| Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale | |
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Illustration of book cover |
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| Author(s) | Ivan Yefremov |
| Original title | Туманность Андромеды |
| Translator | George Hanna |
| Illustrator | Not sure |
| Cover artist | N. Grishin |
| Country | Soviet Union |
| Language | Russian |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Molodaya Gvardiya Foreign Language Publishing House |
| Publication date | 1957 |
| Published in English |
1959 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| ISBN | 0828518564 |
| OCLC Number | 469991798 |
| LC Classification | PG3476.E38 T83 1950z and PG3476.E38 T83 1980 |
Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale a.k.a. Andromeda Nebula (Russian: Туманность Андромеды, Tumannost' Andromedy) is a science fiction novel by the Russian writer and paleontologist Ivan Efremov,[1] written and published in 1957. The novel was made into a film in 1967, The Andromeda Nebula
Contents |
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 Circle 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 Circle civilizations almost never meet in person. The Great Circle 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 (the so called "short aim" SF). Boris Strugatsky wrote,
Yefremov was an ice breaker of a man. He has broken the seemingly unbreakable ice of the "short aim theory". He has shown how one can and should write modern SF, and thus has ushered a new era of Soviet SF. Of course those times were already different, the Stalin Ice Age was nearing its end, and I think that even without "Andromeda," Soviet SF would soon start a new course. But the publication of "Andromeda" has become a symbol of the new era, its banner, in some sense. Without it, the new growth would have been an order of magnitude more difficult, and a thaw in our SF wouldn't have come until later. [1]
(37th Space Expedition)
Efremov's 1968 novel The Bull's Hour is set in the same universe taking place some 200 years later and is considered a sequel.
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