Cartographers of Heaven and Hell

Vasily Vladimirskiy — book reviewer, researcher of the history of science fiction, host of the podcast "FantCast" and the TG channel speculative_fiction. Author of the books "Dragons and Spaceships", "Coupled Worlds", compiler of the book "A World Without Strugatsky" and other anthologies. Laureate of the "Furious Vissarion" award.

"Cartographers of Heaven and Hell" — articles about science fiction writers of the 20th – early 21st century. Here you will find the representative of the Golden Age of science fiction Robert Heinlein, stars of the New Wave of the 1960s-1970s, and the most prominent figure in American feminist science fiction of the 1970s Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr.), as well as major domestic science fiction writers from the "sixties", Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Kir Bulychev, and others.

More than half a century ago, Kingsley Amis's collection "New Maps of Hell" influenced many thoughtful readers, including the Strugatsky brothers, who quoted these essays on science fiction in prefaces, reviews, and even in the novella "Predatory Things of the Century".
Vasily Vladimirskiy, evidently continuing Amis's work, discusses some significant science fiction writers, their lives — some boring, others eccentric — their influence on literature and, let's be honest, humanity, and their books — stunning, audacious, outrageous, but almost never boring.
Shamil Idiatullin