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"The Right to Be Wrong": Science Fiction, Gaming, and the Cybernetic Imaginary in Kon-Tiki: A Path to the Earth (1985–86)

2019; Slavica Publishers; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/kri.2019.0065

1538-5000

Ksenia Tatarchenko,

Cultural Studies and Postmodernism

"The Right to Be Wrong"Science Fiction, Gaming, and the Cybernetic Imaginary in Kon-Tiki: A Path to the Earth (1985–86) Ksenia Tatarchenko (bio) "We should like," replied Symchrophonicus, spinning slowly, "the first [machine] to tell stories that are involved but untroubled, the second, stories that are cunning and full of fun, and the third, stories profound and compelling." "In other words, to (1) exercise, (2) entertain and (3) edify the mind," said Trurl. —Stanisław Lem, "The Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius," The Cyberiad Our understanding of the 1980s in the Soviet Union is inextricable from the period's status as the last decade of the country's existence—any other approach would require a fancy leap of the imagination.1 Mikhail Pukhov's science fiction novel Kon-Tiki: A Path to the Earth performs just such a leap in the strict sense of the term.2 Pukhov's novel combines a futuristic setting of space travel and electronic gaming, with an eye to promoting the enlightenment agenda of the national computer literacy campaign. This imbrication of literary, digital, and social elements does not square with the received historical account of computing, according to which the Soviet failure to mass-produce personal computers was both a marker of and a contributor to the political failure of the system. Serialized in 1985–86, just before the advent of glasnost´ and perestroika, Kon-Tiki's visions also do not closely match the dominant chronology of political ruptures. [End Page 755] The leap of imagination performed by Pukhov's novel conveys the ongoing discursive, social, and technological construction of late Soviet digital utopianism.3 Merging the technical and the fictional, the notion of "cybernetic imaginary"—the general analytical framework I use for reading the novel and its gaming universe—does not only subvert the declinist narratives of late Soviet computing.4 It leaves behind the received understanding of the Soviet belief in technological progress as an ideological postulate to open up the dynamics of Soviet debates about technological change and moral choices, the ontology of error, and the roles and responsibilities of humans and machines. The thrill of the space adventures created by Pukhov's novel and its electronic games attracted numerous Soviet youths to the pages of the popular science magazine Tekhnika molodezhi (Technology for Youth, TM). With print runs of around 1,700,000 copies per issue and an even higher effective readership, the journal's popular success reveals an unexpected intersection between the future-oriented aspirations of the late Soviet technical intelligentsia and the quotidian leisure activities of teenagers. The investigation of the nature of this intersection forms the core of the article and its preoccupation with the continuity between the Soviet and post-Soviet experiences. The 1985 generation of teenagers came of age after the collapse had occurred. Thus they were not fully implicated in the political activities of the "serious" agents associated with the major movements of the period: they were neither political reformers nor activists of a nationalist or an ecological kind.5 Similarly, they are mostly a generation younger than those who informed Alexei Yurchak's classic Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, which assigns the status of the last generation to the young adults of the 1980s: that is, a generation [End Page 756] born in the 1960s or thereabouts. Yet it is the members of this much younger age group, the would-be first post-Soviet generation, that became the main object of the last Soviet country-wide educational experiences and took part in what could be called "digital socialism," one more attempt at creating a better society with new technological tools. Building on Anindita Banerjee's argument that the making of Russian modernity was discursively connected to the new genre of sci-fi emerging in the early 20th century and Slava Gerovitch's and Benjamin Peters's scholarship on Soviet cybernetics, I consider Kon-Tiki an enactment of the cybernetic imaginary and a site of the public debate about Soviet modernity.6 Focusing on the interactive aspects of Kon-Tiki, I explore the relationships among fiction, the materiality of the digital, and new communities of...