Russian speculative fiction

Russian science fiction emerged in the mid-19th century and rose to its prominence during the Soviet era, both in cinema and literature, with writers like the Strugatsky brothers, Kir Bulychov, and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others.

While science fiction did not emerge in Russia as a coherent genre until the early 20th century, many of its aspects, such as utopia or imaginary voyage, are found in earlier Russian works.

Pseudo-historical heroic romances in classical settings (modeled on Fenelon's Telemaque) by Fyodor Emin, Mikhail Kheraskov, Pavel Lvov and Pyotr Zakharyin were also utopian.

Some of Faddei Bulgarin's tales are set in the future, others exploited themes of hollow earth and space flight, as did Osip Senkovsky's Fantastic Voyages of Baron Brambeus.

[3][4] Authors of Gothic stories included Aleksandr Bestuzhev with his German couleur locale, Sergey Lyubetsky, Vladimir Olin, Alexey K. Tolstoy, Elizaveta Kologrivova and Mikhail Lermontov ("Stoss").

Popular literature used fantastic motifs like demons (Rafail Zotov's Qin-Kiu-Tong), invisibility (Ivan Shteven's Magic Spectacles) and shrinking men (Vasily Alferyev's Picture).

[7] Some of Fyodor Dostoevsky's short works also use fantasy: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (about the corruption of the utopian society on another planet), a doppelgänger novella The Double: A Petersburg Poem, mesmeric The Landlady, and a comic horror story Bobok.

Entertainment fiction adopted scientistic themes, such as resurrection of an ancient Roman (Extraordinary Story of a Resurrected Pompeian by Vasily Avenarius), global disaster (Struggle of the Worlds, 1900, by N. Kholodny; Under the Comet, 1910, by Simon Belsky), mind reading devices (a recurring theme in works by Andrey Zarin), Antarctic city-states (Under the Glass Dome, 1914, by Sergey Solomin), an elixir of longevity (Brothers of the Saint Cross, 1898, by Nikolay Shelonsky), and Atlantis (1913, by Larisa Reisner).

Two notable exclusions from Soviet 'Wellsian' tradition were Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of dystopian novel We (1924), and Mikhail Bulgakov, who contributed to science fiction with Heart of a Dog (1925), The Fatal Eggs (1925) and Ivan Vasilyevich (1936).

The following Stalin era, from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, saw a period of stagnation in Soviet science fiction, because of heavy censorship that forced the writers to adopt socialist realism cliches.

[14] Algis Budrys described postwar Russian science fiction as akin to the style of Hugo Gernsback: "Ah, Comrade, here among the marvels of the year 2000 ... we are free to discuss dialectical materialism in total tranquility".

[15] In the second half of the 20th century, Soviet science fiction authors, inspired by the Thaw period of the 1950 and 1960s and the country's space pioneering, developed a more varied and complex approach.

Social science fiction, concerned with philosophy, ethics, utopian and dystopian ideas, became the prevalent subgenre;[16] Budrys said in 1968, when reviewing a collection translated into English, that Russian authors had "discovered John Campbell", with stories that "read like they were from the back pages of circa 1950 Astoundings".

A recurring theme in Strugatskies' fiction were progressors: agents of utopian future Earth who secretly spread scientistic and social progress to underdeveloped planets.

The brothers are also credited for the Soviet's first science fantasy, the Monday Begins on Saturday trilogy (1964), and their post-apocalyptic novel Roadside Picnic (1971) is often believed to have been a prediction of the Chernobyl disaster.

Soviet cinema developed a tradition of science fiction films, with directors like Pavel Klushantsev, Andrey Tarkovsky, Konstantin Lopushansky, Vladimir Tarasov, Richard Viktorov and Gennady Tischenko.

SF short stories were usually present in either popular science magazines, such as Tekhnika Molodezhi, Vokrug sveta and Uralsky Sledopyt, or in literary anthologies, such as Mir Priklyucheniy, that also included adventure, history and mystery.

Of the rare exceptions, Bulgakov in Master and Margarita (not published in author's lifetime), the Strugatskies in Monday Begins on Saturday and Vladimir Orlov in Danilov, the Violist introduced magic and mystical creatures into contemporary Soviet reality in a satirical and fabulous manner.

Most notably, Mio in the Land of Faraway (1987, co-produced with USA and Sweden) was shot by a Soviet crew in the English language, and featured Christoper Lee and Christian Bale.

Urban and gothic fantasy, virtually absent in the Soviet Union, became notable in modern Russia after the success of Sergey Lukyanenko's Night Watch and Vadim Panov's Secret City.

Post-apocalyptic fiction, time travel and alternate history are among the most popular genres, represented by authors like Vyacheslav Rybakov, Yuri Nikitin and Yulia Latynina among many others.

Overuse of fish-out-of-water plots for time travel and parallel worlds led Russian SF&F journalists to coin the ironic term popadanets (Rus.

There are still many writers of traditional space-related science fiction including space operas, such as Alexander Zorich (Tomorrow War series), Lukyanenko (Lord from Planet Earth) and Andrey Livadny, among others.

The late 2000s and early 2010s saw a rise of Russian Steampunk, with such books as Alexey Pekhov's Mockingbird (2009), Vadim Panov's Hermeticon (2011), and Cetopolis (2012) by Gray F. Green (a collective pen name).

[21] And though Metro 2033 raised its creator Dmitry Glukhovsky to national fame, it quickly developed into a franchise, with over 15 books published by various authors[22] and spanned a tie-in videogame.

Production of science fiction and fantasy films in modern Russia dropped in comparison to Soviet cinema, due to high costs of visual effects.

In modern Russia, a notable award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine and internet site is Mir Fantastiki, while Esli and Polden, XXI vek [ru] have closed down after the Great Recession.

[23] The first (and for the long time the only) true Soviet space opera was Flaming Abysses (Russian: Пылающие бездны) by Nikolay Mukhanov (Николай Муханов) published in 1924.

After a period of friendship of the Earthlings and the ancient race of Martians, a war erupts for a newly discovered resource, with numerous kinds of death rays and destructions of satellites.

Writted during "Khrushchev's Thaw" The novel boldly broke the limits of ideologically proscribed "close-range science fiction [ru]", following the path of Ivan Yefremov's Andromeda Nebula with its travel far beyond the Solar System, while still within the framework of communist utopia, adherence to scientific veracity and without any direct interplanetary encounters.