Anatoly Dneprov (writer)

Anatoly Dneprov (also spelled Anatoly Dnieprov, Ukrainian: Анатолій Дніпров, pseudonym; real name Anatoliy Petrovych Mitskevitch[1]) was a Soviet physicist of Ukrainian ancestry, and an author whose science fiction stories were published in the USSR (and also the United States from 1961 to 1970).[2] He is known best for his stories The Maxwell Equations (1963) and Iva.

Anatoly Dneprov
Anatoly Dneprov
Born
Dnipropetrovsk
Died1975
NationalitySoviet Ukrainian
OccupationAuthor

Career

Anatoly Dneprov was a physicist who worked at an institute of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences.

Significance

The Progress Publishers, Moscow wrote of him: His favourite subject is cybernetics – its amazing achievements to date and its breath-taking potentialities. Scientific authenticity is a salient feature of his writings.[3] Algis Budrys compared his short story "The Purple Mummy" to that of Eando Binder.[4] He is now almost a forgotten writer, but his predictions about artificial intelligence and self-replicating machines are uncanny.

Dneprov's 1961 short story "The Game" presents a scenario, the Portuguese stadium, anticipating the later China brain and Chinese room thought experiments. It concerns a stadium of people who act as switches and memory cells implementing a program to translate a sentence of Portuguese, a language that none of them knows.[5]

Selected works
  • Crabs On The Island (Russian 1958, English 1968)

"Why not? Any machine tool, a lathe, for example, makes parts for lathes like itself. So I conceived the notion of making an automatic machine that would manufacture copies of itself from start to finish. My crab is the model of such a machine."

  • Maxwell Equations (Russian 1960, English 1963)

"All the sensations that go to make up your spiritual ego are nothing but electrochemical impulses that travel from receptors up to the brain to be processed, and then down to effectors."

  • The Purple Mummy (Russian 1961, English 1966)

'This is where the information is convolved into the model of the object.

These thin air-cooled needles are something like those used for intermuscular injections. A thin stream of plastic material is pressed through them in short spurts. The needles are synchronized with the ultra-sound needles which are at this moment feeling around the real object. Drop by drop, from point to point, the thin stream of plastic builds the model. The scale of the model may be regulated by using these levers. They may be made larger or smaller than the real object...'
'What about the colour?'

'That's easy. In the initial state the material is colourless, but the photocalorimeter, according to the colour information received, introduces the necessary amounts of the dyes indicated...'

  • The World In Which I Disappeared (Russian 1961, English 1968)
  • The Game (Russian 1961)
  • The Formula For Immortality (Russian 1962, English 1963)
  • When Questions Are Asked (Russian 1963, English 1963)
  • Prophets (Russian 1971)
  • Iva

See also

References
  1. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Jul., 1978), p. 130
  2. "The multidimensional guide to science fiction and fantasy of the twentieth century". natsscifiguide.com/. Retrieved 19 February 2012.
  3. "Anatoly Dneprov". librius.net/. Archived from the original on 12 July 2012. Retrieved 19 February 2012.
  4. Budrys, Algis (September 1968). "Galaxy Bookshelf". Galaxy Science Fiction. pp. 187–193.
  5. http://www.hardproblem.ru/en/posts/Events/a-russian-chinese-room-story-antedating-searle-s-1980-discussion/
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