Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/21/red-star-tales-a-century-of-r.html
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Hell, Russian comedies are rarely cheerful or upbeat.
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well, I’ll grant you that Gentelmen of Fortune is pretty dark but stuff like Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures of Shurik and similar things are all up beat and cheerful. not to mention the writing genius of Ilya Ilf.
“In end, is life that is joke.” ~ Russian comic of stand up-type, Night at Apollo
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Russian pessimist: "Things can’t get any worse."
Russian optimist: “Sure they can!”
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“In your country, audience comes to see comedian get upbeat. In my country, audience comes to see comedian get beat up.”
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I’m not a connoisseur of Russian sci-fi by any means, but Roadside Picnic is a fantastic book!
– Donald Trump
Doomed City is also wonderful.
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So far enjoying this collection–especially the early writings like ‘On the Moon’ by Tsiokovksy…written in 1893!?!
I have several collections of Russian SciFi (‘Aliens, Travelers, and Other Strangers’, ‘World’s Spring’, ‘The Uncertainty Principle’, etc.), and can’t get enough of Russian SciFi. So it was exciting to find out about this one.
I was a bit surprised that there was no entry for Sever Gansovsky. Gansovsky appears in several previous collections. Gansovsky is, in my opinion, one of the best Russian SciFi writers.
Folks on BB probably know of him, and BB linked to Anatoliy Petrov’s 1977 animated ‘Polygon’, which is, I believe, Gansovsky’s short-story ‘Proving Ground’ (http://boingboing.net/2014/10/10/polygon-a.html ).
It’s exciting to see a renewed interest in Russian SciFi, including initiatives from Western SciFi writer’s, like Ursula LeGuin (‘Roadside Picnic’), in getting new editions and translations out there.
It seems for SciFi and Horror, at least in film, that it is the foreign stories–old and new–that are bolstering a rather stagnating Hollywood…
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