BOOK REVIEW
by Cyril Simsa
Reading through
the catalogue of Ivan Adamovič & Tomáš Pospiszyl's major new
exhibition, it occurred to me that the future has a problem.
If, as Pospiszyl
says in his introduction, the fall of Communism in Eastern and
Central Europe ushered in "the end of history" (to borrow
Francis Fukuyama's much disputed sound-bite of a phrase), does that
not logically imply that 1989 also marks the start of the end of the
future? And if there is no longer any real possibility of our ever
establishing a viable alternative to the kind of Western liberal
democracy that "won" the Cold War, what does that imply for
science fiction writers, whose whole raison
d'etre is based on envisioning just
such alternatives?
"It was not
always thus," writes Pospiszyl. "Not only did we once have
a history, we also had a future. It was, admittedly, a highly
debatable and problematic one, and horrific to many, but for all
that, it was there. Some conception of the way the future might turn
out to be did exist."
The focus of
Planeta Eden
is precisely this future that never was: the future as technocratic
socialist Utopia -- a visionary future of Young Pioneers and
twinkle-eyed Academicians, backed up by legions of shock workers,
conquering the stars -- with its roots in that curious historical
moment after the Second World War, when it seemed, briefly, as if
Soviet science might actually defeat the West. And though the
authors extend the period of their coverage from the date of the coup
that first installed a Communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1948 to
the space flight of Vladimír Remek, the first Czech cosmonaut, in
the 1970s, the key to the whole exhibition is inevitably the 1950s.
This, by no coincidence, is also the period when the iconography of
post-war Soviet sf was formed. As the authors write in their blurb,
the 1950s were a time when the Communist's pursuit of "social
Utopia was rapidly being replaced with technical Utopia. After the
amazing success in conquering the universe it seemed that human
migration into outer space was inevitable within the next few
decades."
Of course, this
kind of gung-ho attitude relating to the imminent colonisation of
space is nothing unusual in American sf, either. What we tend to
forget, though, is that for a time it looked as if the Soviets and
their allies would get there first, and their artists and writers
knew it. It is the combination of this technological optimism with
an enthusiasm for the standard propaganda-poster iconography of
flag-waving young men and women in red scarves, singing patriotic
songs to the sound of the harmonica, that gives so much Communist sf
art of the 1950s its special naïve charm. (In fairness, Western sf
was not immune to this kind of stuff, either: Heinlein's absurdly
straight-laced Boy-Scouts-on-Ganymede adventure, Farmer
in the Sky [1950], does very much the
same thing in khaki. Both sides evidently wanted to catch their
cadres young.)
In hindsight, we
now know that the dream of Soviet space supremacy was only a bubble,
and that by the mid-'60s the West was in
the lead again, but at the time, the outcome was far from certain.
[1]
Soviet scientists seemed to have the universe at their beck and
call, and where the Academy led, writers and artists were not slow to
follow. To give just one example, consider the truly mind-boggling
development plan outlined in all seriousness by Soviet Academician
V.A. Obruchev in 1953, which was appropriated by the Czech novelist
Vladimír Babula (1919-1966) as the introduction to his 1955 sf novel
Signály z vesmíru
[Signals from Space]: Soviet science will, it seems, within a couple
of generations, "extend life expectancy to 150-200 years ...
learn to manufacture all known chemical substances on Earth, even the
most complex of proteins, and to invent new ones] ... learn to
control the weather, to regulate wind and temperature, to move
clouds, and to share out rain and dry spells according to need..."
etc. Faced with such prognoses, is it any wonder that leading Soviet
sf writers like Ivan Yefremov (1907-1972), and their Czech imitators
like Babula, foresaw a socialist future? Only now do their heroes
start to seem like Lysenkos of the space ways, and their plans for a
Communist empire of the planets like blueprints for the same kind of
technological hubris that made a desert of the Aral Sea, but there is
no doubting that at the time the whole project was meant sincerely.
Planeta
Eden tackles this period of
Czechoslovak sf with great verve, presenting a cross-section of
materials that for the most part have never been displayed in a
gallery context before (a large proportion of the exhibits comes from
private collections, or has been purchased especially from the Czech
equivalent of eBay). The range of media covered is truly
fascinating: far from restricting themselves to obvious choices like
books and film stills, the authors demonstrate the spread of Soviet
space iconography into the widest fields. I was especially taken by
the profusion of children's books and magazines from the '50s
(already alluded to above), in which rugged, outdoorsy boys and girls
in Communist uniforms are swept up into high adventure in rocket
ships, cosmodromes, and laboratories (think of The
Famous Five at Baikonur). Slightly
later, as the '50s stretch out into the '60s, these are joined by sf
toys, futuristic advertising, TV shows, and even architectonic
studies for unrealised building projects.
Perhaps the
culmination of this first phase of Czechoslovak Communist sf is the
classic film Ikarie XB-1
(1963, often translated Icarus XB-1,
but given that "Ikarie" is a proper name, no translation is
really necessary). Based on an obscure Stanislaw Lem novel, this is
a psychological tale of a space crew going slowly crazy on an
extended flight to the stars, whose position is further complicated
by their traumatic encounters with a derelict vessel from the late
20th
Century and with and what seems to be an alien intelligence (in
typical Lem fashion the film ends just as contact is about to be
made, so the nature of the intelligence is never made explicit). All
the same, the film is very impressively made, with an excellent cast,
a very early, experimental synthesiser soundtrack, and sober,
carefully extrapolated sets. In the context of the exhibition, it is
the sets, with their visualisation of the technocratic space-faring
future of the '50s, that take on the greatest relevance. But in a
wider context, the film is also interesting for capturing the moment
when the boundless optimism of the '50s began to crumble, as doubt
and introspection overwhelms the crew. It is not so difficult to see
the protagonists' inability to deal with their inferiority in the
face of the aliens as a tacit acknowledgement that the supremacy of
Soviet space science might not, after all, be assured, or to read the
claustrophobia of the crew as a metaphor for the burgeoning
claustrophobia of the reform-minded intelligentsia in Communist
Czechoslovakia as the mid-'60s began to loom.
The iconic status
of the film in the former Soviet bloc has a curious coda. Following
its success at the First International Festival of SF Film in Trieste
in 1963, it was picked up for distribution in the USA, where it was
released in a severely mutilated version as Voyage
to the End of the Universe (1964), and
although this version of the film is risible, the visuals clearly had
an impact on American sf film and television in the second half of
the 1960s. The design of the ship's bridge and corridors in
particular finds an echo in the set designs for the original series
of Star Trek,
and perhaps even in the corridors of the space station in 2001.
Not withstanding the literary successes of the foremost Czech sf
author, Josef Nesvadba (1926-2005), then, whose stories were widely
translated in the '60s and '70s, it is thus almost certainly Ikarie
XB-1 that is Communist Czechoslovakia's
most successful sf export. [2]
Belief
in the attainability of this politically and technologically advanced
future began to decline rapidly in the '60s, and by the end of the
decade its creators were left only with a collection of artefacts
(films, books, plastic gizmos, artworks), reflecting a project that
was already lost. In a specifically Czechoslovak context that
overwhelming sense of pessimism was possibly not unrelated to the
Soviet invasion of 1968, and the crushing of the reform wing of the
Communist Party, which had briefly gained the ascendant during the
so-called Prague Spring. But more widely, it seems this was a
general malaise affecting the whole of the Soviet Bloc -- the tank
drivers, as well as their targets -- as the dream of Soviet
technological supremacy failed.
By the 1970s, the
whole notion of a socialist high-tech future had deteriorated into
comedy and high camp, as exemplified in particular by the clever,
funny, but utterly implausible films developed from the stories and
screenplays of Josef Nesvadba over the following two decades, e.g.
Zabil jsem Einsteina, pánové!
[I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen!] (1969) and Zítra
vstanu a opařím se čajem [Tomorrow
I'll Wake up and Scald Myself with Tea] (1977). The only Czech sf
film to take itself at all seriously between the Soviet invasion of
1968 and the fall of Communism is Otakar Vávra's well made, but
politically reprehensible Temné slunce
[The Dark Sun] (1981), very loosely based on Karel Čapek's Krakatit
(1924), in which Čapek's hypothetical new explosive is equated with
the neutron bomb, and its abuse in the political arena is ascribed to
a jet-setting cabal of capitalist playboys. Vávra doesn't quite
roll out the old saw about the capitalist world order being run by an
international Jewish conspiracy, but he comes pretty close. That
being said, the climactic scenes, after the bomb goes off, are
extremely powerful, and belong among the scariest moments Czech sf
cinema has yet produced.
Planeta
Eden happily stops before the real
cultural dog-days of the '80s, when the increasingly anomalous
hard-line regime in Czechoslovakia began to seem out of step, not
only with its own artistic underground, but also with the cultural
policy of Gorbachev's Kremlin. Adamovič & Pospiszyl map out the
dream of the socialist technological Utopia, from its rise in the
'50s, through to its final abandonment in the '70s, with aplomb.
Even though the exhibition is not structured strictly
chronologically, opting instead for a thematic arrangement (film,
urbanism, toys, etc.), one does still get a sense of the future's
story arc.
The catalogue is
conceived somewhat differently, taking the form of a series of essays
on topics raised by the exhibits (comics, Utopia, the relationship
between sf illustration and the avant-garde). It also adds
individual chapters on Zdeněk Burian (1905-1981) and Teodor Rotrekl
(1923-2004), the two most important Czech sf illustrators of the
post-War period. Most of the texts are by Adamovič or Pospiszyl,
but there are also contributions by Jaroslav Olša jr., Ondrej Herec
and others. The quality of the essays is generally very high, but
(obviously) since they are in Czech, their international readership
is likely to be limited. On the plus side, though, the book is
beautifully illustrated, with 460 well chosen reproductions, most of
them in full colour. Another similar compendium of Communist-era
future art is unlikely to be published anytime soon in any language,
and for this reason alone the book deserves a place in any
historical/critical sf collection.
NOTES
1. Francis
Spufford, in his recent novel about the
history of Soviet science and technology, Red
Plenty (London: Faber, 2010) -- which,
by one of those strange coincidences, was published in exactly the
same month as Planeta Eden
-- defines the dates of the "Soviet moment" as lasting from
the launch of Sputnik in 1957 to Gagarin's spaceflight in 1961. But
allowing run-up time for the development of the relevant Soviet space
technology, and a time-lag for public perception to change
afterwards, the extended period of Adamovič & Pospiszyl's
interest from the early-'50s to the mid-'60s, matches Spufford's
remarkably well.
2. The
uncut version of the film is available as a Region 2 DVD, with
English subtitles, from Filmexport Home Video:
http://www.filmexport.cz.
This review had
been first published in Foundation:
the international review of science fiction, Nr. 108.
