Friday, September 16, 2016

Until the Earth is Far (1962) (part 1)





This is a tough one to come up with a correct translated title. Could also be:

 "Still far from Earth"
"Until the earth is still far"

 So I will go with my made-up one:

 Lyashenko, Mikhail and Svirin, Alexander. Illustrated by B. Markiewicz and Grishin. Until the Earth is Far. Moscow:   .100p. 30 cm. (part of "Books of Knowledge" series, Book 1.)

 This was part of an "encyclopedia" for children which took a fictional story and filled it with scientific facts. Other topics in the series were "On this planet can live", "Operation Ocean", "Big Hunt", and "Expedition to the Ancestors."
These are widely known children's classics in Russia and have bee reprinted in both 2010 and 2016.
Having no russian language I speculate we once again have a group of children traveling with a scientist uncle or friend as they explore the solar system in their space craft.




 The illustration are wonderfully fanciful and suggest how fantasy and reality can be shown together.


I have encountered these "wings" in some other russian children's books. I don't know if this was a concept developed earlier than this but it seems interesting.





I think this section shows the conditions found on different planets as they explore the solar system.





I will continue with illustrations from this book with my next post.

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4 comments:

  1. SmurfswackerSeptember 16, 2016 at 7:16 PM

    Nice book! About the wings: in his 1920s book on space exploration Hermann Oberth speculated that because of the sun's intense heat, space suits would need big reflectors--more like heat sinks--to keep them from overheating. I wonder if these wings are intended for the same purpose.

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  2. UnknownSeptember 17, 2016 at 9:47 AM

    It was my favourite book series when I was a kit.

    Three children and a granddad of one of them play a game. They imagine that, they are from a different solar system far far away and they travel on a starship. Eventually they arrive to our system.
    Due to a very long travel time in low gravety they develop some useful adaptations -'wings and tails.

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  3. UnknownOctober 7, 2016 at 12:57 PM

    They are three school friends (Victor, Gennady and Lena). With Lena's grandfather (Alexander Petrovitch) they play the game to explore universe, to find planets with life. Lena's grandfather offered to invent them new nickname, new body, new abilities. So they have wings and tails, sleepless eyes. They invented our spaceship “Luch” (it’s translate as “Ray”)
    p.s. sorry for my english

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  4. UnknownOctober 20, 2016 at 1:14 PM

    Yep, every one of children was at liberty to invent ONE superability for his/her avatar, so one boy invented tail (cause it's cool), the girl went with wings, and the alter ego went with sleeping every 1/3 of second so essentially never sleeps at all

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