The essay is devoted to the music of Soviet science fiction cinema: turning to it opens up important perspectives on form and content in the soundtracks by Andrey Petrov, Mieczysław Weinberg, Arvo Pärt, Valentyn Sylvestrov, Vladimir Deshevov, Sergey Vasi­lenko, Yuliy Meitus, Sergey Slonimsky, Johann Admoni and Alexander Chernov. The aesthetics of fantastic imagery—which grew out of the sphere of the magical, as in fairy-tale films—emerges in the soundtracks of a number of films of the 1950s–1970s. Their sound design helps to shape a sense of the utopian or the dystopian. In several of these scores the qualities of “ghostliness” are significant, as are the specific features that set apart the musical means of science fiction cinema and their impact on the perception of screen content. The essay traces the history of the arrival of electronic music in cinema and defines its distinctive character and the sphere of its use in films. Identifying the expressive means of science fiction soundtracks helps to define the features of the poetics of this genre.