philippos42 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
philippos42) wrote2014-01-13 06:06 pm
philippos42) wrote2014-01-13 06:06 pm
Entry tags:
Bilenkin and me
Sometimes I meet someone who likes science fiction, and they'll ask me if I read science fiction, and I'll say, "I used to." And they'll ask me who my favorite SF author is.
My standard answer for years has been Dmitri Bilenkin.
Which is a little funny, actually. I am a Robert Sheckley fan from way back, & I was pretty into Asimov as a teen; but I say, to have an answer, "Dmitri Bilenkin," of whom I read one collection of short stories years ago.
But if not for Dmitri Bilenkin, I might have given up on fiction entirely--or felt more guilty about reading fiction, in a self-hating way.
As a kid, I had been very into fantastical fiction, and fiction set places unlike my home country in general. I preferred medieval stuff to stuff from USA history, and I liked ancient myth and far countries, and a fair bit of wacky science fiction stuff, fairy-story, and beast-fable. (I am still whatever the opposite of a xenophobe is in some ways; impatient with my own countrymen, sympathetic to the alien. I think that's a good kind of thing, and not entirely usual.)
I was so uninterested in things that were boringly regular, familiar, and--how should I put this? Local? Domestic?--that as I grew up I began to see my hunger for that unlike the world outside my window as a flaw. I was perhaps too much consumed in fiction, and unrealistic fiction at that.
I also had some strange religious influences as a kid, and played around with some strange ideas, in the sense of believing something for a while experimentally.
I knew people who tried to take the Mosaic prohibition on "graven images" seriously, which is hard for a kid who was raised around art of all kinds. Worse, I was taught by other Christians, less literal and thus perhaps more dangerous, who would try to point to abstract obsessions as metaphorical "idolatry." (A reinterpretation of the commandment that's much harder to keep than the actual commandment! Ah, the pitfalls of devout Christian rationalization!)
I wondered if those who avoided icons were right--and then (possibly due to being influenced by the "it's a metaphor" bunch) I took it further. Surely a vinyl record is a graven image of sound, right? I once wrecked my then-favorite album because loving it was arguably a sin. I mean, if you're going to ban icons, ban artwork, why stop at sculpture? Why not painting? Recording?
And fictional worlds, "lies breathed through silver," that can't be practical and good, can it? I hit a point with all of this that I felt I had been too deep in fantasy and fiction both for too long; I needed to get away from it. Even if I wasn't anymore trying like a hardcore Adventist to destroy all that is "graven," even if it was as I was leaving behind the Christianity I had been raised in (and I don't remember the timeline, but I was pulling free painfully for years), I thought maybe we needed lots of truth and chasing made-up stories was a horrible mistake.
Well, this was not a certain idea. It was something I wondered about. But I became as a young adult someone who had craved fantasy and now held it in contempt.
But at some point I read that (translated) Bilenkin collection, The Uncertainty Principle. Bilenkin was in style a sort of cousin of Asimov, I guess. Not all the stories were great, but they were, enough of them, stories of ideas, that they impressed me.
I have read it said by some Westerner, probably a Yank, that science fiction suffered in the USSR because one could not write stories about, "If only," nor, "If this goes on," but only "If only this goes on!" This is, of course, the sort of claptrap we Yanks tell each other to self-propagandize and say how much better we are than those benighted socialists. And Bilenkin proved it quite wrong.
Dmitri Bilenkin wrote real speculative fiction in the best mold. No, it wasn't exactly biting satire, not, "If only," nor, "If this goes on." But it was smart speculative fiction: Imagine a situation that we do not yet know to exist, such as a technology not yet invented, and imagine its possible repercussions, that we can anticipate possible problems if we ever encounter it in reality. Fiction as forewarning and forearming.
He had several stories in this mold, but the one that I tend to think of as a perfect version of this is one called something like, "Through Strangers' Eyes."
I'm going to summarize its basic plot here, to explain what I mean. Sorry to spoil, but I think that's the right call here.
A spacecraft full of future human explorers come upon a planet. They do an active scan of the planet. Then they send down a landing party, and find that their scans have blinded the entire planet. The local fauna relied for their vision-analogous sense on the same wavelengths the ship used to best penetrate the atmosphere. Not what we call visible light, a wavelength invisible to us. Wild beasts, livestock, people--all of whom evolved with organs that react to that range of electromagnetic radiation, but without eyelids. And the ship's scan flooded the whole planet, with enough radiation to overload their sense organs.
All very logical, all very horrible. The last line is to the effect of, "I knew we had to stay here as long as it took to fix the damage."
(Another thing I like about Bilenkin. His characters are imperfect, make dangerous mistakes, but clearly have the active conscience to do the right thing in places where another, English-speaking, writer might have them throw up their hands and despair that all is lost and nothing can be done.)
This is fiction that teaches us, that helps us understand, that prepares us against making such horrible errors in reality, if we will but heed it. That story convinced that fiction wasn't a mistake, nor just a frippery, but necessary. Even if most fiction isn't.
Frank Herbert called science fiction the, "real literature of ideas," as I recall. And Bilenkin lived up to that.
My standard answer for years has been Dmitri Bilenkin.
Which is a little funny, actually. I am a Robert Sheckley fan from way back, & I was pretty into Asimov as a teen; but I say, to have an answer, "Dmitri Bilenkin," of whom I read one collection of short stories years ago.
But if not for Dmitri Bilenkin, I might have given up on fiction entirely--or felt more guilty about reading fiction, in a self-hating way.
As a kid, I had been very into fantastical fiction, and fiction set places unlike my home country in general. I preferred medieval stuff to stuff from USA history, and I liked ancient myth and far countries, and a fair bit of wacky science fiction stuff, fairy-story, and beast-fable. (I am still whatever the opposite of a xenophobe is in some ways; impatient with my own countrymen, sympathetic to the alien. I think that's a good kind of thing, and not entirely usual.)
I was so uninterested in things that were boringly regular, familiar, and--how should I put this? Local? Domestic?--that as I grew up I began to see my hunger for that unlike the world outside my window as a flaw. I was perhaps too much consumed in fiction, and unrealistic fiction at that.
I also had some strange religious influences as a kid, and played around with some strange ideas, in the sense of believing something for a while experimentally.
I knew people who tried to take the Mosaic prohibition on "graven images" seriously, which is hard for a kid who was raised around art of all kinds. Worse, I was taught by other Christians, less literal and thus perhaps more dangerous, who would try to point to abstract obsessions as metaphorical "idolatry." (A reinterpretation of the commandment that's much harder to keep than the actual commandment! Ah, the pitfalls of devout Christian rationalization!)
I wondered if those who avoided icons were right--and then (possibly due to being influenced by the "it's a metaphor" bunch) I took it further. Surely a vinyl record is a graven image of sound, right? I once wrecked my then-favorite album because loving it was arguably a sin. I mean, if you're going to ban icons, ban artwork, why stop at sculpture? Why not painting? Recording?
And fictional worlds, "lies breathed through silver," that can't be practical and good, can it? I hit a point with all of this that I felt I had been too deep in fantasy and fiction both for too long; I needed to get away from it. Even if I wasn't anymore trying like a hardcore Adventist to destroy all that is "graven," even if it was as I was leaving behind the Christianity I had been raised in (and I don't remember the timeline, but I was pulling free painfully for years), I thought maybe we needed lots of truth and chasing made-up stories was a horrible mistake.
Well, this was not a certain idea. It was something I wondered about. But I became as a young adult someone who had craved fantasy and now held it in contempt.
But at some point I read that (translated) Bilenkin collection, The Uncertainty Principle. Bilenkin was in style a sort of cousin of Asimov, I guess. Not all the stories were great, but they were, enough of them, stories of ideas, that they impressed me.
I have read it said by some Westerner, probably a Yank, that science fiction suffered in the USSR because one could not write stories about, "If only," nor, "If this goes on," but only "If only this goes on!" This is, of course, the sort of claptrap we Yanks tell each other to self-propagandize and say how much better we are than those benighted socialists. And Bilenkin proved it quite wrong.
Dmitri Bilenkin wrote real speculative fiction in the best mold. No, it wasn't exactly biting satire, not, "If only," nor, "If this goes on." But it was smart speculative fiction: Imagine a situation that we do not yet know to exist, such as a technology not yet invented, and imagine its possible repercussions, that we can anticipate possible problems if we ever encounter it in reality. Fiction as forewarning and forearming.
He had several stories in this mold, but the one that I tend to think of as a perfect version of this is one called something like, "Through Strangers' Eyes."
I'm going to summarize its basic plot here, to explain what I mean. Sorry to spoil, but I think that's the right call here.
A spacecraft full of future human explorers come upon a planet. They do an active scan of the planet. Then they send down a landing party, and find that their scans have blinded the entire planet. The local fauna relied for their vision-analogous sense on the same wavelengths the ship used to best penetrate the atmosphere. Not what we call visible light, a wavelength invisible to us. Wild beasts, livestock, people--all of whom evolved with organs that react to that range of electromagnetic radiation, but without eyelids. And the ship's scan flooded the whole planet, with enough radiation to overload their sense organs.
All very logical, all very horrible. The last line is to the effect of, "I knew we had to stay here as long as it took to fix the damage."
(Another thing I like about Bilenkin. His characters are imperfect, make dangerous mistakes, but clearly have the active conscience to do the right thing in places where another, English-speaking, writer might have them throw up their hands and despair that all is lost and nothing can be done.)
This is fiction that teaches us, that helps us understand, that prepares us against making such horrible errors in reality, if we will but heed it. That story convinced that fiction wasn't a mistake, nor just a frippery, but necessary. Even if most fiction isn't.
Frank Herbert called science fiction the, "real literature of ideas," as I recall. And Bilenkin lived up to that.