Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia

[A] surprisingly moving story." --The New Yorker

Bogdanov's novels reveal a great deal about their fascinating author, about his time and, ironically, ours, and about the genre of utopia as well as his contribution to it." --Slavic Review

Bogdanov's imaginative predictions for his utopia are both technological and social... Even more farsighted are [his] anxious forebodings about the limits and costs of the utopian future." --Science Fiction Studies

The contemporary reader will marvel at [Bogdanov's] foresight: nuclear fusion and propulsion, atomic weaponry and fallout, computers, blood transfusions, and (almost) unisexuality." --Choice

A communist society on Mars, the Russian revolution, and class struggle on two planets are the subjects of two arresting science fiction novels by Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), one of the early organizers and prophets of the Russian Bolshevik party. The red star is Mars, but it is also the dream set to paper of the society that could emerge on earth after the dual victory of the socialist and scientific-technical revolutions. While portraying a harmonious and rational socialist society, Bogdanov sketches out the problems that will face industrialized nations, whether socialist or capitalist.
Included are the 1908 edition of the novel Red Star, the novel Engineer Menni (1913), and a poem, A Martian Stranded on Earth (1927). Essays by Richard Stites and Loren R. Graham provide the political, social, and cultural context for these classic works of Russian science fiction.