A starship is running out of fuel somewhere beyond Tucana, and the novel opens by looking at its instruments:
In the faint light emitted by the helical tube on the ceiling the rows of dials on the instrument panels had the appearance of a portrait gallery — the round dials had jovial faces, the recumbent oval physiognomies were impudently self-satisfied and the square mugs were immobile in their 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 by profession, a man who had spent his working life reconstructing whole animals from fragments, and who wrote science fiction the way a scientist daydreams — with the physical detail loving and exact, and the social arrangements sketched in confident broad strokes that repay a much closer look than they were meant to receive.
Andromeda is the strangest book in this series and in some ways the most revealing. It is the only one that tries to describe the destination.
Туманность Андромеды — The Andromeda Nebula — appeared in Russian in 1957. This English translation by George Hanna, designed by N. Grishin, was published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow in 1959 and is marked on its title page First Impression.
Those dates matter more than usual. Sputnik went up in October 1957, a few months after the novel appeared; Luna 2 reached the moon in September 1959. The book therefore arrives in English at the precise moment when the Soviet future looked, to a great many people who were not communists, like the likeliest one on offer. FLPH knew exactly what it was doing. This is the USSR's account of where it was going, published in English in the year of its maximum prestige.
George Hanna's translation deserves a word, because it had an unusually hard job. Yefremov invented a technical vocabulary — anameson fuel, the Tibetan experiment, colour-tone notation for music, the Great Circle itself — and Hanna had to carry it into English without either explaining it away or letting it turn into gibberish. He mostly succeeds by refusing to flinch: the terms arrive unglossed, in the middle of ordinary sentences, exactly as the furniture of a real future would. The volume also carries a glossary, which tells you the house expected readers to need help and decided to give it at the back rather than in the text. That is the right decision and a rarer one than it sounds.
It is also a Thaw book. Stalin had been dead four years and denounced three; Andromeda belongs to the brief period in which it was possible to imagine the Soviet future as something other than a larger version of the Soviet present.
The novel is set roughly three thousand years from now, in what it calls the Era of the Great Circle. Earth is a single society. The nations are gone, and so thoroughly gone that the characters' names are synthetic and unplaceable: Darr Veter, Veda Kong, Mven Mass, Erg Noor, Chara Nandi, Renn Bose. The extraterrestrials are Goor Hahn and Zaph Phthet, Director of External Relations of the planet of 61 Cygni.
The Great Circle itself is the book's best idea and its most attractive one. It is a communications network linking the inhabited worlds of the galaxy — messages taking centuries, civilisations announcing themselves across unbridgeable distances, an interstellar commons of knowledge with no centre and no authority. Humanity's arrival in it is presented as the real coming of age, more important than any political event. For an internationalist tradition there is something genuinely moving in that image, and it is not accidental: the Great Circle is what solidarity looks like when it is scaled past the point where power can organise it.
Yefremov's periodisation is his own invention and worth setting out. History runs through the Era of Disunity — our own, "when there were numerous large and small nations that were in constant conflict owing to the economic and ideological hostility that divided their countries" — whose last century is the Fission Age; then the Era of World Unity, the Era of Common Labour, and finally the Great Circle.
And the novel is quite clear that the future has stopped caring about political history:
People living in the Era of the Great Circle were not interested in lists of destructive wars and horrible sufferings or the so-called great rulers that filled the ancient history books.
What they are interested in instead is "the development of productive forces and the forming of ideas, the history of art and knowledge and the struggle to create a real man".
None of the above should suggest the novel is an argument with scenery. Its opening third is straight adventure of a high order, and it is what made Andromeda the most widely read Soviet novel of its decade.
The starship Tantra, returning from Vega, finds its course fouled by what the astronomer identifies in one word: "An iron star!" — a dead, unlit, unmapped mass that no instrument had warned them of. Caught by it, low on anameson fuel, the crew put down on a lightless planet circling it.
What they find there is one of the best monsters in the literature. In the dark, by the flashes of their own lamps, they make out shapes:
huge flat jelly-fish, floating low over the ground with a dense fringe waving in the air below them.... The acute-angled corners of the rhomboid body each had two feelers of much greater length. At the base of the feelers the biologist noticed huge bladders that glowed inside and seemed to be transmitting the star-like flashes along them.
Then Ingrid's voice arrives in the helmet telephones, cheerful, from the ship: "Hullo, observers, why are you switching the light on and off? Are you in need of help? The storm's over and we're going to begin work. We're coming to you now." And Erg Noor: "Stay where you are," ordered the commander. "There is great danger abroad. Call everybody!"
A dead star, a dark planet, luminous predators the size of rooms, and a commander deciding what to say over the radio. Yefremov constructs the sequence with real economy, and the solution — dragging a planetary motor forward on an automatic car to use its exhaust as a weapon — is the kind of engineering answer that this genre exists for.
It is worth remembering that these chapters are the reason the book was read. The society described in the later chapters reached its enormous audience inside a good adventure story, which is how the most effective political fiction has always worked.
Now the count, which is the reason this novel belongs in a series with critical introductions.
In a hundred and twenty-seven thousand words describing the communist future, written in the Soviet Union in 1957:
The doctrine survives as a method — history is "dialectically contradictory", social development obeys "basic laws" — and as a destination, "the mighty tree of communist society that flourished throughout the planet". Its founders and its agent have both disappeared. The class that was to make the revolution is not mentioned in the account of the society the revolution produced.
We do not read this as cowardice; there was nothing dangerous about naming Lenin in 1957. It is something more interesting. Yefremov is imagining a future that has outgrown the vocabulary, in which the questions that produced Marxism have been settled so completely that the names attached to them have gone the way of the names of the great rulers the future no longer studies. It is a tremendous compliment to the doctrine and, at the same time, the most thorough act of depoliticisation in this series. There is no Party in the Era of the Great Circle. There is no state to speak of. There is an Astronautical Council, there are Academies, and there is science.
That is a real utopian tradition and an old one, and it is not Marx's. It descends from Saint-Simon and from Wells: the rule of the competent, arrived at by the growth of knowledge rather than by the self-emancipation of anybody.
Before the island, a chapter that shows both halves of this book at once.
The Council meets in an egg-shaped hall with a parabolic ceiling, its walls panelled in dull gold and hung with relief maps of the solar system on one side and of neighbouring stars on the other, with diagrams of inhabited systems received from the Great Circle under a pale-blue dome. Under the planet maps are mottoes, and they are the best statement of Yefremov's creed:
Look how we are surrounded by facts that we do not understand — they thrust themselves upon us but we neither see nor hear the great things hidden in their faint outlines and awaiting discovery.
And, further to the left:
The curtain hiding the unknown cannot be lifted easily — it is only after persistent labour, retreats and deviations that we begin to fathom true meanings and new boundless horizons open up before us. Never try to avoid that which at first seems useless and inexplicable, incomprehensible....
Never try to avoid that which at first seems useless. A palaeontologist wrote that, and it is worth more than most of the novel's sociology.
Over the rostrum hangs an old painting, restored several times. A violet-black sky; the crescent of an alien moon; an ancient spaceship wrecked, stern in the air; a man in a light spacesuit dragging his feet through sand and looking back at the bodies of his companions. The artist has put into the eyeglasses of his mask, which reflect only the setting sun, "an expression of the hopeless despair of loneliness in a strange world". Something "living, formless and disgusting" is crawling over a nearby hummock. The title, in big letters, is Left Alone!
A society three thousand years advanced keeps that canvas above the chair of its highest scientific body, and restores it when it fades. It is a marvellous invention — a civilisation that hangs its worst possible outcome where the people who authorise expeditions have to look at it.
Then, in the same chapter, this:
Not a single unattentive face, not a single person occupied with his own thoughts, could have been found amongst the hundreds in the hall. A tactful attention to everything was a typical feature of the people of the Great Circle Era.
Yefremov means it warmly. Read it once more. In a hall of several hundred people, nobody is thinking their own thoughts, and this is offered as a characteristic achievement of the future.
There is one further detail in the hall, and it is the kindest thing in the book. The chairs, desks and barriers are made of real African wood, and Chara Nandi notices that "nobody today would waste so much time and effort on something that could be cast and polished in a few minutes" — and then strokes the arm of her chair, finding the wood "warmer and more full of life than plastic". Yefremov allows his perfected future one nostalgia, for handwork, and lets a young woman feel it without being corrected.
Which brings us to the chapter that settles the matter, and that we would ask you to read twice.
The future society has a problem it has solved. Not everyone can keep up. The remedy is a tropical island, separated from India by a strait that geology has conveniently deepened, and Yefremov describes it without a flicker of unease:
The Island of Oblivion was also a happy asylum for those who were not attracted by the feverish activity of the Great World and who did not want to work on the same level as other people. Here in the lap of mother nature, they lived out their years in the peace and calm known to the ancient cultivator of the soil, fisherman or herdsman.
And then:
Although mankind had given their weaker brothers a large area of wonderfully fruitful land, the primitive economy of the island could not fully guarantee the population against famine.
Their weaker brothers. And famine — in a communist utopia, on Earth, three thousand years hence, as an accepted feature of the arrangement.
Set that beside the sentence in which the future's founding insight is summarised. Having understood that their misfortunes came from a social structure "that had originated in times of savagery", the people of the Fission Age also came to understand:
the necessity to train people in the spirit of strict social discipline, something that became of greater importance as the population of the planet increased.
Strict social discipline, increasing with population; and for those who cannot bear it, an island where they may go hungry among the coconuts. The novel intends both of these as benign. They are presented as generosity — nobody is compelled, the island is a paradise, the weaker brothers are provided for.
A tradition that takes "the free development of each" as the condition for "the free development of all" cannot read that chapter as the author meant it. A society that must classify a portion of its members as weaker and settle them elsewhere has not abolished class; it has renamed it and given it a beach. The most humane version of the managed future still requires somewhere to put the people who will not be managed.
A great deal, and we do not want the paragraphs above to obscure it.
The Great Circle is one of the finest images socialist literature has produced: knowledge as a commons across three thousand light years, with nothing to enforce it but the desire to be heard. The physical writing is superb — Yefremov's dying star, his deep-sea horse, his descriptions of exhaustion and vertigo and the mechanics of a ship with no fuel are the work of a man who knew how matter behaves. The book's confidence that human beings will be larger, calmer and better at things than they are now is not naive; it is the necessary opposite of the century that produced it, and it was written by someone who had lived through that century's worst decades in the country that suffered them most.
And Andromeda is a document of the Thaw at its most hopeful — the moment when a Soviet writer could imagine the future without a Party in it and be published, translated and sold abroad by the state's own house within two years.
Read it for the stars. Then read chapter eleven again, and ask who is on the island, and why the future needed one.