The Forced Happiness of Space Colonisation

Connected with ideas of innovation, Soviet science fiction explored the topic of space and contacts with extra-terrestrials. Starting in the 1960s, this literature was concerned with the idea of earthlings helping other civilizations to achieve a new level of life. Soviet science fiction thus put forward the idea of forced happiness, which fitted very well with the utopian foundations of Soviet culture. This article focuses on I Will Be Back in a Thousand Years (1969), a once-popular but little-studied novel by Isai Davydov, a Ural writer. The idea of forced happiness is verified two times in the novel: through the construction of an ideal society of young people on Earth and the functioning of a similar society on another planet, and through an attempt to contact savages. In the end, it transpires that building an ideal society is troublesome and that the savages do not need any help from earthlings. Davydov’s novel is studied in the context of Soviet science fiction novels about contacts with other civilizations, from Aelita by A. Tolstoy to the ‘progressor’ cycle by the Strugatsky brothers. The utopian character of ‘progressorism’ in the works of the Strugatsky brothers is extolled and logically completed in the sequel of Davydov’s novel (2013), where progressors manage to ‘civilise’ savages. The author concludes that the idea of progressorism is important for Soviet science fiction beyond the works of the Strugatsky brothers, although it is most frequently considered in the context of their oeuvre. In Davydov’s novel, the characters regard themselves as gods for the savages, but, unlike the characters of the Strugatsky brothers, they do not consider this mission a burden. This is one of the distinctive features of Soviet science fiction: ‘average’ characters become equal to gods and struggle with time itself in order to secure a happy future for the entire galaxy

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Happiness · Literature · Political science · Sociology · History · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life

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