Faster Than Light: The Poetics of Fuel Economy and Utopia in Ivan Yefremov’s 'Andromeda'

• In Event: Soviet Energy Humanities: Resource Extraction in the Russophone Imagination

Abstract

This paper will explore the ways in which limitations on fuel and travel dictate the reach of utopia in Ivan Yefremov’s 1957 novel Andromeda, and situate the novel in the context of contemporaneous Soviet energy policy on the cusp of the Thaw. As a simultaneous limitation on and driver of interstellar colonization, fuel is the unsung force behind the utopian idealists that populate Yefremov’s novel, paralleling the ways in which energy economies both glorify and disguise their own reliance on extraction.

Author

• Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen, U of Michigan