Vyacheslav Rybakov

Vyacheslav Rybakov ( _ru. Вячеслав Михайлович Рыбаков; born January 1954 in Leningrad) is a well known Russian science fiction author and an orientalist, interested in the medieval bureaucracy of China. He received a 1987 Governmental Award of the RSFSR for writing the screenplay "Dead Man's Letters".

cience fiction

Among Rybakov's works were first published in 1979 and include the prize-winning novels: "Fireplace on a Tower" ("Ochag na bashne", 1990), and "Gravilyot Tsesarevitch" (1994) which describes an alternative world of the Russian Empire. That communism is merely a religion, and our world is just an insane scientific experiment.

His "Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1997) reveals the inner world of a contemporary person in a moment before his death.

The novel "Na budushchiy god v Moskve" ("In the adjacent year in Moscow", 2003) explores a world of a Russia torn apart into small, poor countries, ruled by those idealists of late Soviet Union who sincerely hated totalitarianism but didn't notice any good features of the nation, ruined the whole system of government and survived with help of the West. In the story space is ruled by Darths and Vaders, and a Russian rocket scientist Ivan Obiwankin attempts to resurrect his people's feelings of nationalism by launching his own space ship.

Rybakov preaches equality of cultures and states that cultures are often based on restrictions, and that simply removing the restrictions as anti-democratic may ruin the culture. Rybakov's novel also examines the Russian mentality, criticizing its tendency to understand and agree with the positions of others as an inappropriate way to deal with the encroaching Western civilization. That all living civilizations are unique, and in the future, it may become essential to save some other civilization from stagnation, because a world ruled by only one civilization has no future. But the question is, whether the Christian Orthodox civilization will find the power to arise by itself.

He shows through an example of the ruined family of the main character Alexey that;

"the surest way for you to cease being esteemed and appreciated... even just loved... is to implicitly cede something essential and principal."

Vyacheslav Rybakov and Igor Alimov were also the authors of "There are no bad people." The works was originally attributed to Holm van Zaichik but was later proved to be a hoax. [http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/07/29/105.html] The series tells the story of the world of the Orduss, a fictional country with a humane and rich culture, that unifys lands of China, Russia and the Near East.

ee also

*en icon [http://rusf.ru/english/rybakov/ Official website] of the author.
*ru icon [http://rusf.ru/rybakov/ Official website] with bibliography, texts of stories and novellas, translations of Chinese code "Tan...", etc.