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| Author | Ivan Yefremov |
|---|---|
| Original title | Туманность Андромеды |
| Translator | George Hanna |
| Cover artist | N. Grishin |
| Language | Russian |
| Genre | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Foreign Language Publishing House |
| Publication date | 1959 |
| Publication place | Soviet Union |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale a.k.a. Andromeda Nebula (Template:Lang-ru, Tumannost' Andromedy) is a science fiction novel by the Russian writer and paleontologist Ivan Efremov, written and published in 1957.
This is a classic communist utopia set in a distant future. Throughout the novel, the author's attention is focused on the social and cultural aspects of the society; there are several principal heroes (a historian, an archeologist, a starship captain) involved in several plot lines. Though the world shown in the novel is intended as ideal, there's an attempt to show a conflict and its resolution with a voluntary self-punishment of a scientist whose reckless experiment caused damage. There's also a fair amount of action in the episodes where the crew of a starship fight alien predators.
Several civilizations of our Galaxy, including Earth, are united in the Great Ring whose members exchange and relay scientific and cultural information. Notably, there's no faster-than-light travel or communication in this world, so interstellar missions sent by Earth are few and can only reach nearby stars, and the Great Ring civilizations almost never meet in person. The Great Ring radio transmissions are pictured as taking the energy of the whole Earth and therefore infrequent; one such transmission is a lecture on the history of the Earth civilization which gives the author an opportunity to put his world into a historic context.
Critics have accused this novel of being dry and illustrative, its heroes being more of philosophical ideas than live people. Nevertheless, the novel was a major milestone in Soviet sci-fi literature, which, in Stalin's era, had been much more short-sighted (never venturing more than a few decades into the future) and primarily focusing on technical inventions rather than social issues. Some claim that the booming Soviet sci-fi of 1960s, including such authors as Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, would have been impossible or at least very different without this breakthrough novel.
External links
- Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale in the Udmurt mirror of the Maksim Moshkow's Library