Kir Bulychev, Orbit, Moscow, 1991
I consider Kir Bulychev perhaps the best writer of SF in the Russian language. His Great Guslyar stories are deservedly very popular in what was the Soviet Union. In THE SECRET OF URALGAN he presents us with what is billed as, "An old-fashioned science-fiction story," and indeed to this lover of such stories from before the Great War it has that wondrous aged quality.
It is more than the style, something simpler about the language, very noticeable to this barely literate barbarian who has an easier time reading it, as he has with all Russian he has seen from this period.
It is more than the leisurely approach to the science-fiction element. As Jules Verne in his L'ETONNANTE AVENTURE DE LA MISSION BARSAC, Kir Bulychev takes his time, and it is really in the second half of the novel that we are fully aware that we are reading a science-fiction story. In THE BARSAC EXPEDITION the English reader really has to wait for the second book of the Ace translation before he fully encounters Chief Harry Killer and his remarkable CITY IN THE SAHARA.
This is not to say that the first half of either book is dull, especially keeping in mind the times these stories are set in. Both are filled with the wonder of the exploration of far off and exotic places (for those not living there). Verne takes us on an expedition deep into the Dark Continent, INTO THE NIGER BEND. Bulychev takes us into scarcely better known Siberia along and away from the waters of the northern reaches of the Lena. In the Russian story there is more than enough happening simply in the interaction of the quite motly crew of characters that have come together to search for a lost British arctic explorer, and to hunt for the meteor.
Kir Bulychev has really assembled a remarkable cast: a German professor, an English lady and her Ceylonese servant, an exiled Bolshevik revolutionary, an English gentleman (well, not really) and his supposed Chinese servant, who turns out to be neither Chinese nor a servant, simply to begin the list. To end that cast, of course, we arrive at the extra-terrestrial. For, naturally, the astonishing meteor which has struck Siberia is nothing less than a space ship from another world, whose injured pilot is discovered by these representatives of many of Earth's nations and almost none of the higher human qualities.
Kir Bulychev poignantly presents the two visions that SF writers before the Great War were placing in their pages. On the one hand is the alien (as the Martians in the 1893 classic AUF ZWEI PLANETEN) shocked at the savage conditions of life on Earth and eager to lend a helping hand to uplift humanity to true civilization. On the other is the terrifying prospect of his failure to summon aid and the projections he shares with the Earthlings, that within a generation the awesome might of the atom will be used in war. At the time this story is set, a year or so before the outbreak of World War One, H.G. Wells was writing his prophetic THE WORLD SET FREE with its atomic bombs, one of which dropped on a city sufficed to destroy it. And with the greatest irony, in Bulychev's story when the alien reveals our deadly destiny, one character shouts, "Good, may my nation be the first to develop these weapons." He is, of course, the intrepid samurai spy, Lord Minamoto.
This story has that wondrous flavour of Jules Verne whom some call the father of science-fiction. And I regret the modern realistic depiction of the very human characters that cannot overcome my great enjoyment of this recent book from a master storyteller.
The anthology SF #34 (Moscow 1991) contains a very interesting short story by Kir Bulychev. It is "Rescue Galya," a tale both humorous and cautionary about an expedition into a forbidden zone to rescue a girl who disappeared there. The description of this zone reminds the reader of the Strugatskis' ROADSIDE PICNIC, a novel in which Earth scientists are investigating the phenomena following an alien stopover here (in Canada!). However, the bizarre region in Bulychev's story turns out significantly to be the city dump.
The above article appeared in the December 1991 edition of the OSFS STATEMENT.
Solarguard Russia and Eastern Europe