The Lost War

The novelette «The Lost War» belongs to the genre of anti-Utopia. Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin and English writer George Orwell exemplified this controversial genre. As opposed to Utopists, who attempt to create and depict an ideal human society of the future, the anti-Utopists picture the future in extremely dark colors. A further distinction between Utopists and anti-Utopists is their interpretation of the relationship between the present and the future. While Utopists focus on the future, where humans have overcome all shortcomings of the present, anti-Utopists are quite concerned with the present and project its problems into the future using dark and grotesque stylistic methods. Unfortunately, the pessimistic predictions of anti-Utopists are realized more frequently than the rosy fantasies of Utopists. Grotesque pictures of the totalitarian regime created by Zamyatin and Orwell, for example, became a gruesome reality in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cambodia, and Iraq. This novelette first appeared in 2003 in Russian science fiction magazine «Polden - XXI Vek» published by world-famous writer Boris Strugatsky. It was published in Russian under the title «The Long Unhappy Life of Bill Stressner.» «The Lost War» serves as an alert, an urgent warning to all of us who live today about the future that awaits our descendants if we fail to stop the horrors of terrorism and the ideology of obscurantism.