A Long Time Ago... with Yaroslav Barsukov
Hello there.
Welcome to A Long Time Ago… the fortnightly series where I ask a different guest to share with us a favourite Star Wars story and historical site. This started as a tie-in to my first piece of published writing, the article ART WARS for Star Wars Insider #226. The whole archive of my exploration of fourteen ancient art sites and every Star Wars story on my shelves can be found here.
Today, I hand over to Yaroslav Barsukov!
Yaroslav is a writer of fantasy, science fiction, and everything in between. His debut novella, Tower of Mud and Straw, was shortlisted for the Nebula Award and received a Kirkus Star.
A graduate of both the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and the Vienna University of Technology, he's left one empire only to settle in another. He now lives in Vienna, Austria, with his wife and son, and speaks Russian in the morning, German by day, and English by night.
After leaving his ball and chain at the workplace, Yaroslav goes on to write stories that deal with things he himself, thankfully, doesn’t have to deal with. His short fiction appeared in Galaxy's Edge (edited by the great, late Mike Resnick), Nature, and StarShipSofa, among others.
Bibliography, interviews, guest blog posts, and other goodies can be found at https://www.barsukov.com/
I was lucky enough to receive an ARC (and a wonderful model of the tower) of Yaroslav’s latest novel Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, an expansion and continuation of his praised novella. You can see my copies and mini review here.
And you can check the book out on Amazon UK and US.
I’m also grateful for all the great photos Yaroslav included in his submission… you’ll see!
In A Galaxy Far, Far Away…
Brian Daley’s Han Solo at Stars’ End. Ha! Didn’t expect that, did you? [Editor’s note: I certainly didn’t expect our first repeat pick to be this story (Mark Newbold being the first)], but as you’ll read, this is such a vastly different take!] Let me tell you the story behind it.
So back in the 80s, Star Wars was banned all across the USSR; the only way to see the movies was to attend a secret event at one of the dachas of high-ranking party officials—there were always rumours of these things happening just out of reach. In the 90s, however, the pirate VHS market exploded, paving the way for George Lucas’s saga to enter the living rooms of ordinary Soviet citizens. The films were dubbed, of course, and often quite horribly so: nasal voices droning into the mics, etc.
I must say that this dubbing lent the movies a certain documentary quality, though! I would watch the VHS tape until it wore out, then Dad would buy me a new one on the bootleg market, and I would listen to another nasal voice coming from the TV. It was like magic, like rediscovering Star Wars with every new tape.
As the capitalist reality spread, the pirates arrived in the publishing industry. From 1991 to 1997, the only Star Wars books to be published in Russia were pirated. Take a look at this 1997 edition I owned:
Not bad, huh? Now take a peek inside:
Wait a second. That’s not the Death Star…
Wait wait wait. Isn’t that Michael Garibaldi giving you a hard stare? Yeah, I know, I love Babylon 5, and apparently so did the “publishers.” Or maybe they simply didn’t give a shit. This reminds me of the perfectly legitimate DVD release of Space: Above and Beyond.
Ah, Babylon 5, a much-loved show betrayed by just about everyone! Have you noticed how each time someone recommends B5, they invariably preface it with “Yeah, of course, some aspects of it have aged badly, and the effects are crap, and you’ll need to stick with it until the second season…” Tor.com (I think they call themselves Reac-tor nowadays, for whatever reason) even ran a retrospective on the show titled “The Greatest, Most Terrible SF Series.”
Honestly now. B5 is the best sci-fi series to ever grace the TV screen. It’s also one of the best series, period. No kinda, but that’s okay, or some aspects of it.
But I digress. Where was I? Oh yeah, the most terrible Russian pirate editions of the Star Wars novels. I owned two books, aptly titled Star Wars I (Star Wars / The Empire Strikes Back) and Star Wars II (Return of the Jedi / Han Solo at Star’s End). The illustrations in the second book were a bit better…
I guess that’s what happens when your Dad starts throwing kitchen appliances at you.
…though Han Solo was apparently drawn in the likeness of Nikolai Noskov, the frontman of the once-popular rock group Gorky Park:
Not much can be said about Han Solo at Star’s End, apart from the fact it was the first piece of Star Wars I consumed after the endless nasal-voice VHS tapes. To a Soviet-born kid, the saga felt like something out of a different life, and a new chapter in it was a door into an alternate reality. Back in the day, I knew nothing about the Expanded Universe / Legends and canon/non-canon stuff, of course, so I re-read the novel three or four times, dreaming of hitching a ride on the Millennium Falcon.
Nothing can replace the magic of childhood, man!
In Petronell-Carnuntum, Bruck an der Leitha, Austria…
The “Roman City of Carnuntum” near Vienna. Did you know that Austria’s capital was once a Roman military camp called Vindobona? Carnuntum itself used to be a legionary fortress and the headquarters of the Pannonian fleet.
The Austrians have reconstructed the place with great care: the site hosts multiple buildings with functioning baths and even an underfloor heating system.
Some of the Romans were raised from the dead too, and are now locked in eternal combat with the Germanic barbarians. We, the tourists, buy beer & sausages and watch the bloody battles unfold while the sun tickles our noses from behind the trees’ branches.
Such is the eventual fate of all great civilizations!
Thank you so much Yaroslav!
These posts come out every other Sunday so subscribe today to discover the next guest and their picks!
Cheers,
Harvey