Archives: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame

Lean and intense (but not at the same time), Anna Michailovna Tikhonova was one of the leading SF writers in the USSR during the Cold War.

Born in Kishinev in 1920, Anna Tikhonova saw herself as a free thinker at an early age, often haranguing her teddy for hours about her plans for a futuristic utopian society with very late bed times.

Anna Tikhonova was educated at the Kishinev Heavy Tractor Primary School, the Cold Iron Drop Forge High School, and then at Corbin U, named after a minor hero of the Revolution who managed the Party invitations and RSVPs, and was a dab hand at drop scones.

At the age of twenty-nine, Anna Tikhonova wrote her first SF novel Q, a gloomy tract about the problems of a society where people spend most of their time in lines, waiting for consumer durables. The book caused some ripples, but sank anyway. She soon followed with Altared States, a mind-numbing polemic inveighing against a rigid theocracy based on extravagant places of worship. This caused some comment in the USSR, and the authorities soon came to take notice of Anna Tikhonova.

Undaunted, she scribbled her weighty Desert World series, where water was more important than life, and brevity less important than either of them. 700,000 words later, Anna Tikhonova was branded TBTP by the authorities: Too Boring To Persecute.

Anna Tikhonova's works were introduced to the West by Paul Smelt, a chronic insomniac, who discovered her novels while looking for firewood in Prague. After having his first good sleep in sixteen years, Smelt translated and published all Tikhonova's works and brought her to the West on a lecture tour.

Anna Tikhonova immigrated to Canada in 1972 and began to write even more copiously. She turned to fantasy after reading Lord of the Rings, thinking it was a circus novel. Her first fantasy novel was Lord Bowel's Fane, a religio-scatological romp, with plenty of room for sequels. Concurrently, she began a series set in the magical land of Zernth, where everyone revels in Knock Knock jokes. In a spare weekend she whipped up the five volume Garliciad monument, and a finer doorstop was never written.

As a result of her earlier work in the Moscow Bureau of Economic Development, fantasy proved to be Anna Tikhonova's forte. She rattled off a series of yarns featuring the gay blades Fluffy and the Grey Trouser, then went serious in the megalithic Lord Valentine's Day Massacre ("a bloody good read" — SF Monocle). In 1980 she stumbled on her quirky hero, a wisecracking goblin called Boris who starred in The Goblin and the Sword, The Goblin and the Ring, The Goblin and the Unicorn, The Goblin and the Faeries, The Goblin and the Magic Stuff, and the triumphant The Goblin Unbound.

Anna Tikhonova was invited back to her home town of Kishinev in 1991, and her old TBTP designation was removed, to be replaced with TFTI: Too Famous To Ignore.