" A] surprisingly moving story." The New Yorker

"Bogdanov's novels reveal a great deal about their fascinating author, about his time and, ironically, ours, and about the genre of utopia as well as his contribution to it." Slavic Review

"Bogdanov's imaginative predictions for his utopia are both technological and social... Even more farsighted are his] anxious forebodings about the limits and costs of the utopian future." Science Fiction Studies

"The contemporary reader will marvel at Bogdanov's] foresight: nuclear fusion and propulsion, atomic weaponry and fallout, computers, blood transfusions, and (almost) unisexuality." Choice

A communist society on Mars, the Russian revolution, and class struggle on two planets is the subject of this arresting science fiction novel by Alexander Bogdanov (1873 1928), one of the early organizers and prophets of the Russian Bolshevik party. The red star is Mars, but it is also the dream set to paper of the society that could emerge on earth after the dual victory of the socialist and scientific-technical revolutions. While portraying a harmonious and rational socialist society, Bogdanov sketches out the problems that will face industrialized nations, whether socialist or capitalist."

Alexander Bogdanov wrote the articles in this volume in the years before and during the Revolution of 1905 when he was co-leader, with V.I. Lenin, of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, and was active in the revolution and the struggle against Marxist revisionism. In these pieces, Bogdanov defends the principles of revolutionary Social-Democracy on the basis of a neutral monist philosophy (empiriomonism), the idea of the invariable regularity of nature, and the use of the principle of selection to explain social development. The articles in On the Psychology of Society (1904/06) discredit the neo-Kantian philosophy of Russia's Marxist revisionists, rebut their critique of historical materialism, and develop the idea that labour technology determines social consciousness. New World (1905) envisions how humankind will develop under socialism, and Bogdanov's contributions to Studies in the Realist Worldview (1904/05) defend the labour theory of value and criticise neo-Kantian sociology.