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Popadanets (попаданцы) is a popular genre of Russian pulp literature. It features time travelers, usually military types, who journey to important historical times where they can use their superior 21st century brains to alter events for the glory of the Motherland. It's sort of like Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Aurthor's Court, only instead of cornpone Yankee ingenuity you get soldiers looking to restore Stalin's U.S.S.R.
Above you can see one of their covers which features a demolished Statue of Liberty after the time traveler helped free the U.S.A. from the running dog capitalists. Below we see Comrade Hitler, after the time traveler salvaged the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, assisting the Soviets in defeating England (I never thought I would see Hitler as an action hero, but then again, I also never thought I would see Edison invading Mars).
We then, still on the England theme, have the time traveler helping Russia win the Battle of Trafalger (!) and Josef Stalin piloting his star fighter in an outer space battle. There's even more tomfoolery after the jump.
The style of the illustrations is old-fashioned. Maybe their cover artist is a time traveler from the 1940s. I was also struck by the lack of buxom babes adorning the covers. Methinks that the ultra-nationalistic, yearning for the good ol' days of Stalin's U.S.S.R. patriotic readers need to work on getting their priorities straight. Although, come to think of it, maybe the two rather fey looking time travelers taking a selfie of themselves (image after jump) goes a long way to explaining that lack.
2 comments:
Many of the time travelers appear a bit long of tooth. Perhaps the process ages them.
Yea. some of them appear to be approaching their due date. Here's a link that expalins the genre and gives some details about the plots, which are even weirder than the cover art: Hits, the Horror of Modern Russian Literature. It's in Russian, so you'll need to run a page translator.
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