Social Science Fiction - The Genre in The Eastern Bloc

The Genre in The Eastern Bloc

All science fiction of the Soviet era had to subscribe to communist ideology, or else the author could face serious consequences — from a ban against being published to death under Joseph Stalin, imprisonment or psychiatric treatment under Leonid Brezhnev. There were poor and opportunistic works, there were works of talent touched by ideology (e.g. 1923 Aelita or 1926 The Garin Death Ray by Alexei Tolstoy), there were non-ideological works describing the happy future of humankind (some works of Kir Bulychev and Ivan Efremov), but also such writers as Mikhail Bulgakov, Evgeny Shvarts and Boris and Arkady Strugatsky who chose the hard way of "balancing" on the edge, struggling not to betray their views while avoiding punishment for expressing them.

The 1920s brought Andrey Platonov and Yevgeny Zamyatin, but it was not until the time of Perestroika that their works were published in the Soviet Union.

One exception is an example of critique under Stalin — Evgeny Shvarts' play The Dragon (1944), showing how totalitarianism thrusts its roots into the hearts of the people.

The next period of science fiction in the Soviet Union was shaped by the greater liberalization of the Nikita Khrushchev regime, advances of science, and the beginning of the space age.

In 1957 Ivan Efremov wrote the utopian Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale, revealing a harmonious space-exploring civilization of the distant future, whose culture took much from antique art. His further works included Razor's Edge (1963) emphasizing narrowness of the way of successful development of a civilization, and the dystopian The Bull's Hour (1968).

Amongst the best known social science fiction is the Noon Universe of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, designed to be a future world of "communism", where creative work is considered the highest purpose, but unlike utopian worlds, Noon Universe is settled by real people. The rise of reaction, initiated by Khrushchev's public criticism of modern art and literature in 1963, showed to Strugatsky that "while for us communism was a world of freedom and creativity, for them it was the society, in which the population fulfilled immediately and with pleasure all precepts of the Party and the government". This largely affected their Hard to be a God (1963).

Suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 ultimately ruined Strugatsky's dreams about the Soviet rule. Another Noon Universe novel, Prisoners of Power (1969), somehow alluding to Soviet Union describes Maxim Kammerer, crashed on an unknown planet in the wrecked Land of Fathers, and his attempt to destroy the system of transmission which deprived his new friends of ability of critical thinking.

Kin-dza-dza! is a Soviet comedy taking place on other planets which makes fun of capitalism, classism, and cultural centrism.

Social science fiction turned out to be a powerful means to respond to real situations in communist countries. While communist rules did not allow any critique, one possibility was to veil it as a science fiction world. In the 1980s the genre called 'sociological fantasy' (fantastyka sociologiczna) arose in the People's Republic of Poland. It focused on the development of societies, generally dominated by totalitarian governments. This genre was represented by writers like Janusz A. Zajdel (Limes Inferior, Paradyzja), Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński (Apostezjon trilogy), Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg or Marek Oramus. Books from that genre were based in different times (usually in the future), and usually were pretexts for analysing structures of the described societies, being full of allusions to reality. After the revolutions of 1989, when using real world examples became as safe in former Eastern Bloc countries as in their Western counterparts, this genre mostly transformed itself into a political fiction, represented by writers such as Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz.