Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia

Greeting Comrades! Board your Sputnik, and prepare for Space Communism.

Red Star is one of those weird historical scifi artifacts. Written in 1907 by an early Bolshevik and good friend of Lenin’s, it imagines contact between contemporary Earth and a Martian socialist utopia. Leonid, our narrator, is a communist revolutionary who is selected as the ideal ambassador between Earth and Mars by a secret Martian mission equipped with an anti-gravity spaceship. He journeys to a world where the revolution has won. Mars has advanced industries that require only a single shift per week from each citizen, managed by a complex statistical bureau. The people are happy, healthy, clear and logical. There are the standard utopian plans for production, housing, and health, but I enjoyed the little details that Bogdanov let slip in. In the socialist future, poetry will have strict rhyme patterns in geometric harmony with the universe, none of this free verse nonsense. Meetings will be orderly and to the point, with little bloviating or pointless repetition. Of course, Red Mars is not perfect. They’re decades away from running out of key resources and a complete ecological collapse. The Martians’ only options are to colonize Earth or Venus, both incredibly dangerous prospects. Somehow, central planning can’t see a way out of their dilemma. Engineer Menni is a prequel of sorts, concerning the building of the Martian canals and a metaphor for dialectical materialism as an inter-generational drama. It simply isn’t as good as Red Star. This edition also includes some great historical notes on Bogdanov and his place in history.

If science fiction is about (among other things) contact between radically different minds, then it is harder to imagine a mind more different from our own than the dedicated revolutionary and scientific mystic Alexander Bogdanov.