Writer Sergei Borisovich Pereslegin: biography and creativity

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Sergei Borisovich Pereslegin is a famous writer, researcher, sociologist, futurologist. His interests are very broad and include theoretical physics, history, science fiction, cognitive technologies, and future prediction. In this article we will try to talk about the numerous projects, books and biography of Sergei Borisovich Pereslegin.

Biography

Sergey Pereslegin was born in St. Petersburg (then still Leningrad) on December 16, 1960. Sergey Borisovich is a nuclear physicist by profession, he received his education at the Faculty of Physics of the Leningrad State University. After graduating from university, he began teaching at a school at Leningrad State University, but gradually his interests shifted from theoretical physics towards social sciences: since 1989 he worked on systems theory at the Moscow Institute for System Research, and in the nineties he lectured on sociology.

In 1996, Sergei Pereslegin won the Wanderer Prize for his critically written book Eye of the Typhoon, which analyzes the decline of classic Soviet science fiction literature.

Since 2000 SergeyPereslegin leads the Designing the Future research group, since 2003 - the St. Petersburg School of Screening, since 2007 - the Knowledge Reactor project group.

Sergey Pereslegin is married and has two daughters. Many books and projects of Sergei Borisovich were written and implemented by him together with his wife, Elena Pereslegina.

Pereslegin and science fiction

The name of Sergei Pereslegin is well known to fans of Russian science fiction. Fascinated by science fiction literature, while still a student, he joined the Half Galaxy Science Fiction Club, and also participated in Boris Strugatsky's seminar. Since the late eighties, he has been writing research papers and prefaces to many science fiction books. In the series “The Worlds of the Strugatsky Brothers”, published in the nineties and early 2000s, he wrote the prefaces and afterwords. They are written on behalf of a fictional historian living in the 23rd century in the World of Noon (that is, in the literary world in which the books of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky take place). Thanks to this, the novels turned out to be united into one universe, similar to ours, but due to a different result of the Second World War, it achieved different results - so that individual novels could be consistently combined within a single world, Boris Strugatsky even allowed text editing. Among these fantastic prefaces to science fiction novels, Sergei Pereslegin wrote such things as "Detective in Arkanar", "The Last Ships of the Free Search", "Mirages of the Goldencentury”, “Forecasters of the end of the world”, and others. The Worlds of the Strugatsky Brothers series aroused great interest among new readers in the works of these writers and made it possible to link together Soviet and new Russian science fiction.

For his research work on Russian science fiction, Pereslegin has won various awards many times (the aforementioned Wanderer Prize, ABS Prize, Bronze Snail, Sigma-F, Interpresscon and etc.).

Pereslegin and history

Another area of interest for Sergei Pereslegin is historical science. He is the compiler and editor of the "Military History Library" series and other books on historical topics. Many of his own books focus on historical events, such as Pacific Premiere, which analyzes the military operations of World War II in the Pacific.

Some of Pereslegin's books combine both historical and fantasy elements ("The Second World War between realities", "The War on the Threshold. Gilbert's Desert").

Activities

Various interests of Sergei Borisovich Pereslegin intersect at the point of social design, foresight (from the English Foresight, “looking into the future”) - methods for long-term planning and shaping the future. Since the 2000s, he has been working in the field of social engineering, modeling and predicting the future in various fields using various methods and technologies.

Knowledge Reactor group led by Peresleginconducts information development for various customers, cooperates with private and public institutions (for example, projects were implemented for the Ministry of Education and Science, the Ministry of He alth and Social Development, the Research Institute of Atomic Reactors in Dimitrovgrad, the Skolkovo Open University and others).

Methodology

Modeling and forecasting the future in the “Knowledge Reactor” takes place with the help of various cognitive technologies. The work is carried out simultaneously at the analytical and metaphorical levels, which allows achieving a high level of originality, but at the same time transforming the result into concrete solutions in accordance with the task.

Knowledge Reactor technology looks similar to brainstorming, but it is more complex. The method is based on scientific and practical predictive games (role-playing, strategic, organizational and activity) that create a close-knit creative group capable of jointly solving various problems: scientific, technical, strategic, educational, psychological. This “thought factory” takes a new approach to working with knowledge and is able to effectively explore strategies and likely development scenarios, predict and manage the future, and generate new ideas and meanings. At the same time, a look into the future is based on an understanding of the past: the study of various strategies often takes place on the basis of historical material, analysis of crisis events and wars of the past.

Beliefs

Sergey Borisovich Pereslegin calls himself an imperialist, considers himself an Orthodox Christian, and also adheres to leftist views.

He was one of the first to use the term “Russian world” (a concept that says that all Russian-speaking people, not necessarily ethnic Russians, form a special civilization, the center of which is Russia) in its modern interpretation.

Sergey Borisovich is sure that we are now living in a critical moment for humanity. In its development, mankind has already overcome two phase barriers (the first is the transition to agriculture from gathering and hunting, the second is the invention of the printing press and the creation of a railway network), and now it is faced with the need to overcome the third. If we succeed in inventing something breakthrough, then humanity will enter a fundamentally new stage in its development, if not, it will roll back to the Middle Ages. The next phase of our development, according to Pereslegin, should be cognitive (that is, associated with knowledge).

Many of Sergei Pereslegin's views differ from those popular in society: for example, he considers the problem of global warming and environmental hysteria in principle far-fetched.

And in conclusion, a few words about the most famous books by Sergei Borisovich Pereslegin.

“Tutorial for playing on the world chessboard”

The book “The self-instruction manual for playing on the world chessboard” was published in 2005. This is a study at the intersection of geohistory, geopolitics and geography, an analysis of the modern world geopolitical reality and emerging new global projects. In the bookissues of history, economics, demography, and education are touched upon. It tells about the "life of the state" - about certain laws by which it develops, about the laws of historical processes, hypothetical development scenarios are given. Sergey Pereslegin analyzes various global cognitive projects that shape the future, in particular, he speaks of the “Russian cognitive project” - the need and opportunity for Russia to create its own competitive image of the future.

“New maps of the future”

The book by Sergei Borisovich Pereslegin “New Maps of the Future” was published in 2009. It attempts to describe probable scenarios of world development up to 2050. Sergei Pereslegin considers the main event of this period to be the post-industrial transition, which will take place through a sequence of global crises. The book describes probable scenarios, promising technological directions in the new reality, the hypothetical evolution of the environment familiar to us, social and economic.

“The First World War. War between realities”

Sergey Pereslegin's last book at the moment”The First World War. War Between Realities” was released in 2016.

This is a thoughtful and detailed historical study, an attempt to understand the hidden logic of the First World War and comprehend the underlying key events that led to what happened and drastically changed the entire worldalignment.