Ugh, what the hell, I shouldn't write comments on no sleep. Yeah, Sigizmund. I had Tsiolkovsky on the brain at the same time. Thank you.

Could it be She Has a Broom, He Has a Black Hat? Late 80s film, daughter of Baba Yaga runs away, not sure if the rest of the plot details line up, though.

No, you're right: I got carried away with my pro-Eastern bloc flag-waving (no regrets!) and made a stupid mistake. Edited for accuracy.

Yup. Here's the trailer.

You should be getting more uprates for this.

I don't think I'd like an adaptation of that book to be a series. It suggests a larger world, but the suffocating smallness of their story is part of the point.

Here's the original Russian if you want to do a side-by-side comparison. I'd be curious how they approached it.

Hrm… further confusion! The story opens with a discussion of the word itself, which is the same word in English (for an Ethiopian plateau), but also appears to be "amba" in Spanish? I can't read Spanish so I'll have to leave it there, but what an interesting muddle.

A passing, oblique mention in there:

Well done! I wonder why Amba was changed to Ambo, though. Something in Spanish that made Amba unworkable?

Heh, funny how one letter can lead you on a goose chase. The story is "Amba," by Aleksandr Beliaev. Was first published in English in 1968, translated by Eve Manning.

Totally agree, and I think some of that nascent hostility is already seeping into the book in the form of ideological muddle, but I do think it set out a blueprint for future Marxist SF writers (ideological muddle and all!)

No problem! "Black Column" is probably the 1962 novella by Evgenii Voiskunskii and Isai Lukod'ianov, but I can't find any references to an English-language version. No luck on "Ambo!" yet, sorry. :(

Not sure - it might be one of the Asimov compilations (not really edited by him, but with an introduction, so his name is usually on the cover). "Three matches" might be "The Six Matches," by the Strugatsky bros, which appears in the second volume (published as More Soviet Science Fiction and, more recently, The Heart…

"Republic of the Southern Cross" is amazing, and I wish it were better-known in English. It's by Valery Briusov, who's mostly known as a Symbolist critic and poet, but I like that story better than most of his poetry. (Here's an okay English translation)

[edited for accuracy] I love this, but this is very much just Russian SF - worth talking about the broader Eastern bloc that tradition was so intermingled with it (Lem being the most famous, rightly, but there are rich veins of material throughout Czech, Polish, and other Soviet-era SF traditions). For people looking…

the dudes are all kinda vaguely apey

SPOILERS from the comics:
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I wouldn't be surprised if they keep the Dwight storyline intact. One thing they've done consistently in the show is try to stretch out some of the more rapid character developments from the comics (Remember how quickly Father Gabriel went from duplicitous to not-duplicitous? Like five…

MOAR SPOILERS

SPOILERS, cont.