The Price of Immortality. Our Good Old Science Fiction

The third book in "Our Good Old Science Fiction" complements the first two—"Under the Same Sun" and "Created to Fly." It adds new names to the list of authors who formed the cream of Russian science fiction from the 1960s to 1980s: G. Shakh, O. Korabelnikov, G. Prashkevich, F. Dymov, V. Pirozhnikov, and others. Interesting in their own right, these authors add new colors to the overall literary palette. But the third book in the anthology is more than just an additional volume; it draws a symbolic line, a watershed between generations—the generation of those who began under Yefremov and the generation of the new wave, the then-young authors who emerged from the Strugatsky brothers' "overcoat." There were no particular contradictions between the waves, except that the younger generations were less traditional and more social, more sensitive to the winds of rapid change that were not long in coming in the second half of the 1980s. But this new wave, also known as the fourth, is a topic for discussion later.