Étoiles rouges. La littérature de la science-fiction soviétique by Viktoriya and Patrice Lajoye

Abstract

185 BOOKS IN REVIEW discourses to show how genre cuts across fields and media. Jerng reconfigures what are often called “tropes” as “genres”—a seemingly subtle distinction but a powerful one. Genres create worlds that operate according to certain rules, customs, and variations on a theme. Genres create affordances, which allow some possibilities and not others, allow certain histories, futures, and interpretations to be salient and not others. Dragons are affordances of fantasy; cyborgs are affordances of sf. It is not that those figures cannot be found in other genres, but they are more salient in some generic locations than others. So too with racial genres and the figures, tropes, and interpretations they afford. This book is an important contribution to critical race studies within sf and I recommend it to any reader of SFS interested in race. Just as I suspect we as a group all accept it when Philip K. Dick turns the world inside out, I similarly predict we will easily grasp and accede to Jerng’s arguments about the power of worldbuilding and the connections between genre fiction and the “real” world. It is in his careful analysis of the mechanisms of that worldbuilding as they pertain to race that Jerng truly offers us something novel. And as is so often the case, I find myself wanting to recommend this book to people other than sf scholars. It is probably those who do not spend as much time thinking about worldbuilding who will find Jerng’s study most revelatory. We make these worlds. We could make them differently. —Elizabeth Lundberg, The University of Iowa Distant Constellations: Looking Backward at Soviet Science Fiction. Viktoriya and Patrice Lajoye. Étoiles rouges. La littérature de la sciencefiction soviétique [Red Stars: Soviet Science Fiction Literature]. Paris: Piranha, 2017. 316 pp. $49.95 pbk. Viktoriya and Patrice Lajoye are well known to French-speaking readers as the foremost specialists in Russian sf in France. From 2009 to 2014 they maintained the only serious blog on the subject, Russkaya Fantastika, articles from which were edited into book form in 2013 under the same title. Together they translate and publish Slav legends and fantasy tales, as well as works of such writers as the Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov. They have published a number of articles, together and separately. Patrice Lajoye edited an excellent sf anthology, Dimension URSS (2009), and Viktoriya Lajoye edited a collection of essays entitled Aspects des littératures de l’imaginaire post-soviétiques [Aspects of post-Soviet imaginative literatures] in a special issue of La Revue russe (#43, 2014). In their new book, after a gap of decades since the end of the 1970s when a series of their essays and publications made the French public familiar with then-still-lively Soviet (and anti-Soviet) sf, utopian fiction, and fantasy, they now undertake to revisit this literature from a contemporary perspective. The title of the book, Red Stars, obvious as it seems, brings to mind not only the revolutionary emblem and the Soviet drive for cosmic exploration, but also the 1985 essay of the same name in which Patrick McGuire investigated the political aspects of Soviet sf and, last but not least, Alexander Bogdanov’s 186 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) famous utopia The Red Star (1908), which depicts a Communist society on Mars, the red planet. The Lajoyes’ title announces the subject and at the same time suggests its intricate intertextual and intercultural problematics. Right from the start, the authors cut the Gordian knot of labyrinthine developments. They declare in their foreword that their intention is not to present the results of academic research but, rather, to offer a subjective study based on their personal opinions, an accessible introduction to this particular body of a past literary production. That is precisely what the book is, an introduction aimed at sf fans as well as mainstream readers, teenagers as well as adults. It is written in a very articulate and lively manner. Without insisting too much on the literary analysis of the texts they examine, the authors are interested in whether the sf ideas they convey are sound or dilettantish, original or clichéd, close to Communist...