Valentina Nikolayevna Zhuravlyova (1933–2004) was a Soviet-era science fiction writer from Russia. She published a handful of stories in English in the 1980s that were originally written in the 1950s and early 1960s, but she is largely unknown to Western readers. Especially during the 1960s, the Soviet Union boasted several talented Russian and Ukrainian writers besides the iconic Strugatsky brothers, although the Strugatskys were arguably the only ones to break out into significant English translation.
Although little is known about Zhuravlyova, she did collaborate on science fiction with her husband, the engineer and inventor Genrich Altshuller, who invented TRIZ—the Russian acronym for the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. They wrote many stories together, but because of anti-Semitic restrictions, these stories were published under the single name of Valentina Zhuravlyova. (“The Astronaut,” however, is a story Valentina wrote solo.)
As noted by James Lecky in a 2013 blog entry, “The Astronaut” was first published in 1960 but later appeared in the 1963 anthology Destination: Amaltheia, edited by Richard Dixon. The story is striking for its mixture of big, bold emotions and themes of sacrifice and renewal. As Lecky also notes, despite the emotional openness of the story, its provocative structure marks it as a forerunner of the New Wave of the mid-1960s. This new translation by James Womack corrects several errors in the original translation and provides a newly “refurbished” look at an underappreciated gem of Soviet-era science fiction.