Cartographers of Heaven and Hell

Vasily Vladimirskiy — a 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", "Conjugated Worlds", compiler of the book "A World Without Strugatskys"... 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 can find representatives of the Golden Age of Science Fiction Robert Heinlein, and the 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.), and the greatest domestic science fiction writers of the "sixties", Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Kir Bulychev, and others.

More than fifty years ago, Kingsley Amis's collection "New Maps of Hell" shocked many thoughtful readers, including the Strugatsky brothers, who quoted these essays about science fiction in prefaces, reviews, and even in the novella "The Doomed Age".
Vasily Vladimirskiy, evidently continuing Amis's work, tells about some significant science fiction writers, their lives — for some boring, for others eccentric, — their influence on literature and, to be frank, humanity, and about their books — astonishing, audacious, outrageous, but almost never boring.
Shamil Idiatullin