Reading Soviet Sci-Fi at the End of the World
The best encapsulation of my emotional relationship to technology during the pandemic comes from a Russian novel published in 1991. Victor Pelevin’s Omon Ra opens with the titular Omon recalling his youth, when he was obsessed with space. On playgrounds, young Omon plays pilot. On his aunt’s TV set, he pauses on any channel broadcasting an airborne object. When visiting the Industry Achievements Expo, Omon gazes upon an artistic rendering of an astronaut whose “arms were stretched out confidently towards the stars, and his legs were so obviously not in need of any support that I realized once and for ever that only weightlessness could give man genuine freedom.”
Because the point of view at this juncture is that of a boundlessly enthusiastic boy, and because Pelevin can write his absolute ass off, the sentence does not end at freedom. It takes off,
which, incidentally, is why all my life I’ve only been bored by all those Western radio voices and those books by various Solzhenitsyns. In my heart, of course, I loathed a state whose silent menace obliged every group of people who came together, even if only for a few seconds, to imitate zealously the vilest and bawdiest among them; but since I realized that peace and freedom were unattainable on earth, my spirit aspired aloft, and everything that my chosen path required ceased to conflict with my conscience, because my conscience was calling me out into space and was not much interested in what was happening on earth.
Well hello. That last big sentence full of big ideas arrives on page six in Omon Ra. It speaks of freedom and hearts and spirit, each little clause punctuated by its own invisible kiddy exclamation point, because what is an exclamation point if not a rocket ship? The ones I’m imagining after “aloft” and “conscience” seek to transport Omon and the reader up and away from the “boring” West and also the “vile” Soviet state.
And yet this soaring scene is not one that anticipated my pandemic-induced techno-frustration. That
