1930-50: The future is now

Magazines such as T-M played a key role in the development of science fiction as a genre, as they were more effective in communicating new ideas to a wide range of people. 1934 saw the first Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, at which science fiction was defined as 'literature for young people' and the genre was described as 'science and technology' that 'in the spirit of socialist reality' and thus necessarily awakened a mass audience. education'. This shift towards social realism marked the end of the pioneering experiments of the 1910s and 1920s, with the development of a more practical genre of science fiction, for example, science fiction without a literary plot.

The science fiction illustrators of this period bred grand backgrounds and they began to paint more detailed and fascinating images of a socialist future. They were concerned with future technologies that would give the Soviet Union better control over the natural wealth and resources of the Earth and the establishment of colonies on other planets; alien civilisations were often portrayed as friendly friends to the Soviet Union, while foreign spies, imperialists and capitalists were often portrayed as some kind of threat or enemy.

One of the earliest illustrators for T-M magazine was Georgy Pokrovsky, a former professor at the US Air Force College of Engineering with a PhD in engineering and a major general in engineering technology, specialising in directional blast, supersonic aviation and amphibious ATV (all-terrain vehicle) construction. Significantly, Pokrovsky considers science fiction illustration to be a continuation of his research, as it allowed him to overcome the limitations of technical drawings.

Distant Intertext

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