Anatoly Dneprov (writer)


Anatoly Dneprov was a Soviet physicist of Ukrainian ancestry, and an author whose science fiction stories were published in the USSR. He is known best for his stories The Maxwell Equations and Iva.

Career

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

Significance

published about 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. Algis Budrys compared his short story "The Purple Mummy" to that of Eando Binder. He is presently 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.

Selected works