Swarthmore College Works Russian Faculty Works Russian 2018 Naming The Future In Translations Of Russian And East European Science Fiction Sibelan E.S. Forrester Swarthmore College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-russian Part of the Slavic Languages and Societies Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits ouy Recommended Citation Sibelan E.S. Forrester. (2018). "Naming The Future In Translations Of Russian And East European Science Fiction". Science Fiction Circuits Of The South And East. Volume 2, https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-russian/266 This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Russian Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. SIBELAN FORRESTER 6 Naming the Future in Translations of Russian and East European Science Fiction Science fiction is the ultimate defamiliarizing verbal genre, uniquely well suited not only to imagining space exploration or embodying new trajec tories for science and technology, but first and foremost to envisioning new ways of organizing social and political entities.^ Even works that lack encounters with sentient aliens provoke a confrontation between self and other as readers meet characters from remote times and places or alterna tive and very different presents. This article examines one factor among the ways SF^ creates worlds different from our own: the use of personal names to convey information about international, transnational or post-national groups and societies in the future, and the way these names have been or could be rendered in English translation.