Vyacheslav Rybakov

Vyacheslav Rybakov (Russian: Вячеслав Михайлович Рыбаков; born January 1954 in Leningrad) is a well known Soviet and Russian science fiction author and an orientalist, interested in the medieval bureaucracy of China. He received a 1987 Governmental Award of the RSFSR for writing the screenplay for the film Dead Man's Letters.

Among Rybakov's works were first published and include the prize-winning novels: Fireplace on a Tower (Ochag na bashne, 1990), and Gravilyot Tsesarevitch (1993) which depicts an alternative world featuring a Russian Empire in which communism is merely a religion, and our world is just an insane scientific experiment.

His Death of Ivan Ilyich (1997) reveals the inner world of a contemporary person in a moment before his death.

The novel Na budushchiy god v Moskve (In the adjacent year in Moscow, 2003) explores a Russia torn apart into small, poor countries, ruled by those idealists of the late Soviet Union who sincerely hated totalitarianism but didn't notice any good features of the nation, ruined the whole system of government and survived with help of the West. In the story space is ruled by Darths and Vaders, and a Russian rocket scientist Ivan Obiwankin attempts to resurrect his people's feelings of nationalism by launching his own space ship.

Rybakov preaches equality of cultures and states that cultures are often based on restrictions, and that simply removing the restrictions as anti-democratic may ruin the culture. Rybakov's novel also examines the Russian mentality, criticizing its tendency to understand and agree with the positions of others as an inappropriate way to deal with the encroaching Western civilization. He argues that all living civilizations are unique, and that in the future it may become essential to save some other civilization from stagnation, because a world ruled by only one civilization has no future.

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