For years, Ukrainian science fiction writers have been producing novels about a Russian takeover of Ukraine.
It’s more evidence of science fiction’s facility for predicting the present, reflecting back the day’s anxieties and aspirations about technology and the future. Ukrainian sf writers have penned novels about, variously, a brutal Kiev cracking down on the Russian population of eastern Ukraine; and brutal Russian-speaking separatist militias trying to tear the country apart.
Today, the writers of these novels are part of the soft-power war, producing online videos and providing commentary to news agencies about their version of events, making reference to their works — one just posted his conspiracy theory that MH17 was actually loaded with corpses and was deliberately crashed to discredit Russian separatists.
The Sci-Fi Writers’ War [Cathy Young/Slate]
(via Beyond the Beyond)