Russia and its World
Russia in all its aspects has always exerted a pull on me. Its history, art, music, food, landscapes, dress in all varied ethnic glory, and, above all, its literature have a special access to my attention. A major challenge is Russia’s colossal size and diversity of geography. Another continual surprise is the number of its distinctive peoples, each with unique folkways and histories. Russia has had some epic totalitarian regimes over its long history — but it also has been the home of some of the world’s greatest, most creative, and most influential anarchist philosophers. Russia is big enough and complex enough to handle all sorts of contradictions and paradoxes — and to claim them all proudly (and fatalistically, a classic Russian trait).
Over the years I have noticed that my store has become home to a great range of literature, fiction and nonfiction, of the Russian soul and mind and heart. I share it here and may update it as often as possible.
For over 100 years, most of the science fiction produced by the world’s largest country has been beyond the reach of Western readers. This new collection changes that, bringing a large body of influential works into the English orbit.
A scientist keeps a severed head alive, and the head lives to tell the tale… An explorer experiences life on the moon, in a story written six decades before the first moon landing... Electrical appliances respond to human anxieties and threaten to crash the electrical grid… Archaeologists discover strange powers emanating from a Central Asian excavation site… A teleporting experiment goes awry, leaving a subject to cope with a bizarre sensory swap… A boy discovers the explosive truth of his father’s “antiseptic” work, stamping out dissent on distant worlds…
The last 100 years in Russia have seen an astonishing diversity and depth of literary works in the science fiction genre, by authors with a dizzying array of styles and subject matter.
This volume brings together 18 such works, translated into English for the first time, spanning from path-breaking, pre-revolutionary works of the 1890s, through the difficult Stalinist era, to post-Soviet stories published in the 1980s and 1990s.
Reviews
"This is an impressive and ambitious anthology that reflects an admirably high quality of editorial skill and translator acumen. It is a clear marriage of pleasure and academic rigor as practiced by an estimable group of scholars and translators.... a singularly enjoyable and scholarly book that should serve as a gateway to Russian science fiction for readers of every stripe"
– Jonathan Stone, SEEJ Journal
"Red Star Tales is a labor of love by some of the top scholars and translators of Russian and Soviet science fiction… Howell’s introduction… is highly accessible to the non-specialist and, at the same time, an invaluable resource for the Russian scholar who may be new to science fiction…. The translations are excellent, and the book as a whole is carefully edited… One can only hope that the appearance of Red Star Tales marks an upsurge in the teaching of Russian and Soviet science fiction. Equally important, this collection is a fun read and opens a portal onto a fascinating world of speculative fiction previously unavailable to Anglophone science fiction fans."
– Eric Laursen, The Russian Review