Red Star (novel) | Hacker News Reader

Red Star (novel)

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49 pointsbenbreen14 comments

A similar project - but much later : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed

One of my favourite novels, highly recommended.

BTW the working title of that book was “An Ambiguous Utopia” which I’ve always liked (though the lovely pun of “The Dispossessed” makes a better book title).

I only just realised that the character Arkady Bogdanov in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy was named after this author!

A reddit commenter says «Yes, it is explicitly noted in the text and references "Arkady's famous ancestor" who helped pioneer blood transfusions.»

https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/c86j5x/is_ksrs_ark...

One of my favorite books, and others by KSR are some of my others!

One thing I found interesting about the novel was that the depicted Martian utopia is just as growth hungry as contemporary capitalism.

[spoiler warning] The premise, in fact, is that Mars has consumed its major resources, and now needs to colonise either Venus or Earth in order to survive. The latter option possibly involves exterminating all Earthlings.

I've come across claims that communism is a solution to capitalism's unsustainable growth demands, and it was fun reading a major Russian revolutionary imagining his communist utopia with the very same demands.

Its a weird element in the story, that the utopia wants to eradicate the human race, it doesn't usually go that way in utopian novels. Makes me wonder if there is some subtle satire going on. As if the novel is predicting something like the Great Purge under Stalin? I havent read the novel.

The novel is from 1908. That's before Russian Revolution.

I know, but only a decade before. The idea of revolution was around. E.g. the plot synopsis for the novel on wikipedia says "Leonid, the narrator and protagonist of the story, is a Bolshevik revolutionary and mathematician living in St. Petersburg."

There was more than one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_Russian_Revolution

That's a very interesting remark.

There is criticism against both communism and capitalism for exactly this notion: that history progresses only with material advancement [1]. For example, one is by Cornelius Castoriadis [2] (fan of communism until he assigned this very notion of endless material growth as core of its shortcomings) and another by Erich Fromm, where in "To Have or to Be" [3] he talks about similar ideas.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Castoriadis#The_imag...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Have_or_to_Be%3F

On the other hand, and I think more recently, Sean Sayers has gone against this conception of Marx that he proposed a 'productivist' ideology or conception of communist society[0], for which Marx is still (mistakenly, in my opinion) criticized, especially by environmentalists and eco-socialists. The special focus on a narrow, technical meaning of the 'forces of production' used in describing hi torical materialism has also been called into question. Marx may have been an 'economic determinist' (this is less controversial but still worth discussing) but he certainly wasn't a 'technological determinist'.

[0] https://philpapers.org/rec/SAYTCO

Red Star, in Russian: http://www.lib.ru/RUFANT/BOGDANOW/red_star.txt

While pretty different, this reminds me of the more recent _Vagabonds_ by Chinese author Hao Jingfang, translated to English by Ken Liu. I highly recommend it.

I haven't read Red Star, so can't totally compare. But Vabagonds is also about "different society on Mars what does it have to teach Earth", also by someone from an (ostensibly) communist society... but from a 21st century author of course, and Vagabonds is not propaganda for a particular singular vision, but more philosophical investigation of alternatives and variations and what can be changed and what ends up the same anyway, social as well as personal.

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