Let us remember among SF’s martyrs the famed Soviet SF writer Izaak Yu. Azimov.
Born in Petrovichi, Russia (now in Belarus) in 1920, Azimov attributed his introduction to the world of science and fiction to the fortutious decision of his father to relocate to Moscow, instead of emigrating, in mid-1920. “Had we emigrated to the capitalist countries,” Azimov said in an interview published in the late forties, “I would have been denied a higher education, condemned to unrewarding physical toil, and condignly punished had I happened to write. As is well known, expression of any opinion contrary to the views of the bourgeois oligarchy is potentially punishable by death. In the Soviet Union, I was encouraged to attend institutes of higher education and no obstacle was placed to my advancement, or to my writings.”
The key element in his decision to write what he called “fiction of scientific speculation”, or what in Western countries is called science fiction, seems to have been an encounter with students of rocketry, during Azimov’s studies in chemistry at Moscow University, at which he was a Stalin Student. Attracted by their interest and enthusiasm, Azimov learned that Russian rocketry theorist Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky had begun his interest in space flight through reading the works of Jules Verne. He speedily devoured all the Verne available, going on to read the works of H. G. Wells, even learning English to be able to read more.
It was at that time that he learned of the flourishing market in American pulp literature of what was then more commonly referred to as “scientifiction”. This was however unavailable to him at the time due to currency restrictions. The fact that such stories were still being written seems to have encouraged him to do so himself.
Even then, a number of Soviet popular-science magazines occasionally published a work of “scientific fiction”, and it was in such publications that Azimov’s work first appeared. His first published story “The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use” (1939) described how the World Soviet, faced with an onslaught from the Empire of the Asteroids, a settlement of reactionaries and white guards, employed a device developed in the Stalin Laboratories in Moscow to evaporate the Asteroid Emperor, after which the surviving Asteroides petitioned to be admitted as the Asteroid SSR.
His principal achievement came however in 1940, when a chance reading of Karel Capek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” persuaded him that “under the shining scientific light of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism there must be rules for such creations”. This insight led him to begin writing the famous Robot Series, about the adventures of roboticist Svetlana Engels, robot investigators Dymchenko and Popov, and their explorations of the Three Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Laws of Robotics. During the war he wrote over a dozen of these works, all of which were published in various Soviet popular-science magazines.
To be continued . . .
Born in Petrovichi, Russia (now in Belarus) in 1920, Azimov attributed his introduction to the world of science and fiction to the fortutious decision of his father to relocate to Moscow, instead of emigrating, in mid-1920. “Had we emigrated to the capitalist countries,” Azimov said in an interview published in the late forties, “I would have been denied a higher education, condemned to unrewarding physical toil, and condignly punished had I happened to write. As is well known, expression of any opinion contrary to the views of the bourgeois oligarchy is potentially punishable by death. In the Soviet Union, I was encouraged to attend institutes of higher education and no obstacle was placed to my advancement, or to my writings.”
The key element in his decision to write what he called “fiction of scientific speculation”, or what in Western countries is called science fiction, seems to have been an encounter with students of rocketry, during Azimov’s studies in chemistry at Moscow University, at which he was a Stalin Student. Attracted by their interest and enthusiasm, Azimov learned that Russian rocketry theorist Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky had begun his interest in space flight through reading the works of Jules Verne. He speedily devoured all the Verne available, going on to read the works of H. G. Wells, even learning English to be able to read more.
It was at that time that he learned of the flourishing market in American pulp literature of what was then more commonly referred to as “scientifiction”. This was however unavailable to him at the time due to currency restrictions. The fact that such stories were still being written seems to have encouraged him to do so himself.
Even then, a number of Soviet popular-science magazines occasionally published a work of “scientific fiction”, and it was in such publications that Azimov’s work first appeared. His first published story “The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use” (1939) described how the World Soviet, faced with an onslaught from the Empire of the Asteroids, a settlement of reactionaries and white guards, employed a device developed in the Stalin Laboratories in Moscow to evaporate the Asteroid Emperor, after which the surviving Asteroides petitioned to be admitted as the Asteroid SSR.
His principal achievement came however in 1940, when a chance reading of Karel Capek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” persuaded him that “under the shining scientific light of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism there must be rules for such creations”. This insight led him to begin writing the famous Robot Series, about the adventures of roboticist Svetlana Engels, robot investigators Dymchenko and Popov, and their explorations of the Three Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Laws of Robotics. During the war he wrote over a dozen of these works, all of which were published in various Soviet popular-science magazines.
To be continued . . .
