The Descriptive Prescriptivity of Geography, Imbued with Science Fiction

• In Event: Future Visions: Unpacking the Technological Imaginaries of Science Fiction

Abstract

Inspired by historical and contemporary maps of lake Baikal in Southern Siberia, this paper seeks to investigate cartography’s tension between descriptive and prescriptive practices. In doing so, I focus on Russian/Soviet geographer Boris Rodoman’s idiosyncratic brand of theoretical geography, which morphed into a prescriptive design practice later in his intellectual career. This change was influenced by science fiction (SF) authors such as Polish writer Stanislaw Lem and Russian writer and pioneer of rocket science Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and their modernist visions of the future of humanity.
Some of Rodoman’s main works, published in the 1970s, argued that Soviet modernity has “polarized” the biosphere through human intervention and “modernization” of cities and infrastructures, thus purging nature from culture and vice versa – an argument strongly resembling the Latourian notion of “purification”. After showing how modernity has spatially reworked nature and culture, Rodoman provides his readers with series of “cartoids” which show the ways in which this divide can and should be re-worked to the benefit of both humans and nature. During the same decade, Soviet SF was beginning to imagine a “nature” resisting human intervention and defying human reason.
The proposed paper demonstrates the competing conceptualizations of “nature” during the Soviet modernity by investigating the similarities and divergences between Rodoman’s geography, the SF texts which inspired it, and other Eastern bloc SF narratives problematizing the nature/culture divide. Furthermore, I compare these narratives to the conceptual map of Western theorizations of modernity and their critiques, including the notions of “alternative modernities” or “the off-modern”.

Author

• Konstantin Georgiev, Rice University