"Mars is the eighth and latest republic to be attached to the Soviet Union"

[nwhyte]

Reading John Wyndham's Retro Hugo nominated story, "The Sleepers of Mars", I was startled to see that his cosmonauts knew of only seven Soviet Republics (in a story published in 1938 and set in 1981). When the USSR broke up in 1991, there were fifteen of them. What, I wondered, had Wyndham done with the other eight?

Four were easy enough. In 1938,

Comments

Respec'

[anonymous]

This is the sort of forensic, artistic pedantry that sets us apart from the animals. Well done, that man!

[beamjockey]

My sentiments exactly.

Did Tales of Wonder have a lettercol? Would be interesting to see whether contemporary readers had anything to say in subsequent issues.

(To first order, I myself hadn't known any of this stuff.)

[gareth_rees]

Surely it's just a case of reference materials taking a while to be updated? I mean, if you were writing a story and needed to know how many republics there are in the USSR, you'd go to your bookshelves and consult your most recently purchased encyclopedia or atlas, and this would likely be out of date by a few years. Or you'd note down the query for reference next time you went to the library, but even though the library updates its copies more regularly than you do, there's still a lag of months or years from an event to its inclusion in reference materials to the acquisition of the updated references by your local library. In most cases being a year or two out of date wouldn't matter, but here Wyndham got unlucky.

[nwhyte]

I susect it also shows (as is fairly obvious from other evidence) that Wyndham wasn't in with the political Left in the 1930s. True, there were other things going on at the time, but I'd have thought the USSR's constitutional reform would have been real news for political junkies, especially since that interesting chap Stalin was behind it; the sort of subject that one's Party friends could bore on about at great length. Either Wyndham wasn't listenng to them or, more likely, he didn't have any.

[ice_hesitant]

Also, year of publication isn't necessarily the same as year of final draft. It's possible the manuscript sat on a shelf for two years.

[del_c]

I recall another story, which may have been Wyndham too, in which the Third Reich was still going in the twenty-first century, and a force other states would want to stay on good diplomatic terms with when one of their rocket passenger ships fell out of the sky.

That's not the same class of story-writing issue, of course; it just reminded me, is all.

[aeglefinus]

There was a mention of the new draft Soviet constitution and the increase from seven to eleven republics in the Observer on June 7th 1936 (page 27). The Guardian had an article mentioning eleven federal republics without naming them on June 13th 1936 (page 16).

[nwhyte]

Thanks. That confirms what I thought, that a Guardian reader would be unlikely to have made this mistake; but I have no evidence that Wyndham was one, and indeed this slip is evidence that he wasn't.

[pwilkinson]

I would actually be somewhat surprised if Wyndham was a Guardian - or rather Manchester Guardian - reader in the 1930s. At the time, it was definitely a northern English newspaper, with only limited circulation (though apparently a reasonably high reputation) in southern England. Indeed, the situation was still the case into the 1950s, when my parents had to have it specifically on order from a local newsagent in order to get it. Though the Observer was completely separate from the Guardian until about twenty years ago, and always published in London.

Though I expect that even a Manchester Guardian or Observer reader could have made that mistake - if, say, they had little personal interest in the Soviet Union and had skipped the relevant inside pages.