“The Right to be Wrong": Science fiction, gaming, and the cybernetic imaginary in Kon-Tiki: A path to the Earth (1985-86)

• Main Author: TATARCHENKO, Ksenia
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
• Subjects: Modern Literature; Philosophy
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3187; https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2019.0065
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Our understanding of the 1980s in the Soviet Union is inextricable from the period's status as the last decade of the country's existence—any other approach would require a fancy leap of the imagination. Mikhail Pukhov's science fiction novel Kon-Tiki: A Path to the Earth performs just such a leap in the strict sense of the term. Pukhov's novel combines a futuristic setting of space travel and electronic gaming, with an eye to promoting the enlightenment agenda of the national computer literacy campaign. This imbrication of literary, digital, and social elements does not square with the received historical account of computing, according to which the Soviet failure to mass-produce personal computers was both a marker of and a contributor to the political failure of the system. Serialized in 1985–86, just before the advent of glasnost´ and perestroika, Kon-Tiki's visions also do not closely match the dominant chronology of political ruptures.