Aelita

Alexei Tolstoy's Aelita was written in the 1920s and imagines the first breakneck human flight to Mars. The action starts in the Soviet Union after the Russian Civil War. The old engineer Los and his companion Gusev, a Red Army soldier and true Bolshevik firebrand, fly to Mars in a rickety, egg-shaped craft. There they encounter an ancient civilisation, which actually originated on the long-lost continent of Atlantis on Earth.

While Los is attracted to the privileged and progressive upper cl...