Kir Bulychev is most often regarded as a children’s science-fiction writer. When people hear his name, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the adventures of Alisa Selezneva.
However, Kir Bulychev wrote many works that are anything but children’s literature. Among them, probably the most well-known is the novel Those Who Survive, originally published in Russian under the title Posyolok (The Settlement in English). Initially, Bulychev wrote only the first part of the story, titled The Pass, which was published as a standalone novella in 1980. Only eight years later, in 1988, he wrote the second part, Beyond the Pass, and only then did the book become a single novel known as Posyolok.
The story is built around a spaceship that crashed on a distant planet many years ago. The planet is not exactly hostile; rather, it is simply what an alien world should be — not Earth. It has its own flora and fauna, which were never meant to coexist with humans. As a result, survival is extremely difficult for the crash survivors. The entire world is against them, and after the catastrophe almost none of the technological marvels of the future remain. Those who avoided immediate death are forced to focus solely on survival in this unwelcoming environment — and even that does not always succeed.
Over the years, they have become increasingly primitive in terms of everyday life, yet they have learned how to survive. Children born on this planet know nothing of any other life; they learn about it only through lessons in the small school of the Settlement. Even those who were born before the crash were very young at the time and remember almost nothing of life “before.”
The elderly residents of the settlement, those who still remember their former life, continue to long for its return. But the only chance lies in reaching the crashed ship, which is far away, beyond a snow-covered mountain pass. Many attempts have been made to reach it before, and all of them failed. This time, the expedition must consist of the young — there is simply no one else left to go.
This is how the novel about the Robinson Crusoes of the future begins. Kir Bulychev succeeds in vividly showing what awaits space explorers when there are no magical robots or blasters backing them up. This alone sharply distinguished the book from most Soviet optimistic science fiction of the time, where the future was usually portrayed as cloudless, and every newly discovered planet was either already almost identical to Earth or could easily be turned into Earth-2, Earth-3, and so on.
The first part, The Pass, focuses precisely on this journey of the young expedition toward the ship. It is a journey from which no one truly expects a return to Earth — only a faint hope that some working transmitter might be found, or that the group will at least bring back desperately needed tools and parts for everyday survival. With those, perhaps, the settlement could hold on a little longer — and maybe, just maybe, help would arrive someday.
The depiction of life in the settlement itself is built around the tension between the old and the young — not a physical conflict, but a psychological one. The elders still cling to their former life, trying to ensure that the children remember history and preserve knowledge. It is only in the children that they still sense some hope of return. The children, however, are already inhabitants of this world. All that remains of the old one for them are the elders’ words and a few hand-drawn pictures. For some of them, returning to some distant Earth is not even desirable. Earth is something remote and abstract, while their world is here. Here they know how to avoid danger, how to hunt, and how to survive. And only one of them still dreams of visions of a miraculous Earth.
The first part of the novel is entirely self-contained. It leaves us at a point where the sheer difficulty of life for the former Earthlings becomes clear. Even among those who initially survived the crash, very few remain alive after all these years on the planet. And now they have no choice but to place their hopes in the younger generation — because they themselves are not getting any younger, and it is unlikely that any of them would ever make it to the Pass again.
It is a story about an unattainable hope and about half-Mauglis of a new world. Except that these ones at least know they are not truly part of this planet — they belong to another world. Yet even here it is far from obvious that returning is what they actually need. In the new world, they know everything; in the old one, they would be nobody. Their survival skills in a dangerous forest would be useless on Earth and would impress no one. This very contrast is what Kir Bulychev builds the novella around. There are only three “grown-up” teenagers: one girl, Mariana, and two boys, Oleg and Dick. Oleg embodies science and intellect. He lives through the knowledge of the past and longs to see the magical Earth and its wonders. Dick is a true Mowgli — a hunter and a fighter. He is content with his life, and Earth is nothing more than a fairy tale told by the elders. Yet they are still teenagers, and so they also compete for the one girl.
Dick is a recognized authority in the Settlement. But once the group reaches the starship, his experience and skills suddenly become useless there, while Oleg comes to the forefront.
This is where the core conflict is revealed: what matters more — the knowledge and skills that allow one to survive here and now, or the memory of the past and the experience of previous generations, which might make it possible to create something new, or even to restore what was lost?
It seems to me that Kir Bulychev did not originally intend to write a continuation. That is why it appeared only years later — and why it differs so markedly from the first part. But when speaking about the second part of the book, Beyond the Pass, I cannot avoid spoilers. So if you have not read it yet and plan to, it may be best to skip this section.
The “elders” in the settlement sometimes repeat that future generations will grow completely feral, and that the journey to the ship is a chance not only for personal salvation, but also a slim hope that the children might return to civilization. Personally, however, it seems to me that by the laws of nature this settlement has no future at all. It is simply too small to form anything resembling a viable colony. There are only three teenagers close to childbearing age. There are some younger children as well, but judging by the description their total number does not even reach ten. And the dangers of the environment will inevitably claim some of them. Perhaps the elders are afraid to say this aloud — but they understand it too.
And that is precisely why some of them insist on pushing the teenagers into a search in which those who leave may well perish, while the others do not resist it particularly strongly — except for those to whom it no longer matters.
Thus, the second part becomes a determined attempt to reach the ship once again. At first it is merely a desire to find something more, but the determination is so strong that this time they try to invent something entirely new — something that has never been attempted before. And so a hot-air balloon is reinvented.
It is with its help that the survivors suddenly notice that someone has appeared on the planet. They want to believe that these newcomers are searching for them. And if they are not, it becomes all the more important to make their presence known. This is how a new goal is born: to reach the new Earthlings and let them know that there are people here who have been waiting for them for many years.
Unfortunately, this part turns almost everything established in the first part completely upside down.
The crew of the ship that arrives on the planet, in my view, demonstrates a depressing, near-total lack of professional competence. They constantly boast about their professionalism and insist that there is no place for sentimentality or anything extraneous on the job — yet they carry out that very job in a completely idiotic manner.
I cannot explain otherwise the sheer carelessness with which they study a new planet. Yes, you have a spacesuit and a blaster, and so you are convinced that beyond the protective dome nothing can harm you. Personally, I would be looking around a hundred times before every step. A blaster and a suit are great, but what will you do if, say, an elephant falls on you from a tree? Will the suit save you then? And this planet might well have flying elephants — you have never been there before. Or perhaps some plant could instantly entangle you with vines… or a giant spider could spit sticky saliva and pin you to the ground.
But these people stroll around as if on a leisurely walk. What is more, they even remove their suits, as if they had never heard of bacteria, viruses, or deadly insects — which, as the story unfolds, comes back to bite them. Scientists, indeed.
And this kind of negligence on the part of the supposed “rescuers” immediately shatters the image of the all-powerful and wise Earth civilization that the elders describe so vividly to the feral children of the Settlement. If their ship was crewed by the same kind of “professionals,” it is a wonder that anyone survived at all after losing their blasters and spacesuits in the crash.
The second major issue for me is Oleg’s sudden revelation. All of a sudden, he starts throwing out brilliant ideas like Einstein on steroids. And this is just one example of the many deus ex machina moments scattered generously throughout the entire second part. Yes, misfortunes do occur, but time and again things fall into place at exactly the right moment, with almost zero plausibility.
Apparently sensing that he had gone too far, closer to the end of the second part the author swings to the opposite extreme. From that point on, calamities begin to rain down on the characters one after another: the destruction of the ship, madness caused by foolishly inhaling “ice fleas,” and the utterly absurd rejection of the “monkey” outside the window… Even here, it becomes too much.
Most importantly, the second part fundamentally changes the core idea. Yes, once a real chance to return to Earth appears, the question of whether these Robinson-like children would even be needed there becomes sharper. But overall, the book abruptly turns into a teenage adventure story, whereas the first part was closer to social science fiction. Here, reflections about the future — about how the world would receive the young — are left offstage. What remains is the joy of return for the “elders.” But do the young actually need this return? That thought lingers somewhere in the background, never fully explored.
I still consider the novel a worthy work, and one of Kir Bulychev’s best. Yet at times it seems to me that he should have stopped at The Pass, and not turned it into Those Who Survive.
My rating: 4/5
P.S. It is quite amusing to read science fiction from that era, when authors tried to imagine the everyday life of the future. In Those Who Survive, a smile is brought on by a moment where one of the rescuers, Doctor Pavlysh (incidentally, the protagonist of an entire series of works), is deeply worried about whether his “library” has been lost:
But most of all he wanted to find the container holding the microfilms. Pavlysh feared that while checking the luggage during loading, Klavdiya had confiscated the treasured box in which he had brought along a stash of detective stories and science-fiction novels.
P.P.S. And if you want to explore more of Bulychev’s “not-for-children” works, I would recommend the short story May I Speak to Nina?, as well as the Great Guslyar cycle, which tackles issues that are far from childlike.
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