We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity

Acknowledgments

vii Acknowledgments This book is about the alternative worlds of science fiction, but writing it would not have been possible without the help of many real people. First and foremost, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the people who were involved in the very first stages of its inception and the very last stages of its completion. Although this book has morphed into something quite different than the dissertation I wrote at the University of California, Los Angeles, it still bears the imprint of my advisers, Ronald Vroon and N. Katherine Hayles, who always encouraged me to push beyond canonical texts and established ways of thinking. Michael Heim, Gail Lenhoff, and Alexander Ospovat were always ready to help as I worked my way through eccentric writers and rare materials. At the other end of the process, the final version of that initial idea would not have become a book without the active mentorship of Istvan CsicseryRonay and Arthur Evans. Under their editorship, a shorter version of the third chapter was published in Science Fiction Studies under the title “Electricity: Science Fiction and Modernity in Early-TwentiethCentury Russia” (Science Fiction Studies 30, 89 [2003]: 49–71). I am profoundly indebted to Parker Smathers, my editor at Wesleyan University Press, whose very human presence carried the project through. Along the way, there were almost too many people to thank here. Kenneth Calhoon, Katya Hokanson, Jenifer Presto, and Michael Stern, former colleagues at the University of Oregon, helped me brainstorm critical areas of the emerging manuscript. Jenifer Presto, in particular , has been instrumental in shaping both the title and the contents of the book, having suffered through many drafts and many versions of its different parts. At Cornell University, I have benefitted from the generosity of many colleagues in diverse disciplines. They include Brett de Bary, Debra Castillo, Jonathan Culler, Matthew Evangelista, Sabine Haenni,Timothy Murray, Rachel Prentice, Shirley Samuels, and Gavriel Shapiro. I have also been lucky to connect with scholars outside the institutions where I have studied and worked. Marina Balina, Sibelan Forrester, Mark Lipovetsky, Steven Marks, and Larissa Rudova have contributed greatly to the development of my ideas. A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S viii The Hull Memorial Fund at Cornell University generously supported the publication of this book. I am also grateful to my many students who contributed valuable insights into the nature of science fiction and the particularities of people who read it. The largest debt of all is to Maxim Perelstein, my resident physicist, and Michael Perelstein, the four-year-old wonder who has opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the world. WE MODERN PEOPLE This page intentionally left blank ...