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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32538 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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"Hard to be a God" is seen as dissident fiction now but it's still communist. It took for granted that the future was communist, and that communism would produce a good and stable society. At most it's anti-Soviet and really anti-Khrushchev.

It took for granted that the future was communist

... on their future Earth, which is not a part of the story, no need to worry what happens there, and letsnottalkaboutit. That book iirc is the only one that does explicitly mention communism, and even that passage always stood out to me as, I dunno, tucked on. It has nothing to do with the rest of the story which is set on not-Earth.

This was a very common trope in Soviet fiction, so much that even genuine attempts to play it straight were mostly not taken at face value. Wikipedia:

Most Soviet writers still portrayed the future Earth optimistically, as a communist utopia - some did it frankly, some to please publishers and avoid censorship. Postapocalyptic and dystopian plots were usually placed outside Earth – on underdeveloped planets, in the distant past, or on parallel worlds. Nevertheless, the settings occasionally bore allusion of the real world, and could serve as a satire of contemporary society.

There's a second layer to this with Strugatski brothers specifically, they were progressivists and one of the key assumptions behind their stories was that some problems which are "hard" today will become solved problems in the future, including apparently the problem of keeping a stable society. However, this was a background assumption and they were very light on the specifics.

Agree with all of this. I’m not saying it’s a book about communism, I’m saying it’s a communist book. In that way it’s almost more convincing than something like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists b/c it shows how a perfectly normal person could believe this was the future.

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