interesting that you mentioned about the style.One of the Russian reviewers on fantlab also commented on the style.It's very, very basic.It's primitive.It's written at a simple level.And a lot of the sentences in Russian here, just as much more terse language in English are like two words, three words or something like that.So, yeah, you don't really have like a lot to work with with the characters internal thoughts.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
That said, I did really like this one.And I think there's some really cool stuff in here.Namely, the treatment of extraterrestrials themselves.Again, it could have been handled a little bit better of how it pays off.But the fact that they're not these like malevolent monsters, that they're...
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
I don't know, they're kind of doing their own thing.
JM:
They're kind of very mundane, actually.It's kind of interesting that he chose to do it like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I do like that aspect of it.
Nate:
And there's one scene that I just think really captures the wonder of how huge the universe is.For me, when I was like a kid, just thinking about how big the solar system is and how big the galaxy is just kind of like blew my mind thinking about that.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And it just kind of took me back to when I was like 10 years old thinking about that kind of stuff.
JM:
I can definitely see that.And that aspect too, yeah.Like I was reminded of, I mean, I'm not saying it's like worse than what you would see in necessarily some of the pages of the pulps we've been familiar with already up to this time on the podcast.But, and the ideas, and it definitely, I enjoyed the sight of the aliens doing their business and the cargo elevator going up into the ship and stuff like that.Like it felt very contemporary.I don't know.I appreciated that aspect.Definitely.
And was this one of the ones with illustrations as well?
Nate:
Yeah.So World of Adventure, I guess I didn't mention this in the intro, but it was an illustrated magazine and Universal Tracker was too.So pretty much all the stories that appeared in either of those magazines come with illustrations.The two that we covered this time that are not illustrated are the two that appeared in, like, well I guess one in a Ukrainian general publication and one in one of these like workers publications or whatever.But yeah, all the stuff, that I've found anyway, that appears in World of Adventure, Universal Tracker has illustrations which are kind of on par with the illustrations you'd see in like amazing or whatever is that line drawing style.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
That is fairly common among fiction magazines of the era.The covers I think of World of Adventure are way more put together than like Paul's work for Amazing.So there's some really awesome covers.
JM:
Ah, Mr. Paul.Tone Mr. Paul down.
Nate:
But there's some really awesome covers in the magazine and this is one of them.This is one of the reasons why I wanted to do this story.Is that, yeah, it actually made the cover.So the editors really liked this one and it's been republished a couple of times afterwards.You're not just in the modern era, but in the 60s too.So it did get out there with the Russian readership.
JM:
And yet we don't know who the author is.
Nate:
No, we don't.Yeah.No information online.I assume it's a pseudonym.It might not be.It might just be like some obscure guy who got killed in World War II.I mean, it's not out of the realm of possibility, but again, who knows?It's another authorship mystery that would really be impossible to resolve without archival research in Russia.If it's possible to resolve it all.So yeah, that's kind of where we are with that.So shall we find out what happens in the story then?
JM:
Yeah, what happens in the story?Well, when anything else we say at the end, I think it's easier and the stories are short.
Nate:
Yeah.Okay.
So our two heroes, the narrator, who at the end we find out is in fact, Alexey Volkov instory, further added into the pseudonym speculation.And Vragin, professor of biology somewhere in Russia, are floating together in the water,clinging for dear life to a piece of wooden grating from the deck of their steamer.
Their steamer was on fire.Maybe there was a boiler explosion or something, but they don't really say.But they jump ship and are trying to make their way to safety.And they come up upon this island and they see several figures on a hilltop, but beforethey can get there to receive whatever reception they're in for, the waves start to get violentand pick them up and they crash them into the shore.
The creatures are approaching, but Alexey is temporarily dazed.When they come into view, it chills him to the core.Instead of the Europeans he was expecting to meet, he's greeted by these horrible looking reptiliancreatures with giant saucer-like eyes.And we see one of them on the cover of this issue of World of Adventure where it's a creaturejust hanging out with his eyes and his spear.
Gretchen:
A really fun photo.I like the image here.
Nate:
I do too.But he dwells for a while at how horrible looking they are and how jarring it is to see thehead of a monster on an otherwise normal looking humanoid body.And with this he collapses and in a dreamlike haze, the creatures carry him and Vraginacross the desert dunes to their camp.Vragin looks dead with all the creatures standing over him.One of them plunges a needle into his chest.Alexey wants to save him even if it means certain death and jumps up screaming when he's met byone of these alien creatures holding a spear who whips it incredibly close to his face.The two kind of stare at each other for a while and Alexey finally slowly moves towards Vragin.The creature doesn't really perceive him as a threat and doesn't pursue him any further.
Alexey picks up Vragin and carries his body away from the creature's camp expecting the creaturesto follow him but they never do.Everything seems hopeless.There is nowhere to go so Alexey heads back towards the creature's camp, when suddenlyVragin's eyes open up and he shoots up seemingly back from the dead.He falls into a deep sleep and Alexey collapses from exhaustion waking up with one of thecreatures peering over him.They stare at each other for a bit and suddenly the creature grabs a handful of sand fromthe beach and throws it up in the air, thrusting his spear through the cloud of sand.He starts saying something to Alexey but he obviously can't understand anything thecreature is saying and this gesture makes no sense at all.
The creature walks back to the camp and Alexey goes back to sleep later woken up byVragin who is now back to normal, eating and drinking and offers him some cactus whichserves as both food and water.Alexey tells Vragin about his weird encounter with the cloud of sand and the spear andVragin grows quite excited and he tells Alexey that this is no weird tribe, nolost race but in fact, extraterrestrial aliens.
So at first I wasn't sure how I wanted to translate the title as the word for "aliens"used is also frequently used in Russian in the same non-extraterrestrial sense asthe English word aliens is for example there is a fantastic movie, which isawkwardly translated in English as "At Home Among Strangers and a Stranger Among his Own", it's much cleaner in Russian but the word used for stranger here is thesame word used as "aliens" so I wasn't sure if I wanted to use some form ofstranger or foreigner or something like that as "aliens" is a bit of a spoiler.
JM:
Either would have fit in this context.
Nate:
Oh yeah definitely yeah yeah absolutely.Yeah it's a little bit of a spoiler but not only does the cover of the magazinespoil the fact that they're extraterrestrials but...
JM:
I don't know I'm kind of glad you didn't call it "The Foreigners".
Nate:
Yeah the Russian translated title of the '86 film "Aliens" is translated intoRussian as "Chuzhiye"("Чужие") which is the the Russian word for this, so that ultimatelymade me decide to go with "Aliens" as the title of the translated story.
But anywaysVragin speculates that they could have gone down another evolutionary path fromlizards and they hear some strange sounds that would indicate that they'resignaling somewhere and they see several strange apparatuses which appear toconfirm their theory.In the evening they observe the aliens, they've gathered on the shore and in thedistance emerging from the sea is a sunken ship.Is it the aliens, or is it Vragin's and Alexey's wrecked steamer?Either way it looks like the aliens are pulling up all the cargo from it, wheresuddenly a jackal pops out of nowhere and the aliens is blasted with some lightningweapon and it would appear that they don't hesitate to remove any physicalthreats.
They steal some blankets from the aliens' camp and get a few hours of sleep andwhen Alexey wakes up Vragin after seeing these weird lights coming from the dunesthey go over to the aliens and Vragin repeats this gesture with a handful ofsand which completely grabs the attention of all the aliens.Alexey's afraid but Vragin is confident that they mean them no harm.
At that point the moon gets covered by a strange cloud and appears to be emittingthis halo where one of the creatures opens up a crate and begins to show thema series of stellar charts.They're just each successive zooms on the universe showing the aliens' home worldfar far out and yeah this is the scene I was alluding to earlier whereI just love this it just really really captures the wonder of the night skyand just thinking how vast the universe really is.
So the aliens are from this weird twin star system where the couple habitableplanets though not everything is clear on the map to the humans observing itthere's all kinds of like weird markings and stuff butit appears that the aliens are communicating with something out there somewhereand suddenly the weird cloud surrounding the moon starts to rotateand rapidly increase in size and this is when Alexey realizes it's no cloud at allbut rather a huge object falling fast.It doesn't crash down but instead levitates it's this giant flying saucer typecraft about the size of a circus arena, another just like totally awesome scene.
JM:
Yeah and it was cool that they had it wasn't on the ground with them, like it was,they had to summon it.
Nate:
Yeah yeah just like descends and yeah "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" like totallycomes to mind here.It's a quick scene and it doesn't really take up that huge chunk of the story,but yeah the imagery of this like huge, huge craft just coming out of the cloudsand lighting up the moon it's great.But there's all these weird kinds of lights and sounds and stuffand a cage with an elevator descends allowing the transfer of cargo and personneland Vragin is trying his best to communicate to the aliens to convince them totake him with them kind of like a stray kitten following a random person homeand eventually the aliens agree because off he goesand the alien ship has some kind of magnetic tractor beam thing that pullsthe sunken ship out of the water.Vragin goes up in the elevator telling Alexey not to forget him to give hisregards to Lida and to wait 25 years.
The alien ship just leaves.Vragin all the aliens on board are gone and Alexey is alone on this desert islandwho is eventually rescued by a British ship but I mean that's one hell of a gambleto leave poor Alexey in the space by himself.The captain of the British ship seems quite interested in this strange mapand makes a copy for himself but now it's the present day and Alexey is finishingup his tale to some travelers eating at his restaurant or in or whatever he's runningwhere he still has the map displayed on the walland the traveler who is the one telling us this story asked Alexeywell what happened to Lida? And here's the end of the story.
"He looked at his wife sitting next to him with a smile.
"'Lida will now treat you to tea. The bus to Sochi won't be here anytime soon.' And he finished seriously:
"'And so we'll wait. They'll be coming down here. We have been waiting for 14 years and will wait until the end of our lives. They'll be back!..'"
And that's "Aliens".
JM:
That reminded me of something at the end of one of those 1950s sci-fi movieswhere the family's waiting for the other two aliens.
Nate:
It's totally 50 sci-fi with the flying saucer and all that stuff.This may be one of the earliest appearances of flying saucers in science fiction.I don't know.There may be a couple of weird crafts that we've encountered in the 19th century stuffbut I don't know if Wells or "Edison's Conquest of Mars" really referred to themas like saucer, like circular type things?
JM:
Yeah, I'm not sure.The Cavorite ship was spherical but...
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Yeah, I don't know.I'd say that's a good question actually.It's not really something I've thought of before.I think the ships previously were usually kind of more...I don't know what they say, cigar shaped.
Nate:
Right, yeah.Like modeled after boats and things like that.Like we see in the "Angel of the Revolution" or some of those other airship novelsor whatever where just like, yeah, they put a boat in the air.Cool.But I don't know.This one is described as like a millstone.So it's like a giant flat circle.And he never really used the term flying saucer but that's clearly what it is.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Well, it certainly fits anyway with the feeling of the story.Like it has that...I don't know.It's something I would have...If you just showed me the story, I would have guessed like, oh yeah.At least 1940s maybe.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Yeah.That's kind of cool in that aspect.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I do think that the last segment of the story is really interestingand has really cool aspects of it.I guess it's just that the beginning section didn't grab me as much.
Nate:
Yeah, it does start off as this kind of weird Orientalist adventure story.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
There's definitely like some colonial attitudes in here, even though the underlying messageis kind of one that would align with the idea of a universal brotherhoodas one of the fantlab reviewers say.But the aliens are kind of like...They don't really give a shit about these humans.They just kind of like...They take them along because they're not like a threat and they're persistent,but they couldn't really care less what they're doing.And it is a bit of a tonal shift going from that adventure story,you know, trying to get at the mystery of who these creatures are to this,I don't know, weird extraterrestrial first encounter thing with the ship and all that.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
It's probably a little longer than it needs to be.I actually didn't look at the difference between the cut version and the full text.So I don't know if they cut stuff out for pacingbecause there's really not a lot of objectionable content in here,unlike the next story we'll be covering where it's like,yeah, I totally see why they cut those parts out.So I'm not sure.I should have maybe done a side-by-side compare just to see what they took out.
But yeah, this one definitely could be better paced.It does start off a little bit slow.And yeah, I was kind of surprised to see a little bit of outdated colonial attitudescreep into a Soviet era short story.But I guess for as much as the Soviets like to claim that they're for the universal brotherhood of workersor whatever, colonial and European-centric attitudes die kind of hard.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, well, I mean, it's been interesting looking at these.So actually, I did sort of have a general thought before even that.I was kind of thinking before we even got into the stories,but it's definitely interesting seeing that maybe it was looking for it in particular.And certainly we always point out, you know, when we read English story from the 20s,we're like, well, I don't know, pointing out some perhaps questionable attitudes or whatever,or where we wonder where the author was going with it.But here we definitely do see what I think is propaganda in quite a few of the stories.
Nate:
Yeah, absolutely.
JM:
It's interesting because the perspectives different than what we're used to seeing from this era,but it's still kind of there very much so.And I definitely have a lot of things to say about the Kardinalovska that's coming up in that aspect.So, yeah, this one, though, I didn't really get that feeling from this one, actually.I don't really, I don't know.Yeah, maybe a bit of the colonial aspect for sure.But like, it didn't really feel like that was, you know,the story was trying to make a point about people or anything like that.Like, it's just, hey, here's some, here's a cool encounter like in an adventure with some aliensand the wonder of it and stuff like that.And the imagery, Nate, like you pointed out, it's cool.
It wasn't my favorite, but it's not my least favorite either.So I don't know.It was interesting, but yeah, I kind of wished for more.The pacing is kind of off a little bit, for sure.I mean, it's the longest story of the set, I think.
Nate:
It is, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, and it doesn't really have, I don't know, like,for a story about an encounter with some aliens, I would expect a little bit more,oh, here's the aliensж weird philosophy.Isn't that strange?Kind of like that Nat Schachner kind of like,I mean, that wasn't my favorite story of the astounding period either,but in retrospect, it is one that I think about a bitand along with the predecessor story that we didn't read,that I kind of associate different stories with that kind of context nowand that kind of, I guess, prototype.And now I'm kind of thinking, oh, you know, I want a little more.Like, I want more, but at the same time, yeah,it is pretty slow to get started.So it's not like I want more words necessarily,but it just feels like there's not a lot there,but the spectacle of it, I guess.
So even, you know, the decision to leave with the aliens at the end,I keep forgetting his name.
Nate:
Vragin, yeah.
JM:
It's not really analyzed or gone into or anything,but I hope he comes back and then they come back.Yeah.I mean, it'd be fun to see when they come back.
Gretchen:
They'll be back.
Nate:
Yeah, of course.That is one thing I really love doing about these obscure stories,because, yeah, even though a lot of these ones that we cover are,like, a seven out of ten or so, they're not masterpieces,but they're not terrible either.They'll leave something that sticks with you.And I mean, I've read through this, I don't know how many times already,just doing the translation, but I don't know.There's a pieces of this that I really, really like,and I think that makes it alone worth reading,especially because something is not that long.It's not like you're committing to a 500-page novel or something like that.And that happens with a lot of these stories.Like you said with the Schachner,like a lot of stuff we covered in the Astounding episodeand the Amazing episode are not masterpieces,but they have something, a feeling, a plot point, an idea that just sticks with me.And I think it's really worth getting through some of these lesser stories to get that,because you won't necessarily get all those pieces from the critically acclaimed masterpiecesthat we could all agree are great novels.Because one work just can't cover everything, it's just the nature of it.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And of course, we all have different things we enjoy.We all have, all of us, I'm sure, have been in a position where we've had to defend somethingthat we think is cool against people who dismiss it out of hand,because it's not, I don't know, whatever principles they have of qualitythat doesn't match that or whatever.Each of these stories is an interesting glimpse into a time and place,and that's, I think, a reason to read them if you're interested in this stuff.I will say that I have actually placed the stories, I think.There's one I'm not really sure about exactly which one is my favorite,but I'm pretty sure that I have an order, and I don't know.This story, yeah, I just wonder if the author was somebody who wrote other stories under different names.Yeah, I guess we just can't know that at the moment, but...
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, it's interesting how ahead of the time it felt, I guess, to me, I guess in the sense,because, yeah, I'm used to seeing this kind of around the 40s and 50s, more or less,but again, some of those stories do go into those things a little morethan I'm used to seeing in these kinds of stories, maybe.
So, yeah, it's cool, but not bad, I would say.
Music:
Koval, Marian - "The Factory" (1932) https://dpul.princeton.edu/slavic/catalog/k0698b78r
Bibliography:
Archive of Fantastika: archivsf.narod.ru
Archive of Fantastika "World of Adventure" entry: https://archivsf.narod.ru/1910/mir_priklyucheniy/index.htm
Archive of Fantastika "Universal Tracker" entry: https://archivsf.narod.ru/1925/vsemirny_sledopyt/index.htm
Ashley, Mike - "Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950" (2000)
Ashley, Mike - "Transformations: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970" (2005)
Banerjee, Anindita - "We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity" (2012)
Banerjee, Anindita (ed) - "Russian Science Fiction Literature And Cinema: A Critical Reader" (2018)
City Walls: A St. Petersburg Architectural Website: "P.P. Soikin Publishing House building" https://www.citywalls.ru/house4894.html
Contento, William G. and Stephensen-Payne, Phil - The FictionMags Index: http://www.philsp.com/homeville/fmi/0start.htm
Episodes in Space "Bibliography of Fantastika authors, 1921-1925" https://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/fantast21-25.html
Laboratory of Fantastika: fantlab.ru
Laboratory of Fantastika - entry for "Aliens" https://fantlab.ru/work96387
Okulov, Valery - "On Magazine Fantastika from the First Half of the 20th Century" https://royallib.com/read/okulov_valeriy/o_gurnalnoy_fantastike_pervoy_polovini_hh_veka.html#0
Soviet amateur radio website and archives: https://sergeyhry.narod.ru/
Terra, Richard P. and Philmus, Robert M. - "Russian and Soviet Science Fiction in English Translation: A Bibliography" (1991)
"The 'Ural Tracker' magazine: a jewel in the world of periodical literature" https://dzen.ru/a/ZMOX-gwCYR5r8MMS
"World of Adventure" scans at Russian Public Library http://publ.lib.ru/ARCHIVES/M/''Mir_priklyucheniy''_(jurnal_izd.''P.P.Soykin'')/_MP.html
