| Let's Put the Future Behind Us | |
| Author: | Jack Womack |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Speculative fiction novel |
| Publisher: | Atlantic Monthly Press |
| Pub Date: | April 1996 |
| Media Type: | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages: | 310 pp |
| Isbn: | 978-0-87113-627-5 |
| Dewey: | 813/.54 20 |
| Congress: | PS3573.O575 L48 1996 |
| Oclc: | 33281869 |
Let's Put the Future Behind Us is a speculative fiction novel by Jack Womack set in post-Soviet Russia and released in 1996. It chronicles the transition of bureaucratic apparatchiks into an endemically corrupt Russian quasi-capitalism in the early 1990s dominated by oligarchs, criminals and ultra-nationalist political groups.
The novel arose when Womack's friend and fellow author William Gibson had been collaborating on a screenplay with Kazakh director Rashid Nugmanov after an American producer had expressed an interest in a Soviet-American collaboration to star Russian-Korean singer Viktor Tsoi.[1] Despite being occupied with writing a novel, Gibson was reluctant to abandon the "wonderfully odd project" which involved "ritualistic gang-warfare in some sort of sideways-future Leningrad" and sent Womack to Russia in his stead for a week in March 1992, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union.[2] [3] Rather than producing a motion picture, a prospect which Tsoi's death in an automotive accident put paid to, Womack's experiences in Russia ultimately culminated in the novel,[1] which he began writing in 1994 and finished in September 1995.[2]
The novel has been hailed by Charlie Stross as a "brilliant and vitriolically funny apocalypse geek novel about life in Russia",[4] while Wired commended its "brilliant aperçus and well-aimed jokes",[5] calling the novel "the best Russian gangster thriller ever written by a guy who's not Russian",[6] and Entertainment Weekly rated it a B+.[7]