Let's Put the Future Behind Us

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Let's Put the Future Behind Us

Author	Jack Womack
Publisher	Atlantic Monthly Press
Publication date	April 1996
Pages	310
ISBN	ISBN 9780871136275.

Let's Put the Future Behind Us is a speculative fiction novel by Jack Womack set in post-Soviet Russia and released in 1996. It chronicles the transition of bureaucratic apparatchiks into an endemically corrupt Russian quasi-capitalism in the early 1990s dominated by oligarchs, criminals and ultra-nationalist political groups.

The novel arose when Womack's friend and fellow author William Gibson had been collaborating on a screenplay with Kazakh director Rashid Nugmanov after an American producer had expressed an interest in a Soviet-American collaboration to star Russian-Korean star Victor Tsoi.^[1] Despite being occupied with writing a novel, Gibson was reluctant to abandon the "wonderfully odd project" which involved "ritualistic gang-warfare in some sort of sideways-future Leningrad" and sent Womack to Russia in his stead for a week in March 1992, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union.^[2]^[3] Rather than producing a motion picture, a prospect which Tsoi's death in an automotive accident put paid to, Womack's experiences in Russia ultimately culminated in the novel,^[1] which he began writing in 1994 and finished in September 1995.^[2]

The novel has been hailed by Charlie Stross as a "brilliant and vitriolically funny apocalypse geek novel about life in Russia",^[4] while Wired commended its "brilliant aperçus and well-aimed jokes",^[5] calling the novel "the best Russian gangster thriller ever written by a guy who's not Russian",^[6] and Entertainment Weekly rated it a B+.^[7]