Russian Cosmism

Essentially, this is a mixed bag of early 20th century thinkers involved or associated with the Cosmism movement: a fantastical socialist utopian ideology that revered science to near worship-level and felt the telos of society was pointed, ultimately, towards immortality and interplanetary life. There are many intriguing highlights and interesting portions of this, but also a large amount of absurd notions and half-baked ideas.

The opening essays by Alexander Chizhevsky are very interesting and eye-opening, and the one essay present here by Nikolai Federov is truly inspiring. Valerian Muravyev's essay, “A Universal Productive Mathematics” was a delight, and deeply informed philosophically. It intriguingly prefigures notions currently being developed today, such as the Constructor Theory of quantum physicist David Deutsch. Far less enjoyable were sections written by “Anarcho-Biocosmist” Alexander Svyatogor, which I struggled to get through, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's essays were, in some aspects, interesting, but mostly very dated and bizarre. The final part, a short story by Alexander Bogdanov, is very good.

Overall it was quite enjoyable, though one can't help thinking while reading it, “ah, so this is why Cosmism never really got anywhere...” It's a shame, in a way. We have come so much further with science and technology than the early 20th century when this material was written, but have lost much of the wild imagination this contains, as well as the belief that the stars are our true birthright. Humanity can, and has, done much worse things than to work faithfully (albeit naively) towards physical immortality and an interplanetary civilization.