(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: Chrononauts main theme)
introductions, non-podcast reads, "International Science Fiction" background
Nate:
Good evening and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I’m Nate, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, J.M. and Gretchen. How are you guys doing tonight?
JM:
Oh, pretty well. It’s been busy and, I don’t know, a little bit gray and rainy and sort of miserable out, with just little peekings of spring coming through every now and then. So there’s been some construction around my apartment building, and it’s been a little noisy and chaotic, but it’s all right.
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I’ve been doing all right. It’s also been quite crazy weather. I think it was Thursday night, it was so hot when I was trying to sleep. I couldn’t even sleep at first because I was like, “It’s so hot out. I have to take all the blankets off my bed.” And then two days later, it’s 30 degrees at night and rainy. And it’s like, “Okay, I guess we’re still figuring out the weather a little bit here.” But besides that, I have a couple of days off from work. My schedule is a little different, so I’ve just sort of been able to relax a little bit at home and do a bit of reading as well. So I’m interested to talk about that.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. It’s definitely been pretty good here, though a raccoon has unfortunately posted up in the attic. So hopefully he will not make his presence known when we are recording this, because I don’t want to have to emergency-run downstairs and call the animal control guy again. But we’ll see what happens. So yeah, hopefully we’ll have a good recording tonight. And yeah, I’ve been doing some interesting reading as well. So what have you guys been reading off the podcast?
Gretchen:
So I started this year off wanting to read more books that were like 500-plus pages. I have read "Lost Illusions" by Honoré de Balzac, as I’ve mentioned in one of the last episodes we did, and I have recently been reading "Middlemarch" by George Eliot. I’m about halfway through at the moment. Yeah, I have been really enjoying it.
Nate:
It’s so good.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it is really good. I remember back in, I want to say it was my first year at the University at Albany, I attended a bunch of panels about literature and everything, and there was an entire panel on "Middlemarch." I remember even then being really interested in the book, so I’m glad I finally have gotten to it. But I’m really enjoying that.
And also, every once in a while, of course, I get into a phase where I want to read a lot of short stories. So I’ve also been reading a lot of short stories as well, especially from "The Weird," Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology. I think by this time last year, I had maybe read about 30 or so stories. I think at this point I’ve read quite a bit over half of it now, and I’ve been really enjoying all of the works that are in it. I have also been reading from an anthology called "Black Water," which Alberto Manguel is the editor of that. And it’s also been really interesting: a lot of fantastic and ghost stories as well. There are some really good authors in there. There’s a Charles Dickens story, Edith Wharton. Yeah, some really great authors in there, and I have been enjoying that as well.
And also, for my sci-fi book club, I am just about to finish, for the next meeting, "This Is How You Lose the Time War," which is written by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It’s really interesting. It’s like an epistolary novel where each writer writes for one of the two characters, and I really like the style of it. It’s very poetic, which I believe both of them have had a bit of experience with poetry, so it kind of makes sense that it would come out that way. And the month before, I reread "Kindred" for, I think, the third time at this point, which is always a great novel.
JM:
We like that one.
Gretchen:
Yes. Yeah. I was really glad to read it. And luckily, it was a hit with all the people that went to the meeting, which was very good. I would have been a little sad if there were people there that didn’t like it. No, everyone seemed to enjoy it, and we had a pretty good discussion about it.
JM:
Yeah, "This Is How You Lose the Time War" was one I was kind of going to read, and I guess there were a couple of other things that distracted me. And it’s very short, so I’ll probably get back to it. I guess I was thinking about it because, I don’t know where it came up exactly, but it’s definitely been compared to "The Big Time" a lot. I also had a friend who was reading it, and she didn’t really like it. She was not into the style and all that. But it also did make me curious. I kind of want to see how it’s different. I guess it is more of a romance of sorts, right?
This is a bit of a different format, and I guess the crux of the story is a little different. But the setting and background seem very similar, so I really like that concept. I like the way Leiber handled it, and I like some of the other authors that played with similar things, like William Tenn. They’re talking about how different time paths might be inimical to each other and trying to cancel each other out and stuff like that. It’s kind of interesting.
And those anthologies, like "The Weird" and stuff, are just so great to dip in and out of. I’m not sure, honestly, how many of the stories I’ve read, but I keep coming back to it. There are still entries that I haven’t read. And to be fair, most of the stories in there are quite short, but there are a few in there that I’ve tried to read once or twice, and I just have to be in the right mood or mindset, I think, because I just kind of bounce straight off of them. But for the most part, it’s really, really great. Even if the stories are not really catching me, it’s always kind of interesting. And I think they do a really good job of tackling the idea of the weird from many different cultural angles. I’ve been inspired to check out a few writers because of the collection. So yeah, it’s a really good one, definitely.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And I’ve also been recently watching the YouTube channel — there is also a podcast, but I’ve been watching their YouTube channel — "The Wheel of Genre," who are going through each story in "The Weird." They haven’t finished it yet. They’re still in the middle of the work, but it’s been also fun to finish a story and check out to see if "The Wheel of Genre" has gotten to it yet, and hear their thoughts as well.
JM:
Yeah, it’s funny. I found that podcast toward the end of last year, I guess, and was looking through it, and I wanted to hear what they said about Jean Ray. And they were doing a lot of other interesting stuff, too. Recently, they did a couple of episodes on "A Voyage to Arcturus." And I just think it’s funny because back when Nate and I discussed that book, there didn’t seem to be a lot of coverage for it on podcasts and YouTube and all that stuff. But now it’s kind of blown up a little bit in the last couple of years, and a lot of people have been reading it. It’s kind of a bit of a community thing, and people like to listen to each other’s things. You know, like, “Wow, you’ve got to check out this really weird psychedelic book,” and everything like that.
Most people seem to be into it, but everybody seems to take quite a different interpretation, and I’m always surprised at the things that sometimes are not mentioned that I thought were really cool, or vice versa: maybe even like, “Wow, okay, I never thought of it like that.” That’s kind of an interesting work in that way, I guess, because it is one that I have actually reread quite a few times — not since we did the podcast episode, I think, but still. Yeah, it’s cool to notice that people are noticing.
Yeah, I do feel like I had this thought — maybe we should do "Dangerous Visions" — and it was quite a while ago, and we had other things coming up. And now everybody’s doing that. But anyway, we’ll talk more about that at the end of the podcast.
What have I been reading? Well, I read "Wise Blood" by Flannery O’Connor, and I’ve talked about her short stories before, and we all, I think, enjoy them. Nate, I’m not sure if you’ve read any of her stuff.
Nate:
I’ve actually only read one of her stories, the one that appears in "The Dark Descent": "Good Country People."
JM:
Yeah, okay.
I do have an anthology of her stories. I just haven’t read it yet. It’s one of those things that I’ve been meaning to get around to, but haven’t. I typically like that genre, like Faulkner and Eudora Welty, who are somewhat in the same ballpark, if not entirely 100% similar. So I do want to check out her stuff at some point.
Gretchen:
Yeah, the Southern Gothic writers, I’ve always also really enjoyed.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. So I had really gotten into the short stories, and I thought, well, she didn’t write a lot of longer work, but I would check out "Wise Blood," which is, I can’t remember if it’s for sure the only novel she wrote, but it’s certainly the best known of her works because it’s a longer work. And I have to say, I mean, I enjoyed reading it. The style was all there. There was dark humor and everything, and it was good. But I don’t know. It kind of left a not-so-great aftertaste.
I don’t know. There was always this thing when I read Flannery O’Connor where I guess sometimes I’m wondering what she’s really thinking. And yeah, there’s this kind of intense Catholicism. I guess you could say in the short stories there’s a little more room for ambiguity and stuff like that. It seems like in the longer work, she really distills it to this sharp point at the end. And I kind of felt like — I don’t know. I mean, I’m really torn about it. I’m glad I read it, but I can’t say I can totally recommend it.
I don’t know, all this stuff about pain and suffering. I’m sure people have written essays about this book and what it all means and everything like that, and I’m not saying I have the right interpretation. But it just kind of felt like glorification of suffering in a way that was done in a way I didn’t really appreciate all that much. I still like her. I’ll still read the short stories, because there’s still a lot that I haven’t read. But yeah, I don’t know. I can’t say I really loved the book. But it was interesting.
I also read "Unholy Land" by Lavie Tidhar, which is a more recent book. It’s an alternate history kind of book, but it’s also a lot of crossing timelines and stuff like that. It’s about an alternate homeland for the Jewish people that was established in the book in the early 1900s in West Africa. And it’s about how things parallel modern times, I guess. But also there’s a lot of intrigue and paranoia. It really reminded me a lot of Philip K. Dick, actually, and "The Man in the High Castle." It’s a little different. The cultural perspectives are really different and everything, but there were quite a few similarities to that in style and in presentation and everything. It was not a short book. I quite enjoyed it. It was very interesting.
And again, every now and then I start to feel like I’m reading too much in the past, and then I want to check out something that’s a little newer just so I know what it’s all about. And I’m glad I read that.
I also read, which is kind of a reread, "Nova" by Samuel R. Delany, which was just great. I loved it. If anything, I have one complaint: maybe it’s too short. Maybe I wanted more, because he takes a lot of time to go into the backstory of one character in particular. And while it’s really interesting and I certainly wouldn’t get rid of it, it almost feels like by the time he gets back to what you think of as the main narrative — which is, again, kind of a story about this guy who assembles this space crew to go look for something — it’s similar in some ways to "Babel-17" in that respect. There isn’t a lot of time to develop things further.
But the writing is really good. His knack for very colorful backgrounds and settings is really on display. And this is cool because his conception of the future is one that I think it would be pretty awesome to live in. So yeah, I really enjoyed the book a lot and definitely recommend it, especially if you listened to the podcast we did some time ago and enjoyed "Babel-17." That would be a really great place to go.
Nate:
Cool. Yeah, I’ve been reading some interesting stuff too. I finished up with volume five of the Burton translation of "The Arabian Nights," which ends with one of the best stories that I read in it so far, which is "The Queen of the Serpents." And that itself contains a couple of nested adventure stories, but the frame story is really, really awesome and touchingly tragic in a way that a lot of the other stories in the volume just aren’t.
So then, following my formula of returning to podcast authors in between "Arabian Nights" volumes, I read E. M. Forster’s "Howards End," which was great and even cites another podcast author, namely Marie Corelli, though in a very brief and offhand way.
JM:
Oh yeah. She’s actually got some coverage online recently too, which I thought was interesting, for other stuff besides the one we did.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, "The Sorrows of Satan" was, for I don’t know how long, certainly at some point in time — I want to say it was for decades — the bestselling novel in the world.
JM:
Wow.
Nate:
And it’s totally forgotten today. I’m not familiar with what coverage she’s getting in other places, as I haven’t seen that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if other podcasts, other literary blogs, writers, or whatever, would be reevaluating her work, because yeah, she was an interesting figure in her personal life and just immensely, immensely popular. She outsold Doyle, Wells, and all those other early speculative scientific romance people combined. Not just individually, but combined. Yeah, just insane, insane amounts of sales.
I don’t know. I mean, "The Romance of Two Worlds" was a weird novel, but it was also kind of trashy, almost like the late nineteenth-century version of a beach novel. It was just a really weird read. But yeah, she gets name-checked by E. M. Forster, I guess due to her immense popularity during the time.
And yeah, "Howards End" was great. This novel, like most of Forster’s work, has nothing to do with science fiction or fantastic fiction or anything like that at all, and it’s purely a social novel, but I thought it was excellent. It has some interesting musings on English and German relationships a little bit before World War One would break out, so that was just interesting to read in a historical context.
So then after that, I read "Arabian Nights" volume six, which starts off with "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad," but there are actually eight, because the text gives two completely different versions of voyage number seven, both of which are completely different from the classic film, which bears more resemblance to voyage number three, which itself bears a lot of resemblance to the Cyclops episode from the "Odyssey." So just a lot, a lot of fun.
It then goes into "The City of Brass," which I stated in a previous episode that I believe is the one from volume six, the one we did from episode one. I think I had misstated the episode from volume four as being the "City of Brass" one that we covered, but it also involves a city of brass with magically enchanted figures. I’m still not 100% sure which one I read for episode one, because we did the readings for that episode like six years ago, which is kind of crazy to say.
JM:
It is crazy. It was a very different podcast.
Nate:
It was, yeah. I mean, episode one is definitely hard to listen to, I think, for a lot of reasons. The technical stuff, especially microphone quality, wasn’t good. I didn’t really know how to edit stuff. But yeah, the podcast changes over time, and that’s good.
But yeah, both of these "City of Brass" stories — this one from volume six, the longer of the two — only have very, very brief instances of the enchanted statues and fantastic elements. So yeah, not 100% sure, but I think it was this one from volume six here.
The middle of this volume contains a bunch of Battle-of-the-Sexes-type short stories, which alternate between the craftiness and wicked ways of women, and then are contrasted with stories that deal with the craftiness and wicked ways of men. And then the volume ends with two stories, "Judar and His Brethren" being a really, really awesome adventure story. And then the one after that is the first part of a much longer story, which gets concluded in volume seven.
So yeah, definitely some interesting reading from last time, and we have some interesting reading coming up tonight. But before we get into that, you can find us on all major podcast platforms, on Apple and Spotify, and we post our episodes on YouTube. You can also check out our Blogspot, which especially is very, very important tonight because we’re presenting a lot of original translations for you tonight. So, some new stuff from stuff that’s old, which we really like to do on the podcast, as it really goes to show that the well really never ends. Even dealing with authors who were writing 75 years ago, there’s no shortage of new stuff to be discovered.
So yeah, you can check out our original translations, as well as our episode transcriptions, on the Blogspot — including, just four of the authors tonight, can I count? seven, eight stories we’re covering tonight? Because we’re doing a couple of stories by the same author tonight. But yeah, again, check out our Blogspot. We have lots of really, really cool stuff up there, which is chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com. And you can also send us an email at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter at @ChrononautsSF, or on Facebook at facebook.com/chrononautspodcast.
Last time on Chrononauts, we took a look at "Galaxy Magazine," which was arguably the most influential and important science fiction magazine to launch in the United States in the 1950s, and possibly the most influential and important science fiction magazine from the second generation of science fiction magazines. "Amazing Stories" and "Astounding" solidified the science fiction magazine itself, but with "Amazing Stories"’ launch in 1926 and "Astounding" in 1930, by the time we get to 1950, when "Galaxy Magazine" launches, the market had significantly changed, and we are basically 20-plus years into the pulp magazine science fiction era at that point.
We discussed this at length in our last episode, but for this episode we want to focus on another aspect of "Galaxy Magazine," namely its international reach. While magazines like "Amazing Stories" were certainly sold outside of the United States, including a pretty incredible report from one of the readers that it was being sold in Shanghai, these magazines, generally speaking, did not have a large presence in other languages. While there was a Japanese-language edition of "Amazing Stories," it didn’t launch until 1950, and most of the time, when stories from "Amazing Stories" or "Astounding" appeared in non-English magazines, the individual stories were specifically licensed to appear elsewhere. It wasn’t like they had a French version of "Amazing Stories" that was just reprints of the entire issue of "Amazing Stories."
But "Galaxy Magazine" was a bit different in that it launched editions of the magazine itself in several countries. Mike Ashley, in his book "Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970," lists local editions of "Galaxy" that were published in Italy, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, and somewhat Argentina. Some of these local editions of "Galaxy" didn’t last for very long, and others had massive impact, especially in Argentina. We’ll be talking about Argentina at length later in the episode, and why the Argentine magazine "Más Allá," or "Beyond," is somewhat a Spanish edition of "Galaxy," but not quite 100%.
But we’d like to start off the episode focusing on the flow of international science fiction into the United States from other markets. As we’ve always said in Chrononauts, science fiction is not American or British, but worldwide, and it really sells the genre short to only focus on works from America and the United Kingdom.
In 1967, Galaxy Publishing Corporation launched the magazine "International Science Fiction," edited by Frederik Pohl, who at the time was also the editor of "Galaxy Magazine." While it only ran for two issues, it did exactly what the title implies: that is, it brought translated versions of stories from all over the world into English. In particular, it published translated stories from Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Poland, India, Austria, Chile, and, of course, one story that was originally written in Esperanto, because why not?
Both issues are easily accessible online through the Luminist Archives. And while I couldn’t find any concrete discussion about the failure of the magazine online, it would seem that Pohl blamed poor distribution for the failures of some of the other short-lived magazines that Galaxy Publishing tried around this time.
So tonight, we’re going to be taking a look at two stories that were published in this magazine, the first from the Soviet Union, which Gretchen will be telling us about.
(music: spacey echo)
"Wanderers and Travellers" discussion, spoiler summary
Gretchen:
We have previously covered the Strugatskys on the podcast in an episode where we covered "Roadside Picnic," the novel that was, of course, adapted into Andrei Tarkovsky’s film "Stalker." So if you are curious about the lives of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, please check out that episode.
The story that we are covering here tonight is "Wanderers and Travellers," which was first published in "Fantastika 1963" and republished in the first issue of "International Science Fiction" in November of 1967.
It was really cool to read this story by the Strugatskys. I feel like it kind of covers some of the similar themes that we see in "Roadside Picnic," at least with this idea of people going into somewhere that has a lot of mystery, and coming out changed, or having something happen to them that transforms them in a way.
Nate:
Yeah, it has some interesting musings on contacting alien life and what it means for different scales of intelligence.
JM:
It had an interesting way of going about it because I thought, at first, they sort of thought, “Oh, we’re on an alien planet,” right? I was reading this, and I think I was maybe a little bit tired when I started the story, so it took me a little bit to figure out, “Oh, okay, they’re not. They’re just hanging out here on this ocean area.” But they use it as a springboard for all this philosophical musing. It’s very melancholy and kind of hopeful, but also kind of not going anywhere. It’s a little mysterious in a creepy way. I don’t know. It was interesting.
I think in terms of — I mean, I don’t mean to obviously set us up for anything here — but in terms of the stories we have tonight, some of them are a little bit thin, right? There’s not a lot really going on beneath the surface, maybe in a couple of them. But this is what I would expect from the Strugatskys. It’s very thoughtful. It’s a different way of approaching first contact and stuff like that. It’s not very in your face. It’s kind of abstract. You don’t really even know fully by the end of the story whether a first contact has taken place. But there definitely seems to be something, something going on. And there’s a parallel between perhaps what humans do and what aliens might do if they found us and didn’t quite realize what was going on.
JM:
So it was interesting, and probably in some ways the most interesting story of this batch today.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, I really like how it contrasts how we, I guess still in the present day, tag animals with tracking devices to monitor their behavior and see what they do. Some in a more intrusive way and some not that intrusive, but the animals generally have no idea what’s going on in the process. I mean, maybe a cow can feel a tag in its ear, or a seven-legged octopus can feel a module that gets shot into it by a rifle or something like that. But I guess once it gets used to it, it just kind of goes about its business and does its thing.
And I like how this story brings up the idea, well, what if that’s what’s happening to us? We just wouldn’t be able to conceive, necessarily, of how we would be monitored, how we would be seen by a force that’s so much greater than us. And yeah, it just really leaves a lot of stuff in the background.
JM:
It was kind of cool because when I read this, I had just rewatched the 1970s science fiction film "Phase IV." I don’t know if either of you have seen that film, but it’s basically about ants in a certain region suddenly becoming hyper-organized and developing an intelligence based on a hive mind. And they start to basically hold the humans under siege. Just describing it, it sounds like one of those 1970s animal-attack kind of movies, but it’s actually a lot more cerebral than that. It’s just really interesting the way it’s done. There’s almost a drama of the ants that’s just as serious as the drama of the human characters. There are only like three characters in the movie, really.
The idea of communicating with something that’s so far removed from us, and how we perceive each other — what do we think when we see each other doing things that we think are intelligent actions and actions that are premeditated by our own human desires? What about creatures that have other desires, or other purposes, that are maybe just as intelligent in their way? The story kind of did resonate with that in my head just because I had just watched it again. Kind of an interesting parallel that developed for me here with this one.
Nate:
Yeah, I’m not entirely sure about the chronological timeline, but this might have been one of the first, if not the first, Strugatsky brothers stories translated into English. Certainly this predates "Roadside Picnic" by several years.
JM:
Yeah, I think so. This was pretty early for them in general, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah, that does make sense. I feel like some of the ideas that we get about the relationships that humans might have with aliens, and the unknowable quality that would exist between them, are echoed in this story. I think that they both have that in common.
Nate:
Yeah, I have to give credit to the translator too, because some of the other volumes of translated Soviet science fiction I’ve read that were translated in the ’60s — the translations can be a little bit stiff at times, for sure.
JM:
Yeah. I mean, I definitely read a couple other Strugatsky shorts that I found on the internet way, way back in the day, and I had a lot of trouble with them. I was really struggling with the translation. I’m like, “Is this just a really experimental story, or do I just not have a clue what the hell is happening?”
I definitely think that some of the Soviet science fiction, when it made it into English, was undersold by the efforts in translation, from what I can tell. Not so much "Roadside Picnic," maybe, but some of the other stuff.
Nate:
I mean, the Strugatskys are interesting because they do leave a lot in the background. They do leave a lot unsaid, and that’s definitely intentional. But also the Russian language is just so much more terse than English, and it has an elaborate case system to kind of link all the pieces together, rather than some of the articles and prepositions and things like that that we actually spell out in English. So it can lead to some awkward translation choices, for sure.
I really don’t like the title "Hard to Be a God." Just, why not say it like, “It’s hard Being God,” or something like that? And even — yeah, right?
JM:
Well, it’s kind of the same when we did "Heart of a Dog." It’s like, do we call it "The Dog’s Heart" or "The Heart of a Dog"?
Nate:
Exactly.
JM:
Yeah, I don’t know. It sounds almost better if you just say "The Dog’s Heart," right?
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But yeah, I mean, I have to give credit where credit is due. "International Science Fiction" didn’t seem like it sold a lot of copies, and it was only around for two issues. So I’m sure the process of getting translators to work competently, especially in the pre-internet era and in all these different languages, was not an easy feat whatsoever. I’m sure they had no shortage of translators willing to jump at bit at the Esperanto story.
JM:
But can we just talk for a second about how cool it is?
When was this originally published in "International Science Fiction" — ’67?
Nate:
’67, yeah.
Gretchen:
And it was first published in "Fantastika 1963."
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so we’re still really, really paranoid about Russia. And this is bad. I bet "Galaxy" lost a subscription or two.
Gretchen:
Oh, yeah.
JM:
You know, there are some people that comment on the YouTube channel, like, “You lost a subscriber today. I can’t believe you said that.” It’s like, “You published this weird Russky story. What’s wrong with you?"
Gretchen:
You can’t be exposing the Soviets.
Nate:
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. Campbell and those other, I guess, more right-wing-leaning people, who are very much anti-communist, probably wouldn’t like that. And they published a couple other Soviet short stories in issue number two as well. So yeah, I think the anti-communist stuff was probably mellowing out a bit by the late ’60s in comparison to the height of the whole McCarthyism era in the ’50s, but it had still definitely not gone away.
JM:
It was still there, but it was definitely not quite as virulent, I guess.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, from what I’ve seen, it seems like especially around the late ’60s, I’ve seen a lot of different translated anthologies or collections of stories from the Soviets in print in the U.S. There’s the one translated by Judith Merril, and there are a couple other ones that I’ve seen.
JM:
It was probably like people were really becoming interested. And, of course, you have to check up on "Star Trek" by then. I guess it was 1967, right? So the space race — that was the big thing, obviously, at that time, right? And so maybe on some level, some people were able to view this as a kind of reason why science fiction should band together internationally, and think about the future, think about what’s to come, even though there’s this big rivalry going on between the USSR and the U.S.A.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, it’s definitely an interesting time for the Soviets too, as far as their science fiction community goes. As we discussed when we talked about the ’20s Soviet short stories and magazine form, the magazine field in the Soviet Union was basically dead throughout the ’30s, the ’40s, and the ’50s, and really only starts going again in the early 1960s. So this is kind of the resurgence of the genre.
Yeah. It’s just interesting from a lot of different angles.
Gretchen:
So should I get into the details of the story?
JM:
Yeah, definitely. I think with these, when we talk about the next guy, just kind of briefly say what happens in the story and then kind of talk about it, because a lot of these are so short, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yes. So the story begins with a man named Stanislav Ivanovich sitting at the bottom of a lake and waiting to spot a septopod to mark. He wonders if his daughter, Masha, is growing worried about the amount of time he’s been under, whether she is preparing to dive down for him. But then he sees a septopod and hits it with his marking rifle.
He emerges from the lake to find Masha, not about to come after him in the water, but chatting with a stranger. This other man is named Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky, and he is an astro-archaeologist. He admires a dragonfly and its simple life, but Masha calls the insect merely a machine. Leonid then describes a giant dragonfly with a seven-meter wingspan he encountered on a planet known as Pandora. Stanislav says the two creatures have in common their information-handling process, reacting by instinct, but Leonid says that those are just words, that he only knows he and the dragonfly differ in intellect through intuition.
However, he knows that there is Reason in the universe, and feels that there are beings who are more advanced than humans and at a different stage of intelligence. He refers to the "Voice of Empty Space," which he explains to a curious Masha as a phenomenon that occurs in certain areas of space where any wireless set for automatic tuning will eventually broadcast a voice repeating a sentence in an unknown tongue. Scientists still believing in human superiority have waved this phenomenon away.
He then changes the subject by asking Stanislav about his work. The latter man tells him about the septopods, that though they are sea creatures, they have recently been appearing in freshwater places such as the lake alongside them. Some septopods, Stanislav says, have even been found on dry land, though they weren’t alive when found.
Though Masha is busy with the radio looking for the "Voice" Leonid mentioned, Leonid himself is very interested, and eventually finds in the septopods’ venturing from salt water to fresh water, and then on to dry land, an analogy for human beings venturing into space.
After this observation, Masha turns to a station to find it broadcasting strange signals, which Leonid claims are coming from him. He, two other pilots, and their spaceship have become the source of radio waves. Leonid says one of the pilots has traveled as far from Earth as possible, while the second now works at a submarine station.
“Only I remain here,” he says, “wandering around and signaling, and all the time I expect something to happen.”
Leonid gets up to leave, but before he does, he tells Stanislav to be more considerate of marking the septopods and what effect it might have on them. Once he has departed, Stanislav gets back to work. Regarding Leonid’s worries about greater beings out there, he doesn’t think it’s worth getting too concerned about: “Most likely we won’t even notice one another’s existence. What do they care about us, after all?”
Nate:
Yeah, it’s really brief, but it’s a really cool comparison and contrast between the previously unknown septopod just peeking its head out of the saltwater deep into fresh water and then onto land, in the same way that humanity would eventually, I guess, peek its head out of Earth’s atmosphere and out of the solar system and into the interstellar cosmos, where who knows what’s going to be lurking out there, who knows what’s going to be watching us emerge, just kind of clueless and stumbling around in a totally new and unfamiliar environment.
JM:
Yeah. That’s why I think this story has one very obvious kicker moment that’s super, super eerie. She tunes in the radio and they’re getting this weird signal. I don’t know, this really didn’t quite come across in the translation, but I was kind of wondering if maybe she was like, “Oh, it’s the Voice from outer space,” and she wasn’t really thinking about that that seriously. And he’s like, “No, actually, it’s me.” And it was just like, that was the moment that made me just sit up and go, “Whoa. Oh, okay.” And that was really, really cool.
Yeah, this comes to the general sense I had about this story, and it’s not necessarily a complaint, but I kind of felt like we were in the middle of something, right? Because I had read a few Strugatsky shorter pieces many years ago, and I actually started wondering if one of these characters was familiar, or certain things were familiar. I seem to remember something about a planet called Pandora, and now I’m thinking, “Okay, maybe it’s in the middle of something.”
And then there’s the strange fact that I guess he’s been marked and he’s radio-transmitting, but then it’s like, well, he’s not the only one. And I mean, I don’t know, don’t you think realistically they would probably have kept those people somewhere, kept them isolated or something like that, and not let them wander around? I mean, the human governments, right? You’d think that they would act upon that, especially since who knows what the purpose of the transmissions really are, right?
Again, it’s not really a complaint, because I think the story was a really effective mood piece, and I loved that kicker, right? But I just kind of can’t help but go on to the inevitable consequences of that. They know he’s transmitting. They know this is happening, and yet here he is wandering around, and he’s about to go back into space. Don’t you think they would be like, “Oh, he might be an alien spy”? Even if he doesn’t realize it, he’s obviously been compromised, right?
And it’s just like, all the space fiction we’re used to seeing, especially from back then, is just all so paranoid, right? I don’t know. Maybe again, it’s just the fact that it’s a Soviet-written piece that makes it somehow different. Again, it’s a very short story, but I kind of feel like if this were American, there’d be like a Secret Service guy hanging around or something like that. And there doesn’t seem to be anybody like that here. So it’s interesting.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I also think it’s even interesting — so Stanislav is the character that we’re getting the narration from — having it be sort of this outsider who just has this little encounter with someone who has apparently had some sort of experience with extraterrestrial life, or something that has affected him like this. It’s really interesting that we get it from that perspective.
Even by the end, we see that Stanislav hasn’t really taken much of this to heart or been as impacted by this as, he says, Masha is. She is still kind of thinking about it, but he’s thinking, “Oh, well, Leonid is just paranoid about this,” or is worrying too much about this. And I think even that attitude that the main character takes is really interesting: not taking it very seriously and still sort of seeing this as just a bizarre encounter, rather than what the audience — like what J.M. is saying with the kicker moment — would feel. We’re kind of more engaged in this, while the narrator just kind of is like, “I wouldn’t take that to heart.”
Nate:
And I do like the little bit of humor they put in here, with Stanislav really overexplaining his work to Masha and Leonid, and them just kind of glazing over and losing interest really fast.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I do like the glimpses of Stanislav and Masha’s relationship. I do think it’s a very funny moment at the beginning where Stanislav is thinking, “Oh, Masha’s probably getting really worried about me being down here at the bottom of the lake. She might try to dive in and see if I’m okay.” And he comes up to the surface and she’s talking with Leonid and hasn’t really noticed him, and he kind of feels a bit hurt by it. It’s just a fun little moment there.
Nate:
They do like writing these quirky kind of characters, and I really appreciate that.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
It’s kind of a family story too. It’s a really weird juxtaposition because, yeah, it feels kind of wholesome, but then by the end you’re sort of creeped out. I don’t know, I was a little bit. It’s cool. It was definitely not a horror story or anything like that, but it’s kind of a way more subtle take on some of the crazy sci-fi movies that were popular at the time about what happens to the people that go into space, like "Quatermass" and stuff like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
It was still kind of creepy, but it wasn’t unsubtly scary, right? It was just kind of like the fear of the unknown, really. Also expectation, I guess, but also fear, right? It’s like, yeah, it’s going to be great, but it’s also going to be maybe really unsettling, and we’re not going to understand everything.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Reading "The Weird" recently, especially the "Voice of Empty Space," it feels like something I would encounter in one of the stories in that collection. It kind of reminds me of that story "The Night Wire," which is about this guy who is getting these telegrams from somewhere where there’s this weird fog taking over, and he’s getting them from his friend, who is typing them out from the telegram. It’s this very odd communication story.
I think I initially thought of that, and it does have sort of this horror connotation, this idea of this voice coming to you from the void of space. Even I think Leonid says it’s very eerie. It comes to you when you’re alone and everyone else is asleep or away. And it’s still kind of treated as not necessarily just horror, but still like something that you don’t understand. But maybe it’s not as concerning as Leonid first makes it out to be.
JM:
Yeah, I do think in a lot of ways this story is the most justifying of the "Galaxy" formula expanding to, “Hey, let’s see some stories from Russia. Let’s see what those writers are doing.” And I think that there’s a good reason that the Strugatskys managed to get popular in their way outside. It seems like it’s only grown over time now, right? There’s definitely a unique character to it.
This is very different from "Roadside Picnic," but a very enjoyable little piece, and not long to read. It took me a minute to get into it because, yeah, it was just so peaceful and relaxing, hanging out by the ocean, and the kind of thing where, if you’re in a certain mood and you start to read that, I was getting a little sleepy or something. But then when I picked it up again, obviously, it was just like, “Oh, yeah,” and I raced through it. It’s such an effective little piece. So I’m not really spoiling anything, but this is probably the best of the set, honestly, in terms of just being a cool story that you’ll remember.
So we’re going to move over to Italy, and we’re going to talk about a man who’s most famous for not writing science fiction short stories. That would be Luigi Cozzi, and the story "Rainy Day Revolution No. 39."
Bibliography:
WSFA Journal #51, Jan 1968https://fanac.org/fanzines//WSFA_Journal/wsfa_journal_51_miller_1968-01.pdf
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