Science fiction is the genre that links our lives to the future: the faster the pace of scientific and technological advancement, the greater our awareness of what István Csicsery-Ronay called “the science-fictionality” of everyday life. The more we feel the effect of scientific and technological change on global flows of economic, social, and cultural exchange (not to mention the blurring of biological and environmental boundaries), the more we are drawn to a literature that Boris Strugatskii identified as “a description of the future, whose tentacles already reach into the present.“ It is hardly surprising that scholarly interest in Russian and Soviet science fiction has been growing in recent years, with an expanding roster of roundtables and panels exploring the topic at professional conferences. Why talk about Soviet science fiction? As the articles in this special thematic cluster suggest, science fiction functions more as a field of intersecting discourses than as a clearly delineated genre: for readers of Slavic Review, it is a genre that foregrounds the interdisciplinary connections between the history of Soviet science and technology, political and economic development, and social and literary history. Science fiction, in short, offers a way to read the history of the future, with texts selfconsciously oriented toward distant spatial and temporal horizons, even as they point insistently back to the foundational factors shaping the vectors of a society's collective imagination.

The question of the perpetrator is largely uncharted territory in the history of the Soviet Union. The term is rarely used in the historiography of the Stalinist Soviet Union. In part, this omission is based upon a reluctance to go beyond Iosif Stalin in assigning agency or responsibility for the immense crimes of his reign. In part, the omission derives from decades-long restrictions on archival access. Lynne Viola begins with an exploration of the postwar trajectories of the historiographies of the mid-twentieth century's classically paired “totalitarian” regimes in order to understand the relative absence of “perpetrator studies” for the Stalinist 1930s. She then examines the question of the Soviet perpetrator, less to demarcate who the perpetrator was than to offer a conceptualization of the range of factors that enabled, conditioned, and shaped their violent acts. Intended to raise questions for further study, Viola's article is complemented by comments from Wendy Goldman and Peter Fritzsche.

Based on a detailed analysis of published and unpublished sources, Matthias Schwartz reconstructs the making of Soviet science fiction in the cultural context of Soviet literary politics. Beginning in the 1920s, nauchnaia fantastika (scientific fantasy) became one of the most popular forms of light fiction, though literary critics and activists tended to dismiss it because of its origins in popular adventure, its ties to the so-called Pinkerton literature, and its ambiguous relationship to scientific inventions and social progress. Schwartz's analysis shows that even during high Stalinism, socialist realism's norms were far from being firmly established, but in the case of nauchnaia fantastika had to be constantly negotiated and reconstituted as fragile compromises involving different interest groups (literary politicians, writers, publishers, readers). A cultural history of Soviet science fiction also contributes to a better understanding of what people actually wanted to read and sheds new light on the question of how popular literature adapts to political changes and social destabilizations.

In this article, Francesca Stella examines the notion of Moscow as a global city through the prism of cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism by exploring articulations of queer space in the Russian capital. Two types of queer space are explored: the “scene,” understood as a loose cluster of commercial venues and community organizations catering to an LGBT clientele, and Moscow Pride, a temporary but also highly visible and politicized appropriation of urban space by the LGBT community. The analysis of Moscow Pride as a putative cosmopolitan object is framed within a broader sociopolitical context characterized by the rise of authoritarian, sexually conservative, and anti-western nationalist discourses. Stella provides insights into the contextual ability of political strategies based on visibility, recognition, and the support of transnational solidarity networks to pursue cosmopolitan values of openness and respect toward sexual diversity, highlighting a crucial tension between global/local and universal/particular in current debates on cosmopolitanism.

This article situates Slavoj Źižek in relation to his formative intellectual and political context in Yugoslavia, a context all too frequently ignored in the Anglo-American appropriation of his work. Through an analysis of Źižek's positions on immigration, the NATO bombing of Serbia, party politics, and violence, Homer argues that a consistent pattern emerges in Źižek's politics of adopting radical and provocative positions abroad while simultaneously maintaining conservative positions at home. Homer also addresses the irony of Źižek's Leninist turn, as he was a central figure in the “demarxification” of Slovene theoretical discourse in the mid-1980s. In opposition to Źižek's view of Marxism as a formalism without specific content, Homer argues that a left strategy today requires us also to argue for something. Finally, Homer considers Źižek's writings on violence, arguing that this is a route the radical left has taken once before in the 1970s; it was disastrous then and will prove so again today.

In this article I argue for criteria in evaluating the persuasiveness of interpretative work: propositional factuality, argumentative validity and conceptual coherence. With the above criteria in mind I analyze Slavoj Źižek's work on film—overall rhetorical strategy employed, film theories supported and interpretative work undertaken. I demonstrate that Źižek's film theory is plagued by hasty generalizations and inaccurate formal analyses which make it fail to compete with its main rival—cognitivism. I point to the conceptual incoherence of the key philosophical term Źižek near-ubiquitously resorts to in his interpretative work—the Real. Finally, the identification of repetition as a key rhetorical strategy allows me to dismiss numerous interpretative and theoretical claims Źižek bases on a limited set of fixed examples by demonstrating that their descriptions are factually incorrect.

In this article, Muireann Maguire examines the cultural construction of the trope of the engineer-inventor in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the changing representation of this archetype in three science fiction novels by Aleksei Tolstoi: Aelita (1922-23), Soiuzpiati (The Gang of Five, 1925), and Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (Engineer Garin's Death Ray, 1925-26). Tolstoi's fiction portrays engineers as misguided and self-centred at best and as amoral, megalomaniacal, and irredeemably un-Soviet at worst. This increasingly negative portrayal of the engineers in these novels, and in their later redactions and cinema versions, helped to prepare the way for the alienation of engineer and technical specialist within Soviet society, providing cultural justification for Iosif Stalin's show trials and purges of both categories in the 1930s. Tolstoi's alienation of the engineer-inventor, the traditional hero of early Soviet nauchnaia fantastika (science fiction), prefigured the occlusion of science fiction as a mainstream literary genre. As a trained engineer, former aristocrat, and returned émigré whose own status in Soviet Russia was deeply compromised, Tolstoi's literary demonization of engineers effectively purchased his own acceptance within the Stalinist literary hierarchy.

This article focuses on the apocalyptic images of Moscow that not only proliferated in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union but that have also persisted during the 2000s. Mark Griffiths analyzes Tat'iana Tolstaia's Kys' (2000) and Dmitrii Glukhovskii's Metro 2033 (2005), comparing and contrasting the roles of Muscovite space in these narratives. Riddled with misinterpreted ideas and mutated remainders, turned upside down by ideological volte-face, and haunted by uncanny vestiges of preapocalyptic life, these postapocalyptic worlds are not tabulae rasae but pastiches that reflect post-Soviet transformations. In Kys', Moscow's concentric circles are connected to temporal cyclically, disrupting narratives of progress. In Metro 2033, the fragmentation of Moscow's metro system allows Glukhovskii to thematize the splintering of the post-Soviet city. Both novels evoke the long-standing opposition between Moscow's center and periphery but unveil the darkness of the hollow core, raising questions about the city's past, present, and future.