Strange Telescopes: Following the Apocalypse from Moscow to Siberia (NF 2009) - Daniel Kalder

Strange Telescopes: Following the Apocalypse from Moscow to Siberia (NF 2009) - Daniel Kalder

It was a pretty slow night at the library, a good time for checking in new books. Part of that process involves checking the bibliographic information in the library catalog against the book in hand and its labels. When I saw Strange Telescopes, I thought it was a work of Science Fiction incorrectly labeled as Travel (914.7). Sure enough, it was non-fiction. The subtitle “Following the Apocalypse from Moscow to Siberia” could be misconstrued as one of those crazed, off-the-wall sf romps you see from time to time. Soon I realized this was a crazed, off-the-wall travelogue recounting the real adventures of author Daniel Kalder as he investigated people living in the sewers of Moscow, witnessed live exorcisms, met a former traffic cop claiming to be the Messiah, and visited the world’s tallest wooden skyscraper. All non-fiction. Most sf writers would love to follow any one of those concepts in fiction, let alone four.

Kalder (originally from Scotland) lived in Russia for years, so he knows something of the people and the language. Yet no amount of time there could adequately prepare him for these four journeys. They are filled with wonder, yearnings, pratfalls, false starts, misunderstandings, humor and a sense of something both sacred and enormous.

Fairly early on you get the sense that because Kalder is a stranger in a truly strange land, he’s being toyed with. In each of his journeys, few of the locals pay any attention to the odd goings-on. (The messiah is an exception; the entire community is involved.) Kalder is seeking, but often he’s the only one. Is this because he’s from a different culture or does it have something to do with the changes that have taken place in the former Soviet Union for the past twenty years?

While investigating the wooden skyscraper in the Arctic, Kalder asks his tour guide Natalia how the builder got away with constructing such a monstrosity. Natalia replies, “It was the early nineties. The old laws were not working; the new ones were not yet fixed in place. We were in a new time, everything was in chaos. He took advantage of this situation, and that was that.”

Yet there seems to be more to it than that.

Kalder later says to his guide, “My feeling now is that the collapse of the Soviet reality, for all of the chaos and suffering it brought about, also led to a great liberation of personality and of dreaming, but that this has gone unnoticed because these manifestations of creativity rarely take the form of ‘objects’ such as books or paintings, or if they do, those are secondary products. As a result, they’re much harder to quantify or pin down, or even to find as, for the most part, they exist entirely in people’s heads.

“I’m not saying that the people I’ve spoken to are on a par with Dostoevsky in the genius stakes, of course. But they have produced remarkable work that is strange and fascinating and meaningful if you look at it properly and don’t just dismiss it with labels like ‘crazy’ or ‘insane’ or ‘eccentric.’

“And now I think I finally understand why I’ve been so interested in these people. When I write my book it will be as a testament to what happened at a unique moment in history - when several remarkable individuals stepped from the ruins of the Soviet Union into a brand-new, chaotic world and the roofs of their skulls flew off and these visions of possible realities forced themselves out into the world...I will be a cartographer of the impossible, drawing maps of these creations so they don’t just disappear into oblivion. I can’t record all of the them, of course - that would take years, and most of them would be impossible to locate anyway. These are just four of the most interesting ones that I found - or that found me.”

Interesting? No, fascinating. Indeed, a fascinating read.