There was a copy at home, the first pages long gone, and still captivating. I don’t remember the first time I read it, nor the second. But I do going back to it, searching for one or another climatic moment to read again. When the athletic Miyiko goes freediving and discover, in a cave underwater, a big horse made of gold, which speeds up the launching of an ambitious spaceship expedition. Or when the inventive captain Erg Noor defeats an absorbing energy monster in a dark planet, by turning off his own lights. It took me a long time to also realize that the whole book was a utopia, a soviet utopia at that. The society in which all this plays was a post-revolution, post-soviet-union society, where all humans were united to the pursuit of arts, knowledge and space travel. The book is called “Andromeda, a space age tale”,written by Ivan Yefremov in 1957.
There was another science fiction book at the home of my parents that I keep reading. This one is easier to read randomly, since it has some thirty chapters, each a tale in itself and chronologically arranged at that. I came back again and again to “Usher 2” where Poe’s Usher house is rebuild in Mars, to lure and kill the people responsible for having censored fantasy writers. I laughed at the last man left in Mars, running away from the last woman. And I cried and suffered for the annihilated martians, gone from one chapter to the other by human disease. All the same, Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”, published in 1950, is a profoundly poetic book, melancholic and tender. So it also took me a long while to realize that it is, at his core, a distopia. It was one of the communist friends of my father that showed that to me, in not quite kind terms. I would have been 10 years old, arguing that Bradbury was a way superior writer than Yefremov. The answer came swift: “that might be, but what is the value of a whole culture that can only imagine that at travelling to Mars, the only thing that humans will manage would be to place hot dog stands in the channels?”. I reeled at the anger of the evaluation. And he went on: “Is it not much better to suppose that when we will be at the dawn of space travel we will have gone beyond our current egoist and destroying present?, should we not aim at a future that space travel is possible when we are a planet at peace (and socialist)?”
I never forgot this plea, and for a time, I did adopt it. Later on I realized that the soviet union of the first Khrushev years was not at all a country building an utopia, but an empire consolidating its power, even if de-stalinization could be seen as a step forward. And then again, the USA of the fifties was under the spell of McCarthy. I kept wondering about this wish of dream an utopia, or predict a distopia. With the pass of more years I have come to profoundly distrust the utopias that are being sold to us. I feel less happy with myself, almost dirty. When I think about it, it is like discovering that every other person that once said to love me, actually hated me. But then again, I am just unhappy, but many failed utopias killed millions and millions of people.
Would it be that the critic of the king is far more necessary than the court appointed poet, busy with writing the achievements of the sovereign? It obviously is. But why do we dislike the critic so much, then?