A starship is running out of fuel somewhere beyond Tucana, and the novel opens by looking at its instruments. The round dials have jovial faces; the oval ones are impudently self-satisfied; the square mugs are immobile in stupid complacency. A crew is dying of exhaustion and the author's attention is on the faces of the dials. That is Ivan Yefremov: a palaeontologist who had spent his working life reconstructing whole animals from fragments, writing science fiction the way a scientist daydreams. The physical detail is loving and exact. The social arrangements are sketched in confident broad strokes that repay a much closer look than they were meant to receive. It is set three thousand years from now, in the Era of the Great Circle-a communications network linking the inhabited worlds of the galaxy, messages taking centuries, an interstellar commons of knowledge with no centre and no authority. It is one of the finest images socialist literature has produced. The Russian appeared in 1957, months before Sputnik. This translation arrived in 1959, the year Luna 2 reached the moon: the USSR's account of where it was going, published in English at the moment of its maximum prestige. It is also a Thaw book, written when the Soviet future could be imagined as something other than a larger version of the Soviet present. Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, First Impression. Translated by George Hanna. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
