Professor Galya Diment has been invited to come and speak at the University of British Columbia (March 15th) and Grinnell College (April 30th).
The talks will be based on the volume she is editing for Anthem Press (UK), H. G. Wells and All Things Russian. One of the most fascinating aspects of Wells’s relationship with Russia is his rather outsized influence on the Soviet science fiction. In her talk she will pay particular attention to the impact the English writer had on the pioneer of that genre in the Soviet Union, Alexander Belyaev, who extensively read Wells (both in English and in Russian translations) before he started writing his own science fantasies, including “Professor Dowell’s Head” (1925) and “The Amphibian Man” (1928). Wells and Belyaev finally met during Wells’s second and final trip to the Soviet Union in 1934.