(listen to episode on spotify)
(music: Leon Valiashchik - "Elektro-Miss, or; the Electric Girl Fox-Trot" on vibrato synth)
Gretchen:
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Gretchen, joined by my co-hosts, Nate and J.M. This segment is part of our episode covering five Soviet science fiction stories from the 1920s, translated by Nate. For more background on the history of Soviet sci-fi magazines during this period, please listen to the first section of this episode.
Anna Alexandrovna Barkova was born on July 3, 1901, in the town of Ivanovo, 250 miles fron Moscow. Her mother, a textile factory worker, died when Barkova was young, while her father was a porter for a local school. Having received the formal education, Barkova began writing for a local newspaper, called Workers' Realm by the age of 17, publishing nonfiction, poetry, and prose for a few years before she moved to Moscow in 1922. Around this period is when she wrote a number of notable works, including her one collection of poems, "Woman", in 1922, the play, "Nastasya Koster", in 1923, and "A Steel Husband", her story that we'll be covering tonight. While this story was initially ignored by contemporary critics, her poetry wasn't, with "Woman" being immensely praised upon its publication.
Despite this promising reception to her work, things quickly became difficult for Barkova. Attending the Literary and Art Institute in Moscow, she lasted only a few days due to her differences of opinion regarding the nature of creativity. Her work also was often subject to the strict censors in place during this period. The sarcastic and critical tone of her work, something that is clear in the story we'll be discussing, put her at odds with the authorities. In 1934, Barkova would be arrested for the first of several times throughout her life. Occurring after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, one of Stalin's personal friends, she was sentenced to imprisonment in Kazakhstan for five years after an offhand remark about the assassins shooting the wrong guy.
Her second arrest occurred in 1947 when she earned a ten-year sentence for "propaganda and agitation that called to overturn or undermine the Soviet regime". She was released in 1956, only to face her third and final arrest the following year. This arrest was due to the interception of a story about Molotov that she had sent by mail and she was sentenced to eight years of imprisonment. Upon her release in 1965, she lived briefly in the village of Potma until 1967, returning again to Moscow and remaining there for the rest of her life.
Due to the suppression of her fiction during the previous decades, Barkova had fallen into obscurity. She did continue, however, to write poetry during the final years of her life, some of which is considered her most acclaimed work. Although she received more acclaim posthumously, there was some appraisal of her work during the remainder of her lifetime. She gained a pension from the literary fund, using it entirely on books, which filled her entire living space. This included her fridge that she never turned on, transforming it into a bookshelf, truly the dream, to just to be so surrounded by books.
Shortly before her death from throat cancer on April 29, 1976, she bolted from her hospital bed and fainted from exhaustion after running down several flights of stairs, then explained upon gaining consciousness that she wanted to be buried according to Orthodox rite.
JM:
So what really floors me about this story is like, I mean, she got arrested multiple times and basically spent decades not completely isolated and caught off, but definitely not in a very hospitable place and, I don't know, probably like having a labor really intensely. And then, you know, she was kind of like, "rehabilitated" back into society and would try to do something normal, but before long, she would once again get on the wrong side of the authorities and once again be arrested and spend years of her life doing what she probably didn't want to do.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
It just sucks, like so much time was eaten up by all this.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, like, the story is actually really good. This is like probably one of the stories that we have tonight that I would say the story could be considered a lost classic, maybe, in its way. So I would definitely be curious to know what else she wrote as well, the reason for that.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, it would be interesting to see what her poetry is like.
Nate:
Yeah, some of her poetry has been translated into English. There is an anthology, "Till My Tale Is Told: Women's Memoirs of the Gulag". I don't know, there's maybe like 10 pages or so of her poetry. So it's not a lot, but it's really the only thing that we have in English aside from this one.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Her other stories do sound really cool, though.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
The descriptions of "Eight Chapters of Madness" sounds awesome.
JM:
Some of the reviews of her stuff are kind of interesting, a bit like contentious, like some of the people that talked about it were kind of offended by some of the things that she said.
Nate:
Well, yeah. It's pretty easy to see why.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I do enjoy the comment that did get her her first arrest, it is just a very funny comment.
Nate:
It was like an offhand remark she made at a party too when somebody snitched her out and she got 10 years for that, however many it was, which is common back then.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Oh, yeah.
Nate:
Absurdly certainly long sentences people got for doing almost nothing like that was very, very common.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can see why if just an offhand comment like that got you that much time, why so much literature was repressed, I mean, saying that sort of thing in print would have... Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah. Exactly.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
You'd have the censors and authorities knocking on your door pretty quick.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, especially it's one of her arrest was due to her sending a story or a piece through the mail and it probably being intercepted by the censors.
JM:
Yeah, commentators seem to think that she had like, they would consider it a perverse streak or something like that. And you definitely see a little bit of that in the story too, where there's this perversity angle a little bit where you're like, well, explain what I mean when we get into talking about it. It definitely seems like this, like she was, she had a very sarcastic personality and didn't go down well with people who took these matters super seriously, I guess.
And I don't know, even the modern, one of the modern reviews on Fantastika Laboratory of this story, it was like resorting to this kind of sexist diatribe about how women don't know what they want. And like, this is just like, okay, buddy, she's still bothering people even now, I guess.
Nate:
A hundred years later.
JM:
So yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, her late poetry seems to be well acclaimed within Russia. And it seems like a lot of that stuff she just wrote during the gulag to keep herself sane.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
But this one seems to be ignored largely. I mean, obviously, the science fiction fans have rediscovered it, and there's a couple comments on the fantlab website, but I wasn't able to find any like criticism in depth of this that talks about this story, aside from just like I mentioned that, yeah, she published it in her early Moscow period.
JM:
So it's a very short story, and like, you know, you could possibly say that she could have done more with it, but like, I think it's pretty effective the way it is. And that definitely remind me a lot of "Future Eve", but like, obviously, completely different perspective, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And we got a bit of that with "The Wife manufacturered to Order" that one didn't go nearly as far as this one.
Gretchen:
Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, we've covered that and we covered in sort of the same space with like the domestic sphere, the, the "Eli's", oh, mechanical house...
Nate:
"Automatic Housemaid", yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, "Automatic Housemaid". It's interesting that those two were stories written by women, but we're still looking at the perspective of like a feminine version of like an automaton, a machine, an android. And here we do have the true reverse of like, here's the steel husband, the machine husband.
Nate:
And it's an interesting take on the domesticity angle too, because both "Future Eve" and "Wife Manufactured to Order", they focus on like the emotional feeling of intimacy and love rather than the physical act of sex, which is just like only kind of like implied is happening off screen, but it's never like actually mentioned that it's going on where as here she's like, yep, I'm having sex with a robot and it's the greatest thing ever.
Gretchen:
During those, during those cold winter nights, you know, things happen.
Nate:
Yeah. And I mean, she's not like vulgar or crass about it though. I mean, she does work it in like a humoristic way and I really like her tone throughout the story. And I have to say that is by far the most difficult one to translate just bringing all of her puns and sarcastic tone and all that into English, it took a lot of work, but it's different than like the male gazey type stories that we've covered that deal with the topic of sex. Like last time when we talked about Fritz Leiber's "Knight to Move" or some of the thirties pulp stuff like Ross Rocklynne, that's also different from the scatological body humor type works like the Jarry. It really feels like a mature and honest exploration of the subject matter.
I thought there was a potentially interesting real world tie in here that electrified sex toys have a history that date back to the 19th century, which you could read more about in the books Rachel P. Maines' "The technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction", as well as Hallie Lieberman's "Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy". And I don't want to get too much into the history or historiography, but I definitely recommend checking out both books, as they disagree with one another quite significantly and there's no need to inflame the drama between the leading scholars of vibrator history here. But where they more or less can agree is that the electric vibrator was first invented sometime in the 1880s and by the 1920s, they were being manufactured by appliance companies like Hamilton Beach and sold in American women's magazines under the guise of personal massagers and things like that.
JM:
Health aides!
Nate:
But they were almost certainly being used for the purposes that they're used for now. I think a really good demonstration of this point is in the Lieberman book, she reprints an ad from a Hamilton Beach product, which has a woman with a very 1920s hairstyle giving the reader a very knowing smirk and has the text, "why miss the super pleasures in life?"
But the thing about this story is that it's largely US and UK centric, and I could only find passing references to continental Europe and nothing to Russia specifically. And all the Russian language sources that I looked for for the vibrator histories and stuff are more just like restatements of Maines and Lieberman's books with no localized angle. And the Soviet magazines are obviously way different from the US and UK magazines in that there's no advertisements at all for commercial products.
JM:
Yeah, that's nice, isn't it?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I mean, it is nice in retrospect seeing those, but like, you know, that's because they're old, so they're museum pieces and they're kind of interesting.
Gretchen:
Yeah, old ads are charming. Recent ones, contemporary ones never are.
JM:
Yeah. Now all the ads were exposed to it's horrible. Like who wants to see that? Nobody, right?
Nate:
Yeah. But I mean, even the pre-revolution Russian magazines that I was able to find, I wasn't really able to find like the onslaught of advertising spam that you see in those early issues of Amazing where they're selling like all kinds of, you know, weird stuff, dental products, miracle cures, even technical courses, you know, you don't find any of that stuff in these magazines. Really the most you'll see is like an in-house catalog where you can order a back issue or something like that.
So I mean, it's hard to pin down a real world inspiration for the technological angle. But I mean, part of me wants to think that it's there as in it's a really interesting exploration between, you know, yeah, that difference between the emotional feeling of love and intimacy and the physical act of sex. I mean, the two are obviously related. But I think here is she getting at, you know, is it possible to reduce the feeling of love to a system of "organic movements" that is developed by our engineer? Is this a story about a woman who falls in love with her vibrator? Is it a story about the existential horror of a vibrator developing a conscience and intelligence? You know, she doesn't really explore that in any significant amount of depth. But I think the way that she's able to hint at all these really fascinating philosophical issues through just like a handful of sentences on the subject matter.
JM:
She does talk a lot about his so-called intellect and how it should be built.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
What she wants in it and what she doesn't want in it. So this is basically like a lot like "Future Eve", like she dispenses with the first half of "Future Eve" in just a couple pages, pretty much, and just like goes through all that side of like, oh, what do you include and what do you not include it? Whereas l'Isle-Adam had all these weird off-putting anecdotes and stuff to illustrate his philosophy of, I don't know, I guess kind of misogyny, but idealizing at the same time. And I don't know, the sex angle was maybe a bit more subtle in that one, but it was there too. And again, that was the other side of the coin. This is definitely the other way of looking at it, where it's like, yeah, she's had this brilliant scientist create the steel husband for her. It's quite a marvelous creation. She ends up getting kind of jealous of the steel husband, as we'll see.
Nate:
I think it would be useful to view this as an inversion of the "Future Eve", because there's just such a nasty undercurrent of misogyny in that one, whereas this is a very feminist text, I would say. Perhaps more so than almost anything we've covered on the podcast, even including some of those works that we covered during the Feminist Utopia episode.
JM:
Yeah, I can see that. Let's get into what happens in it, so we can talk about more specifics.
Gretchen:
Yes. All right. This story was first published on May 23rd, 1926 in the magazine Red Field, and it begins with the narrator asking a scientist friend of hers to make her a husband. She claims, "I finally decided, make me a steel husband. I clearly see that my foul temper and my awkward appearance only serve as an impassable obstacle to a romance with a natural, animate representative of the opposite sex. I don't care for the people who could love me and the people I fall in love with respond with the deepest indifference or justify their rejection by lack of spiritual unity or differences in views and beliefs or don't want to find love outside of their work or class. I'm sick of psychology. I repeat, make me a steel husband."
The scientist...
Nate:
So good.
Gretchen:
It's really good. Really great. Right off the bat. Love the first few paragraphs in. You get that....
Nate:
Yeah. You really get a feel for her sense of humor and her self-deprecation, and yeah, it's great.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
It is kind of neat the way, like, yeah, there's all this sexual prowess implied in that, like the steel husband and everything, but at the same time, the story really does constrain more on the philosophical side of it, just like with Hadaly and "Future Eve". You can control his organic movements with a flick of a forehead switch or whatever and make him sort of open up the intellect a little bit and allow some of that intellect in through the valve intake or whatever it is. The robot doesn't know it's a robot. So that's kind of terrible, I guess, that she realizes that. But again, it's the perversity, right? She knows it'll be devastating to her.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Anyway, we'll get to it. I'm jumping to gun here.
Gretchen:
Yes, the scientist responds to her request reproachfully, taking issue with her choice of words that the husband won't be just steel and that she is sentimental in her distinction between the mechanic and the organic. The latter term, something he thinks she uses with too much sentimentality.
The narrator, not looking to argue, brushes past his concerns, asking about the features of the husband he will make for. He tells her he will give him knowledge of several languages, whatever beliefs she desires him to have, and incredible strength. Realizing he will lack the biology of a human, blood, digestion, and the need to eat, she reacts with distaste and she has a similar reaction to the scientist referring to the being he will create as a person, distinguishing between people and machines. The scientist claims his creations are the peak of development and culture, and that just as the proletariat overthrow the bourgeoisie, so will these beings overthrow the proletariat who have paved the way for them.
The scientist then turns back to the task at hand and asks the narrator more about what she wants from her husband. She asks him to make the husband an actor and arrange for him to have a range of beliefs that she can adjust to fit her mood. He confirms this is possible that she can turn him on with a button on his forehead, and also turn love on by kissing him. The ease of this latter mechanism makes her uneasy, so the scientist assures her that he will set in place a certain combination of movements that must take place for it. After she tells him the appearance she wants, the narrator leaves the scientist to it.
Within the month she receives her new husband, she strolls with him, who appears uncannily alive through Moscow. He discusses art with her, declaring it higher than life, dismissing the futurist movement. She defends futurism for its removal of theology from art, and her husband vehemently argues against her point and continues to make his own. The narrator in this moment, as she claims she has in others, doubts his being a machine. She then, however, presses the button on his forehead, changing his emotions and his opinions. She points out his inconsistency, and both are left disconcerted for different reasons, of course.
They arrive at the theatre where he is performing, and while there, someone asks her how they met. She tells the truth, and it is taken as a joke, which is repeated to others.
She speaks with the scientist of her conflicting feelings about her steel husband. He doesn't fully understand her unhappiness, as the being satisfies all her wants more than a human being can. When she laments over her inability to get over her lover's nature as a machine, her friend tells her to give him back to him, that he'll be more used to him than to her in her bedroom, and she refuses to speak with him further kicking him out.
She continues her relationship with her husband, and relates her experience with turning on his love, activating his passion. During these moments, she can't help but make vague remarks about his being a machine, and commenting on his fidelity, only resulting from other women not knowing the right movements to turn him on.
JM:
Yeah, this was terrible, she tore him to pieces.
Gretchen:
Taking them as strange jokes, he grows uncomfortable with them, urging the narrator to stop making them. These moments continue until one evening when the narrator watches her husband, giving an incredible performance on stage that made her feel, and thus, believe the machine had triumphed. He decides to convince him that he is a machine, and not a human being. She first finds it difficult to claim so outright after they return home from the theater, so she continuously implies it, but she eventually grows resentful and reveals the truth to him. His initial denial and shock quickly give way to certainty, and the narrator immediately regrets it and tries to reassure him.
However, it is too late as the husband walks to the door of his office. With an attempt to make him stay, she hurries towards him and presses the button on his forehead, but nothing happens. He tells her the apparatus is broken.
Over the next several days, the husband remains holed up in the room. The narrator attempts to move on with her life, disconnecting herself from the machine, but she still struggles with the effort of doing so. Eventually, she wakes to find the office empty except for a note from him. In the letter, he declares his decision to destroy himself. He tells the narrator that he did love her, that he couldn't live if she didn't love him back.
He and other machines could conquer the world as the scientist claims, he writes to her, but he couldn't do so knowing she didn't love him. The scientist, upon hearing of this, merely comments that the mechanical beings are then just as likely to be destroyed by empty concepts as organic ones.
JM:
Yeah, so you think that last line is the scientists sort of saying artificial lifeforms are just as prone to existential ennui as real people?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know. That's kind of how I interpreted that final line, this door, and it's pretty abruptly on that. It's like, there's certain contempt expressed for the scientist, like he's kind of an awful person, I guess.
Gretchen:
Oh yeah.
Nate:
He's a jerk, and there's this great scene again, she doesn't dwell on it for that much, but at the beginning, she, I guess, is describing the sexual movement she wants to the engineer, and he's like, well, actually, I don't know anything about that. Could you write it down for me? Because I have no idea what I'm doing. But yeah, no, he's this callous person who's rude to her the entire time, and he just has this dehumanizing philosophy that, yes, of course, it's this system of organic movements that's going to be the future of humanity. It reduces people to nothing more than machines.
Gretchen:
Yeah. But yeah, he's like, don't be so sentimental about the organic life, because it's just like mechanical life, and both of them are equally as meaningless.
Nate:
Yeah. And the philosophical nature of what does it mean to exist, and what does it mean for life to be alive is kind of framed differently in the Russian language, which this story illustrates a lot with the use of the term "animate", which in Russian is "одушевленный"/"odushevlennij", which derives from the word "душа"/"dusha", which means soul, and the implication is that, you know, to be an animate object, you need to have a soul, which is kind of baked into the Russian language. And what does it mean to have a soul? What does it mean to be alive?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And the whole story just kind of plays on that idea of, well, yeah, you need a soul to be animate, essentially.
JM:
And you see that in robot stories for decades to come.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Pretty much.
Nate:
Yeah. And I guess what happens here is the robot does develop a soul. He's had a soul the entire time.
JM:
And it was in part knowing that he was a machine that caused the soul to manifest in its ultimate way, which was in self-destruction, of course. That's the terrible thing about having a soul sometimes.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. I can't remember if it was in one of the reviews he referred to, some of the sort of, the person that did it was referred to the somewhat jocular, but not quite, laws of robotics added on to Asimov's initial three and what was the fifth law of robotics, which is that a robot must know that it is a robot.
Nate:
Yeah, I didn't, I wasn't familiar with the reference that he made there. I think he was like a Bulgarian story from the 80s that he quoted?
JM:
I think it was not entirely serious. Yeah. I think it was Darko Suvin he was quoting or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I just thought that was kind of funny. I can see where that would be. And yeah, like, I mean, that scene of the two of them, presumably in the bedroom there, and she's like picking up a part piece by piece, like revealing that he's a machine. She knows that no good will come of it. She knows that it's like kind of a horrible thing to do, but she feels compelled to anyway. And I guess she's like a part of her is, I don't know if it's just that she's jealous of the fact that like her friends are all like, Oh, where did you meet him? He's so great and so awesome. Well, yeah, well, if you just knew and instead of telling them, well...
Gretchen:
And of course they do because she does tell them the truth and of course they all just laugh it off.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, right. It becomes a note of gossip. What a crazy thing that Anna said today, you know.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah. Did you hear that she said her husband was created in a lab by her scientist friend? What a crazy thing to say.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of interesting because again, it's like a reversal of this whole idea of like, you know, you could picture a story like, "Future Eve", for example, where we don't really get to see it, but it goes off with his artificial bride and parading her around and stuff. And she's like the talk of the town, like Olivia from "The Sandman". And the story wasn't not like that, but also like, I don't know, she seems to be affected by the, I guess, the envy that all her friends that we're feeling and she wants to poke holes in the dream, which is kind of interesting. I don't know if this is like, I don't know if it's social commentary or it's personal commentary on Anna Barkova's experiences, but it's just, I find that aspect of the story really interesting. Yeah, she's kind of conflicted emotionally about this whole business from the start. And she's like, yeah, I have a steel husband and I'm not just going to keep him in the bedroom. He can make conversation, he can talk with dignity, but sort of vacuity about art and so on. Like, he sounds dignified and gentlemanly, but maybe he really doesn't have anything much to say because he's like a robot, right? People don't understand how empty he is. Now, he's really just steel on a flesh frame, something to parade around a trophy. Interesting toy. And nobody realizes this and in the end, she has to ruin it. But yeah, in doing so, it reveals that he does have a soul and even at the end, the scientist very glibly and offhandedly comments on that like, yeah, yeah, of course, like, what did you expect?
Gretchen:
Yeah, it is interesting that she chooses for him to be an actor. He's forced to perform for other people, just like he has to perform for her.
Nate:
And in a sense, existence is a performance in and of itself.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
You know, we all perform these social roles. We need to say the proper things in conversation and not say something that would be politically incorrect. You know, he starts to go off of these like crazy...
JM:
Which Bakova was doing all the time.
Nate:
Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I mean, what you ask is if this is social commentary or personal commentary, I think it's definitely both here. We could see that she was a very acclaimed new poet when she published her first book in 1922, but maybe a couple years later when she gets into fights with the head minister of the art school or whatever. And her one unfinished like novelette or whatever, that actually sounds really awesome. Just like gets scrapped and I'm sure she had a frustrating time of stuff not getting published. So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me that she is venting some of her own personal frustrations about her successes or lack thereof as a poet and she doesn't want her robot lover to compete with her in that realm. So just make him an actor and do something else that isn't going to get in her way.
And eventually she just gets jealous of him regardless. She's jealous of all the success that he gets and she can't stand it because nobody's interested in her poetry or her literature or whatever she's printing out in 1925, 1926.
JM:
Kind of interesting too because of now it makes you think of all this A.I. shit that's going on like nowadays with the artistic compromise and stuff like that that's been happening. She does make you feel kind of the steel husband is a tragic figure, but he's also maybe a little bit of a comic figure at the same time, right?
Nate:
Well, that's something the story does is it blends the comedy, the sarcasm and cutting remarks with the tragedy. I mean, because this ultimately is a tragic story, you know, we feel bad for the steel husband. We feel bad for the narrator who I'm assuming is more or less a stand for Barkova herself. But yeah, it's definitely interesting commentary and the A.I. thing that you mentioned earlier about how it's now starting to slowly creep into some of the other creative arts like music and I'm sure it'll be performance sometime soon. There's an A.I. song generator out there. How long before we get an A.I. movie scene generator where we have the likeness of a famous actor or whatever doing a scene?
JM:
We already have that. Yeah. You can watch a couple of them. So it's a pretty famous example of Benjamin, the A.I. created movie, movie director/script writer. Pretty weird and interesting. I don't know if I've mentioned it on the podcast before, but after watching its weird, artificially generated script amalgamations, the message you get from it most is that people are always saying to each other that they don't understand a thing that's going on, that I don't understand. Over and over again, all the characters are saying that and it's really disconcerting to watch, actually, because it's like it's supposed to be like a based on a sci-fi movie concept, apparently they put a lot of X-Files scripts into it and it's like it's really odd. And then you can see like the later ones have weird composites of actors and like all the voices are computer generated and it's really, really, really off-putting and weird. Kind of cool though.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know. Yeah.
Nate:
But we definitely don't get any uncanny valley in the steel husband's performance because apparently he's a brilliant theater actor and just impresses everybody.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And of course, it's how great he is at performing that leads her to think, you know, I have to break him down.
Nate:
Right, exactly. It's that inherent jealousy. She just can't stand to see him succeed where she failed and it eats her up inside and makes her do that. Ultimately, I don't know, is it cruel? Is it liberating? I don't know. It's hard to say. It certainly causes the steel husband affair amount of suffering and anguish, at least to the extent that that's possible with a machine, soul or not.
JM:
I mean, yeah. I mean, I think she does a pretty good job of making you see how the narrator thinks that this is all a big joke, but also making you kind of appreciate the dignity and I guess solemnity of the steel husband, I mean, he is steel after all, so he's got this strength to him and kind of can't help but appreciate that.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
She does a good job of portraying both those sides of the aspect where the protagonist is over and over again saying like, well, this is a joke. How can this even be happening? This is my steel husband. This isn't a real person. Like, and why don't you tear it down, right? So.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I mean, we do feel for both of them.
Nate:
And even the scientist's cynicism is a lot of fun too. It's just kind of, I don't know, I like reading characters like that.
Gretchen:
Very curmudgeonly.
Nate:
Exactly. Yeah. Totally absorbed in his work. Doesn't care about literally anything else.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Kind of views the narrator as more of a nuisance who's like mildly annoying and will make her go away. But he's also a weirdo himself.
Gretchen:
Can't you see what these machines can do when you're just asking me to make you a lover for them?
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
They can conquer the world.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This one could have easily been a lot longer and I wouldn't have complained. I do think the way she does it is pretty good. Like, it's not, it doesn't really leave me wanting, but I mean, there's there's certainly so much you could have explored in this topic and definitely a lot of sci-fi writers are very into doing that. We see a lot of these, there's stuff from the 30s that we haven't covered yet. The story "Helen O'Loy" by Lester Del Rey about a scientist that creates a perfect robot woman and stuff. And then there's a bit of a love triangle going on and stuff like that. And she's kind of a tragic figure, like we see a lot of this coming up in the 30s especially. I mean, we had a little bit with the 20 stories, "R.U.R.", it's a bit of that like complex tragedy of being an artificial being and stuff like that.
So this story does feel like, I don't know, I definitely would read more fiction by her. Just knowing that she was such a troublemaker is kind of fascinating. I think it makes me want to know more for sure. So this is, to me, that was the most interesting find in that, like, I feel like I want to go deeper into that. The story was really good. Again, you know, it felt like themes that I've definitely been exposed to since childhood and are still very much alive. And now that we can have conversations with computer programs that seem at least on the surface to be real conversations, we're kind of getting to a point where, okay, stuff like this is especially interesting.
And I mean, there's already been, I can't remember the name of the thing, but obviously it was a computer program and not like an actual steel husband, but artificial intelligence used for, I guess, sexual gratification purposes and stuff. And there was a company that got in some serious trouble about stuff like that recently because they were like demanding more money from the people or something like that. And like they took away a feature and suddenly their sexbot couldn't be dirty to them unless they had paid a certain amount of money or something like that, and it was like, all these people on the internet lost their minds because it was so terrible, right?
And I mean, you know, it's easy to feel contempt for that, but at the same time, it's like, yeah, well, you get roped into something like this and like suddenly the company takes it away because it's some shitty, everything is like trial for a subscription now, obviously. The way we're going, but she didn't anticipate any of that, but she certainly anticipated this weird climate in our, we do actually have the question whether a human is responsible for some of the things that we see and deal with.
Nate:
Yeah, I think that's one really interesting thing about this story is that a lot of these science fiction authors will take like one idea and use their story to explore that, or as she's just like a farmer in a field or whatever, just kind of scattering seeds and wherever she goes, there's just like so much she packs in here and each of these little like kernels we could unpack and just talk about individual sentences for a while, just these philosophical ideas of, you know, what does it mean to fall in love? What does it mean to be alive? You know, what does it mean to have a soul? What's the difference between that and being a machine, being something that has no conscious as well, as the various social commentary, of what we have of the arts in the place of society and all that stuff. She presents a lot of ideas here in like rapid succession and while she doesn't develop them to the point where like this would be developed in a novel, the fact that she's able to cram so much in here and still have it be a satisfying story that, you know, reads from start to finish in an a logical order, I think it's just an incredible, incredible job that she did here.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, I definitely agree.
Gretchen:
Yeah, just does so much with relatively little.
Nate:
Yeah, it's not a very long story. I think it's my translation finished out at like 6000 words or something like that. So I don't know, 15 ish standard pages, maybe.
JM:
Тhese genre explorations, science fiction stories, the short story is a very good form for idea exploration.
Nate:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
JM:
And sometimes you do get the feeling like wanting more is good, watching more is good because you don't know where she would have gone if she had taken it and made it longer and stuff. I mean, sure, a lot of stuff could happen, but is there something to be said for just having the basic ideas presented to you and then the rest of it, you have to do the work and you have to think about what it signifies and what it means. The things that could have happened behind those individual encounters between the steel husband and her friends or how it was really being with the steel husband and what made him desirable as a lover or different things that could have been explored, but weren't. But you must be thinking about because she does pack it all in there and especially in the conversation they have, where the truth is finally revealed to him, there's a lot packed into that conversation that you really feel that conversation. There's not much of that kind of writing in these five stories. So we see it here, where there's some really good character interaction that you feel the tension in the atmosphere. You feel the, I don't know, like you almost want to tell her, no don't, don't do it. Don't say it, but of course she does.
Nate:
Some of the offhand throwaway jokes are kind of funny too, like how the comment, how she hates port wine and things like that. It's a really nice personal touch to the story.
JM:
The electric wine. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
That was like something out of Marie Corelli for sure. Give you electric wine to prepare you for the ascending to meet the electric Jesus and his psychic cables. Gretchen, you weren't here for one of the weirdest books that we did on the podcast. I didn't really think it was very good, but it was sort of weird and interesting.
Nate:
You know, sometimes the weird ones are the most fun to talk about, I have to say.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
This is good though. This is really good.
JM:
If you're going to read one story for, I guess, intellectual depth, then this would be the one for sure. "Steckerite" is the great horror story and "The Lord of Sound" is a pretty fun satire capitalism and whatnot hits home, but anyway, this one was, yeah, this one was really powerful. I thought that a really interesting discovery.
So thanks for doing this one, Nate. It's a really good job with the translation.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Again, very rewarding work. I just wanted to briefly mention her one story, "Eight Chapters of Madness", which is described as "the modern Mephistopheles in the guise of a former Soviet employee retired and fishing in the local pond relates how he communicated with the Stalinist minister of state security and Adolf Hitler himself. This Mephistopheles invites the author, presumably that's Anna, to travel through time and space. And so the two go to the future. That is to its alternate variants, liberal, democratic and militaristic communist worlds." So it just sounds really cool. I'm sure with her...
JM:
It sounds weird.
Nate:
Yeah. Exactly. I'm sure there's like a lot of fun social satire and some cutting remarks in there. So this is a...
JM:
Yeah. Possibly quite angry.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
That's good.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I can see the censors getting a little upset.
Nate:
Sure. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. I imagine I would be too. Yeah. I mean, it just blows my mind, like we've definitely had some writers who have had some harsh experiences and stuff, but like Barkova constantly being arrested and just her life being put on hold almost so that this meaningless crap can happen and she can be forced to labor or whatever she was doing. Maybe some of her poetry talks about that. I mean, I don't know what it was really like for her. I'm sure it was quite an upheaval.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, no matter what you're doing, 30 years in the gulag system is horrible regardless of how you slice it.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I mean, if there's any author that is calling for a proper English translation anthology to be released, it's definitely this one.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Hopefully that happens.
JM:
After all that, nothing seemed to crush her spirit.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
Doing her things. Yeah.
Nate:
Her weird religious revelation at the end of her life, I think it's another fascinating end where.
JM:
Oh, yeah. She just. The Christian, the religious revelation.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, the life-long atheist just sees the light and no matter how hard it's going to be for her to rush out of her hospital bed, she needs that Orthodox burial. Really weird story to cap a really fascinating and powerful life.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know that point she was probably in a lot of pain and she was in the hospital and stuff. She probably drugged off with whatever. So who knows, but I mean, it's still, yeah, I mean, it is, it is something that happens before death to a lot of intense people, right? They have these weird revelations and I think it was the same for Gogol. I'm not sure. Maybe he was more religious before than Barkova was, but he definitely seemed to have some strange revelations, you know, like the way that he burned a part of his own work.
Nate:
Yeah. His masterpiece.
JM:
Evil stuff like that.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, the only reason the second fragment survives is that somebody is able to fish it out of the fire after he tried to burn the whole thing that he just didn't work.
JM:
Well, it's interesting to see different artists do that. Even Prince tried to do that to one of his albums. He like suddenly decided the album was evil. So he didn't want anybody to hear it and he didn't want it to be released. Even put a message in one of his videos that was something like, sorry about the black album or something like that.
Gretchen:
Boticelli also did that, right? With his artwork?
JM:
Oh, okay. Yeah.
Gretchen:
I believe he converted like halfway through his life and just decided to start burning most of his his work.
Nate:
Huh. Interesting. Yeah, I have a book of sketches that he did for "Divine Comedy", so I'm sure that religiosity plays an influence that the intense visions of hell and all that.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. Change thy ways.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, yeah, I'm glad I could present these stories to you guys and I had a lot of fun doing this. The whole process I think was extremely rewarding and yeah, now the stuff is out there. So you can read it in English and it's no longer unavailable to the English speaking world. So I'm very proud of that, and we came away with some good stories in the long run too. So win-win.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Yeah. This is a really fun exercise. Even the ones that were not maybe the highest quality in terms of storytelling were an interesting read. So I definitely have no, look, these stories are so short that there's no point in regretting anything. Yeah. Yeah. Like how often are you going to get to see this? It was just such a cool contrast to some of the stuff we've been doing up till now. I enjoyed it. Like not just a contrast though, but a parallel in a lot of ways because there are a lot of similarities with stuff like what was published in Amazing at the time, especially I think a lot of the same kind of quality of storytelling and stuff like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, this does feel like the episodes we did on Amazing where you get a couple of weaker stories, but they still are fun to read and the gems are real gems.
Nate:
Yeah, exactly. Not everything can be a masterpiece, but that's okay because it's fun reading them. It's fun talking about them and even the ones that aren't great still have these little nuggets of, I don't know, just thought and historical interest and just something that sticks with me. But it's been the case for every story that we've covered pretty much. I don't think there's any story that we've read, even the ones that I kind of hated where I'm like, this is a total waste of my time. Like even "New Steam Man", like it was a slog to get through and I kind of hated how racist it was.
JM:
Yeah. We can keep talking about "Symzonia".
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
We know what we're talking about when we mentioned "Symzonia" and Mr. Slippery. So what's there to regret?
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Sometimes the ones that you hate stick with you the most.
Nate:
Exactly. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. The five stories were different in their own right. Like they were a couple that were slightly similar, but it was a nice variety. Only one sort of space, space aligned story and that was "Aliens". So I guess if there was anything I would like to see more of in the future in these kind of stories, maybe it is the first contact/alien kind of stuff to see how that could be done better maybe because yeah, "Aliens" maybe wasn't the best use of all those things, but it was it was interesting and it felt ahead of its time in some ways to me personally, just because I guess I'm used to all the 40s and 50s flying saucer war and everything that came afterwards and stuff.
Nate:
Yeah, that novel "Blazing Abysses" that was serialized in World of Adventure is apparently one of the earliest examples of Russian space opera. Again, it's novel length. So I think it'd be a little bit out of our grasp, but definitely the stuff was out there. Spaceships flying around and those things that you'd see present in American science fiction.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah. It's interesting parallels.
JM:
All right. Well, this has been really fun and I'm really glad that we took this excursion into the hidden depths of Soviet 1920s science fiction.
But next month, we're going to return to a theme type episode, which we haven't really done in a little while, I think, or our focus has been a little different. But earlier on, we were definitely doing a lot more episodes based around certain topics and we're going to return to that every now and then. So our topic for next month is fertility and we have a few interesting selections for everyone for next month. I'm going to go in chronological order, but most of these are really short except for the final one.
So we have the story called "Unto Us, A Child Is Born", which is by David H. Keller, MD, the baby guy mentioned earlier on in the episode. And yes, he was translated into Russian once apparently. So this is a story by him from the July 1933 issue of Amazing Stories. Very short, very interesting social commentary. So it's going to be fun to talk about it for sure.
We also have the story "That Only a Mother" by Judith Merrill from Astounding, June 1948. If you think that title is a little bit clumsy, think about what the phrase is kind of an excerpt from and that will tell you a lot about what the story is actually about. It's, again, a very short story. Of course, the phrase is, that's something only a mother would love. Disturbing little story from the 40s for sure. That is, again, going to be pretty great to talk about.
We also have one of the last stories that E.M. Forster ever wrote. There's a story called "Little Imber" published in 1961. Definitely not widely published. Seems like mostly shared among his friends, but it did end up in a book eventually. So we think it's from around 1961.
Nate:
Yeah, it's in fragment form. So I'm not sure if it ever actually got published in a real magazine?
Gretchen:
I think the copy that was found in, what is it, "Arctic Winter" or something was the name of the anthology? That's the only place I was able to find it and I came across the reference to it in that Wendy Moffat biography of Forster and I don't think it was ever published anywhere else.
Nate:
Yeah, that was a sense I got, especially after reading the contents of the story. I don't know. Have you guys read that yet?
JM:
No. I haven't.
Nate:
Okay, yeah. Talk about it. Yeah, when I read things, sometimes the movie appears right in front of my eyes and this is total 70s John Waters, Pink Flamingos type gross out ridiculous humor. I mean, just picture David Lochary as a little Imber with his leisure suit and porn stash and absurd high class accent. Some of these lines just leap off the page. I never expected we would do a story like this on Chrononauts and I never expected that it would come from Nobel Laureate, E.M. Forster, but I'm glad that both are true and it's going to be a lot of fun talking about this one next time.
JM:
All right. Well, that's certainly very intriguing.
For the longer work, we also have a book by the famous mystery author, P.D. James. This is her well recognized science fiction book in part probably because it was made into a quite well-known movie in the early 2000s. This is "The Children of Men" from 1992.
So it's going to be a really interesting series of stories that I'm really excited to talk about should be definitely getting heavy into the social commentary aspects and satire social satire and stuff which kind of does go along with where we were heading with our 1950s like heading kind of more into the 1950s, pulp, Galaxy and stuff like that. But again, this is stuff from other sources and yeah, it's going to be really interesting to go chronologically and trace this from basically the 1930s to the 1990s and I'm sure there'll be a lot to talk about.
Gretchen:
Really looking forward to these ones.
Nate:
Yeah, likewise.
Gretchen:
I haven't read "Children of Men" yet. I have seen the film, so I'm curious to see what the actual novel is like.
Nate:
Yeah, I've never watched the movie. I remember when it came out and everybody was like, this is great.
JM:
I haven't seen the movie either.
Nate:
So yeah. Yeah, definitely looking forward to it.
JM:
I'm definitely going to watch the movie.
Nate:
Oh yeah, likewise.
Gretchen:
Oh yeah. It's a great movie. I mean, the cinematography is incredible.
Nate:
Cool. Yeah.
JM:
That's really cool. Yeah. I'm definitely curious about it. I don't know. I may be avoiding it at the time, but I'm not really sure why. It's kind of one of those days maybe because it got some publicity and hype. It's kind of like, yeah, I don't want to. Definitely going to be a good one.
But for now, I think that the night has come and I'm going to relax in my chamber full of cylinders containing poison gas and pieces of steel husbands and weird cone wire coil apparatus. And I'm going to think about not selling my great inventions to the horrible capitalist institutions of a corrupt and decadent West. And we will say good night to you listeners. Thank you for tuning in and listening to us tell you these vital messages. Yes, 1920 Soviet science fiction is an interesting field. And we had a lot of fun bringing you these stories. We'll be back next month when we talk about birth and humanity and fertile industry and more. Good night. We are Chrononauts.
Music:
Valiashchik, Leon - "Elektro-Miss, or; the Electric Girl Fox-Trot" (c. 1920s) https://dpul.princeton.edu/slavic/catalog/cf95jf74s
Bibliography:
Fedotova, Margarita and Taganov, Leonid - introduction to "Eight Chapters of Madness" anthology https://royallib.com/read/barkova_anna/vosem_glav_bezumiya_proza_dnevniki.html#0
Germanovna Kachalova Larisa - "The work of Anna Aleksandrovna Barkova from the 1920s to early 1930s, in the cultural paradigm of the era" https://www.dslib.net/russkaja-literatura/tvorchestvo-anny-aleksandrovny-barkovoj-1920-h-nachala-1930-h-godov-v-kulturnoj.html
Laboratory of Fantastika - "Anna Barkova" https://fantlab.ru/autor6656
Lieberman, Hallie - "Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy" (2017)
Maines, Rachel P. - "The technology of orgasm: hysteria, the vibrator, and women's sexual satisfaction" (1998)
Vilensky, Simeon (ed) - "Till my tale is told: women's memoirs of the Gulag" (1999) https://archive.org/details/tillmytaleistold0000unse
