Idylls of the Same: Soviet SF, Cosmic Humanism, and Escape from History

Abstract

Why to revisit a civilization that is no more, a Socialist Atlantis swept away by the tide of history? SF looks to the future; why to poke through the rubble of a failed Utopia that — depending on your political orientation — is an embarrassment, a warning, or an irrelevance? The aliens did not save Russia from itself; who cares whether they were seen as enemies or as space brothers in the long-ago age of fake enthusiasm and true heroism, of sputniks and Gulags, of “cosmonauts and cannibals” (Moynahan 3)?