Premium Pulp Fiction S1:E4 Ukrainian Philosophy and Poetry Put on a Spacesuit

In this episode of the Premium Pulp Fiction podcast, my guest is Maksym Van Shamrai — millennial novelist, cultural theorist, and Ukrainian expat.In 2010, Maks had just finished his doctoral studies in Kyiv. His thesis examined something called cultural anthropocentrism — the idea that humans are both the authors of culture and the products of it. Heavy stuff. The kind of thing you wrap in abstract philosophical language until nobody understands it anymore.Then he attended a lecture on the role of poetry in forming personality. At the end, confused by the jargon, he asked the speaker to explain it simply.She smiled and said: “Poetry helps the heart think when the brain is tired.”That sentence cracked something open. Maks realized his ideas about humanity, memory, power, and meaning didn’t want to stay inside academic language anymore. They wanted characters. Danger. Conflict. Emotion.“2010 became the moment,” Maks told me on this week’s podcast, “when my philosophy quietly put on a spacesuit and stepped into fiction.”A Book That Lived Several LivesScions of the Last Hope began in Ukraine under a different title — The Last Crew — written first in Russian, the everyday language of southern Ukraine at the time. By 2011, Maks had moved to Spain, diving deeper into art and culture, meeting the love of his life, learning Spanish at the government language school in Vigo. The manuscript paused at chapter seven. He was absorbing rather than creating.Then came 2022.When the sirens sounded in Kyiv, Maks was working on chapter eleven. Something opened inside him. The book wasn’t just philosophical anymore — it became deeply emotional. He finished the manuscript in Ukrainian, then translated the entire novel into Spanish himself. Not with Google Translate. With dictionaries, with his Spanish family, with random guys at the calisthenics park who could tell him how young people actually spoke.“It was quite a challenge,” he said. “Asking people, asking my family, my friends — which was quite a nice journey.”He wanted to publish first in Ukraine, his home. But Ukrainian publishers had been hit by missiles. The infrastructure was gone. So Spain became the path forward. The Spanish edition, Vástagos de la Última Esperanza, was released in 2025 by Caligrama, an imprint of Penguin Random House.And now Premium Pulp Fiction has acquired the English-language rights.What Survives When a Story Crosses BordersOne of the things I pushed Maks on during our conversation was voice. How do you carry an Eastern European literary sensibility — with its space for silence, moral tension, slow philosophical moments — into English, a language that often rewards acceleration?His answer was precise: “I didn’t want to sound very Spanish or German or whatever. I wanted to sound Ukrainian. Eastern European.”That’s not about being different for its own sake. It’s about protecting the philosophical heart of the book. Scions of the Last Hope isn’t just a space adventure with explosions and heroes. It explores what Maks calls “biopolitical science fiction” — questions about power over human life itself. Who is allowed to live? Whose memory is preserved? Which version of humanity gets a future?These questions need space. They need reflection, not just fast action.“If I remove that deeper, quieter layer,” he said, “the story would lose part of its meaning.”The Seed of the NovelWhen I asked Maks what the book is really about, he offered two questions that haunt the entire narrative:Can you build a new future without carrying the ghosts of the past?When systems of power and survival define humanity, what remains of the human?His answer to the second: Choice. Fragile, constrained, often punished — but not entirely erasable.That’s the seed. Set in 2136, after planetary cataclysm has plunged humanity into collapse, the story follows scientists racing to understand a distant exoplanet that might become humanity’s new home — while navigating corporate intrigue, government conspiracies, and a mystery encoded in a single prehistoric word.It’s dystopian science fiction, yes. But it’s also a reflection on identity, memory, and what it means to remain human when technology and power structures are trying to decide that for you.Eastern European RootsMaks cites Stanisław Lem, the Strugatsky Brothers, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke as influences — but also Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Arenev and Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski (yes, The Witcher). And films: Star Wars, Alien, Prometheus.What unites them? “Humanity facing the big questions,” he said. “I’m always looking for the philosophical point in every single book or movie. Even if there is no philosophical point.”He grew up in a household in Mykolaiv where his father — a professor of physics and mathematics — also played guitar, piano, and accordion, and wrote poetry that he never published. His mother taught ...