Omon Ra Review:

 Omon Ra Review 

Graham Swanson

 The stereotype is that Science Fiction is for nerds so they can be entertained but I think it can be for creative minded people so that they can learn science. I was a nerdy day dreamer for a long time. Thinking of my own sci fi stories, I began to wonder how space worked, how time worked, how minerals and moisture worked in the vast vacuum of space. I learned no science from school, it all came from sci fi stories. Omon Ra spoke to me because I was a little communist who dreamed big and thought he had big things coming just like how Omon played with a toy jet and dreamed of being a pilot. I ended up growing into an adult who listened to Kino and Molchat Doma from Eastern Europe. Omon expected big things for him too, but the real world is unfair. Other peers get good jobs because the party likes their names, Vladnen, Seven. When a door finally opened for him, it was a glorious suicide mission. Then it turns out to be a conspiracy to fake a Moon landing. Likewise, no one ever called me with a job offer, when it did happen, it was for a job moving “hazardous waste” (which I would kill for now). Omon once saw the USSR as a world of wonder that was destined to send men to the stars. He believed the propaganda and thought he’d be a flying among them. The books ends with him escaping the Metro, and ascending to the Moscow ghetto. He can finally see life on Earth for what it really is.

Almost everyone can admit to life being unfair, and in Omon Ra we see that even sci fi can persuade us to believe in a dream that someday the world will be better. The USSR used sci fi to persuade it’s people into believing a bright future was one rocket blast away, when really they were still trying to figure out how to hook your house to a sewer, how to industrialize the struggling sectors, and how to bring backwater villages in Turkmenistan into the 20^th century. The novel came out after the fall of the Soviet Union, and it never achieved those things. The USSR did invent sputnik and send a man into space, but just as depicted in Omon Ra, their technology was hastily put together patchwork likely stolen from a science facility in the West. People at the time of the Cold War didn’t know the USSR had these weaknesses. The USSR reached an economic peak in the 60s and 70s, and spread it’s message of the future so effectively that few even in the West doubted that the USSR would one day prevail. Not that long ago everyone thought that the internet would make everyone equal, that there would be no rich and poor, and that we’d all share the same information. Then one day, the internet turned out to be a big ghetto over the Metro of Amazon, Social Media, and news commentary shows.

The USSR used propaganda to make its people look into the future of Communism to distract them from the reality of the present. Afterall, Communism was an ideaology of the future. There is a very popular misconception that the Soviet Union was communist. It wasn't. It was ruled by a Communist Party that wanted to ACHIEVE communism, and never did. Every Premeir took office with a plan to achieve Communism in their lifetime but it never happened. Marx didn't think people could force Communism. He believed it would occur naturally over time just as Monarchies and Capitalist Empires did. The USSR would become convinced advancements in science would lead them to the Communist Utopia, and so they invented their own genre of Socialist Sci Fi to create the idea that the People of the USSR were on the brink of a glorious future. However  the contradictions of Soviet society created a dystopian vision that mixed science fiction with the squalor of East European slums. Omon Ra is heavy with this imagery. The young cadets sit with their friends over a small fire, drink fluid from chipped bottles, smoke inferior cigarettes, while looking up at the stars and discussing space flight. They play with toy spaceships in their youth, but as they train to leave earth, their equipment is described better as kitchenware. Saucepans, handles, pedals. The small pilot they discover in their toy ship reflect an eerie fate that they are expendable agents who will be sacrificed to the dream of a futuristic utopia. 

The USSR did launch a man into space, not for science, but for propaganda. In Omon Ra everything the cadets are taught is some kind of indoctrination. It even seems that their value is determined by the kind of message they provide to the advantage of the party ideology. Truth is not the goal, but an illusion that someday the hammer and sickle will be carved into the face of the moon. Scientific truth is a cold thing to find. Oman Ra ends with a surreal question of if the journey to the Moon was even real. For propaganda purposes, all they need to do is put the idea in people's heads that the USSR made it to the moon, but the actual accomplishment is not necessary. People do not need to know the truth, they just need to believe. Reality in this sense is perception, not experience. Truth exists in our consciousness, and its often manipulated, if not challenged. Science is hard to believe because it challenges many of beliefs humans have possessed for about as long as we've been alive. Humans of the modern age must face that we are a speck of dust in the grand scale of the cosmos, not the center of the universe. They must face that fossil evidence suggests that life on Earth derives from Tiktaalik, it didn't come here on a spaceship with fully developed brains and spinal chords capable of speech and a desire to perform dance concerts. Fantasy grasps the perceptions of reality and plays with them to create a new reality that seems wondrous yet plausible like the Nordic Wonderland of Skyrim. Science Fiction plays with the what science considers to be true to merge reality with technological concepts. 

I heard once about a man who was from Ukraine, and spent ww2 in a POW camp. During his confinement, he wrote a science fiction novel, but he threw it out after the war. "The science had changed" is how he explained it. There was things that he didn't know going into the camp that he knew when the war had ended, and the facts and measurements no longer held up. Personally, I say the scientific errors are what makes Sci Fi so great. We aren't watching documentaries when we watch Star Trek, Omon Ra is a not an instruction manual on how to drive a Lunokhod. It should be CONSISTANT to the world it takes place in, but the ending of the novel creates as much joy as seeing junk explode in outer space in Star Wars. Before we know he is beneath the Moscow metro, he is essentially riding a tricycle on the moon, turns the moon red, and tries to fire a gun in outer space. I must say, I preferred the propaganda. 

Socialist Sci Fi Propaganda