Who Goes There?

From the ’50s until Arkady’s death in 1991, the Strugatsky brothers were almost certainly—along with Stanislaw Lem—the most internationally acclaimed SF writers to come out of the Soviet Union. There are a few reasons for this. No doubt during the Cold War there was a push to translate Soviet fiction that badmouthed practices in that coalition, and usually could get away with it since the censors apparently didn’t pay as much attention to genre fiction as “serious” literature. Even so, the Strugatsky brothers sometimes ran afoul of censors, with their novel The Doomed City being written in 1972 but not published until 1989 as censorship was loosening. Their 1972 novel Roadside Picnic is one of the most famous non-English SF novels of all time, helped by an extremely loose but equally fascinating film adaptation in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

In the introductory blurb, Norman Lobsenz (I think it’s Lobsenz) says “Initiative” is the first Soviet SF story ever to see publication in the SF magazines. This might be true, although I’m not ready to tumble down that particular rabbit hole. I’m not sure whose decision it was, Lobsenz’s, Goldsmith’s, or Rutley’s, but despite giving us a direct translation of the title (“Spontaneous Reflex”) in said blurb, the story itself is named “Initiative.” In fairness “Initiative” does sound better in English than “Spontaneous Reflex,” and basically conveys the same meaning in fewer syllables. “Initiative” was first published in the Russian in 1958, and was one of the Strugatsky brothers’ first published stories.

Placing Coordinates

From the May 1959 issue of Amazing Stories, which is on the Archive. Finding reprints for stories in translation can be a bit tricky. For example, “Initiative” was never reprinted in book form—at least under that title. As “Spontaneous Reflex” it was reprinted in what seems to be the same anthology under two different titles, A Visitor from Outer Space and Soviet Science Fiction (editor not credited). As “The Spontaneous Reflex” it appeared in Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian and Soviet Science Fiction (ed. Yvonne Howell). See what I mean?

Enhancing Image

Urm (“Universally Reacting Mechanism”) is a robot—a metal giant that does not wanna harm anyone, the only problem being that it’s bored. “The Master” has gone away and apparently nobody has been left on-site to watch over Urm and make sure he doesn’t get into any funny business. Suppose you’re a machine with arms and legs, and some capacity to make decisions on your own? You might wanna get a hobby or two. You might even become curious. Urm takes it upon himself to explore what seems to be a nuclear power plant (we’re not given many details), scaring an assistant or two and accidentally getting himself irradiated—which is fine, because Urm is virtually indestructible. He leaves the site “a contaminated and a wiser robot,” news of which the underlings at the plant are quick to bring to Urm’s makers, namely Nikolai Petrovich and Piskunov. (I don’t think we ever get Piskunov’s first name, although the authors felt it necessary to give us Petrovich’s first and last name almost every time.) To make matters worse, this is in Siberia, and there’s a snowstorm going on.

I would be intereted to discuss this story with someone who actually has a background in robotics, since it posits a few questions about artificial intelligence, albeit not very seriously. The Strugatsky brothers are known for having a cynical sense of humor, and at least in this early story their humor reads like a similar-looking branch to Robert Sheckley’s—but not belonging to the same tree. Two comedic voices in genre SF that formed around the same time but totally parallel to each other. But whereas early Sheckley can often be summed up as the man’s folly when inventing or confronted with a scientific revelation (the situation will always get worse, and often it ends very grimly), the Strugatsky brothers are a bit more forgiving. “Initiative” is a comedy of errors, but it’d be more accurate to say it’s a comedy of one error, even if it’s a big one. Piskunov and his team had designed Urm for a specific purpose (we’ll get to that in spoilers), but failed to consider the cognitive limitations of a being that a) practically a newborn, and b) only semi-sentient. It’s less that Urm doesn’t act according to his programming and more that his programming is flawed in ways not predicted.

The human characters don’t really matter here other than as physical stand-ins for man’s hubris; they’re little more than cardboard, and that’s fine because the story compensates in other ways. Urm is pretty interesting as a plausible depiction of a self-aware robot, since unlike Asimov’s robots he’s never overcome with delusions of religious zeal or godhood, nor does he particularly dislike humans. He also, we’re told, doesn’t have a sense of self-preservation, such that a man on the street firing a gun at him in terror doesn’t phase him at all—never mind that it would probably take a literal tank to destroy him. Of course what makes him so special, and why Piskunov is determined to capture him rather than destroy, is his brain, “an extremely complicated and delicate network of germanium and platinum membranes and ferrite.” There’s some debate as to how much Urm’s actions are of his own initiative (ha) and how much it’s him simply reacting to stimulation; after all, “reacting” is part of his name. Like a toddler his absorbs information without actually trying to understand it.

Here we see a somewhat juvenile prototype of what would become a recurring theme for the brothers, that being human cognition and its relationship with ethics. Because Urm had been programmed to take interest in tangible things but not ethics and morals, and because it has no real sense of self past a need for stimulation, it’s not fully sentient. It’s not immoral (it doesn’t even cause that much trouble, ultimately) so much as amoral. The Strugatsky brothers seem to be arguing that it’s not possible to be truly self-aware while also being totally divorced from morality. This is a basic premise, and anyone who ascribes to religious faith, or indeed anyone who leans somewhere on the left politically already knows this; whether they choose to do anything good or constructive with the fact that their capacity to think is linked inextricably with the capacity for moral understanding is a different question. Like any self-proclaimed leftist who indulges in racism, classism, misogyny, or transphobia, Urm runs into a problem because there’s a connection not being made in his thinking—although in fairness to Urm this is because the connection can’t be made.

There Be Spoilers Here

With the help of some construction equipment the crew are able to trap Urm and have him turned off, and nobody even had to die to make this happen! It’s also here that we’re finally told why such a robot would be invented in the first place. “Initiative” takes place not far in the future (everything is recognizably “modern”), but enough in the future that it’s clear the Space Race is in full swing. Makes sense: this story was published in Russia about a year after Sputnik. Unlike way too many American SF stories of the time (and until about the ’70s, it turns out), the scientists here got the bright idea to send robots to probe planets in the solar system instead of humans. Urm was made of very tough stuff because he’s supposed to set foot on Venus at some point; this was before it became known to everyone that Venus is too inhospitable a place, even for specially armored robots like Urm. You could date this story, from it being obviously written in the early days of the Space Race, but ultimately the Strugatsky brothers are more interested in thought experiments immerging from the tech than the tech itself—as tends to be the case with good science fiction.

A Step Farther Out

I liked it, and unlike early Sheckley there’s a good deal to chew on here despite the comedic tone. (I like Sheckley, but if we’re being totally honest, once you’ve read a few early Sheckley storie you can predict where they’re going.) This is still much smaller in scale than the intellectual big game the brothers would be hunting a decade or so down the road, but it marks the beginning of what would be a very fruitful creative friendship. That the brothers almost always worked together, what with Boris only writing two novels after Arkady died despite outliving him by two decades, shows a fluidity of style and work ethic. If you were an American genre reader and had picked up the May 1959 issue of Amazing Stories, the prospect of reading a Soviet SF story in translation would’ve been novel, but it also would’ve presented a story that was a bit more cerebral than what American genre readers at the time would’ve expected.

See you next time.