Half-Lives: Remembering the Reception of Soviet Science Fiction

• In Event: Soviet Science Fiction of the 1950s and 1960s in the Context of Domestic and International Politics and Influences

Abstract

Writing in the Times Literary Supplement of March 6, 1967, the poet and lifelong Communist Randall Swingler hailed a new collection of Soviet science fiction, Path into the Unknown (1966), as 'dynamic inspiration [...] far more refreshing and straightforward than even the best baroque productions of the west'. He also noted, however, the volume's 'curiously off-hand' lack of a preface, or an editor, or any 'mention of translators'. This absence of translators foreshadowed a wider forgetting of their role in making Soviet science fiction visible abroad. This paper aims to partially recover the translation history of Cold War-era English-language editions of Soviet SF, re-tracing their dissemination from the first anthologies released in the 1960s and 1970s by left-leaning publishers like MacGibbon and Kee, or Victor Gollancz, to the popular novels later commissioned by mainstream presses from translators like Helen Saltz Jacobson and Antonina Bouis, often with prefaces by Theodore Sturgeon or other Western SF celebrities. These translations served radically different political functions: some exerted Soviet soft power abroad (like Path into the Unknown, underwritten by the state-run Novosti Publishers, or Kir Bulychev's classic for younger readers, Half A Life) while others were effectively tamizdat, such as Bouis's versions of novels by Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii, whose works could not be legally circulated in the Soviet Union. Relying on contemporaneous critical records as well as archival correspondence, this paper will explore the complex politics of the translation and reception of Soviet science fiction during the Cold War.

Author

• Muireann Maguire, U of Exeter (UK)