出版社：National Research University Higher School of Economics
摘要：In a novel published in the middle of the 1960s, the famous Soviet science fction writers, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatski described an experiment; the character of the novel travelled into a depicted future, or, better yet, a series of futures ordered according to the time of the appearance of the corresponding works of fantasy. With a timemachine of the imagination, he started with the frst antique dialogues on the ideal state, and continued through the technological utopias of the recent past. Finally, he landed in the rather dark fantasies of mankind divided by an iron wall into hostile worlds, attacked by savage robots, and colonized by extra-terrestrial creatures. All of these images were familiar to the fans of the sci-f literature of that time. With bitter sarcasm, the Strugatski brothers mentioned the “half-translucent” (i.e., poorly and unconvincingly depicted) inventors of clever machines, parodied the unnatural talk of the “people of the future”, and mocked stereotyped stories. Back in his “real” world, the narrator (by the way, he is a sofware developer in the research institute “of sorcery and magic”)1 fnds his colleagues vividly discussing inter alia the quasi-scientifc ideas formulated in the observed fctions. Whereas they fnd what he saw during his journey interesting, he has a small talk with one of his colleagues: “When I fnished my story he asked, ‘Didn’t this Sedlovoi [the experimentator] try traveling in the described present? In my opinion that would have been much more amusing . . .’” (Strugatski, Strugatski, 1977: 113).
