EUtopias and Other Futures: A European Journal of Science Fiction

By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** To answer the question raised in the title: I have no idea, other than: "why not." (I did it, anyway.) (Also, keep in mind that in Russia, Christmas Day is January 7, 2020.) This actually sums up the nature of my experience with this movie well: hailed as well as ridiculed as Russia's response to the Marvel superhero universe, Zashchitniki (The Guardians)   clearly entertains more when watched with little to no expectations. Or, basically, as trash, sifting through which one may strike gold sometimes.  Which is not to say that you will strike 24-karat gold in this case — it's just the idea of why you could embark on watching the movie in the first place, or at all. The plot is of the kind that even five-year-old children could quickly come up with, given the right incentives. But that should be no reason to bash this movie too badly. The team behind it ...

The complete stories of J.G. Ballard (for reasons to be made clear below) By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** Click-baiting headlines happen in the world of science, too, unfortunately (or — these days — necessarily?). Whatever we make of it, this article , reporting on some recent research, is certainly interesting to read. As we are informed there, plants are found to emit sounds, picked up "on an ultrasonic sound range between 20 and 150 kHz", inaudible to the human ear. These sounds apparently reflect the conditions that the plant finds itself in: "Stressed plants were found to emit significantly more sounds than plants from the comfortable control group. Not only were they noisier, but the researchers claim that they gave off different sounds depending on what was happening." Of course, research into the subject is not exactly new. Here is this article from 2013 , which makes it clea...

By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** In this new format, I will post one-paragraph/one-sentence briefs on books and short stories of interest, saving you (as well as for myself) a lot of time even as I hope to still be able to give you enough information to make up your mind as to whether you're interested in the given story. It might be useful to add that I very much remain interested in writing longer reviews of anthologies and novels, too -- this is just an additional trick to pull from the bag to keep things going and keep you posted. First up in Briefings on Readings is Celle qui n'avait pas peur de Cthulhu  (The One Who Wasn't Afraid of Cthulhu) by Karim Berrouka : At times light entertainment, mixing comedy and action, at times lightly philosophical, this book gives you a mildly critical take on the body of work by Lovecraft (and also about religion) and takes you on a ride through the wor...

Above : A snapshot from "Arrowsmith", by Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco. By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** If you have not heard of the Corvinus Journal of International Affairs so far, that is perhaps because it is no magazine of science-fiction. It is a scholarly publication, with a focus on International Relations. I am bringing it up here, because the next issue, a thematic issue on the 100th anniversary of the Versailles Treaty, features my article on WWI alternative history fiction, along the following lines — as outlined in the article's summary: This article offers a brief overview of the challenges of assessing counterfactual statements in terms of plausibility, to then consider the reasons for the comparative scarcity of WWI alternative histories in published alternative history (AH) speculative fiction. The relative rarity of such fiction may be striking, given the popularity of th...

Super-haunting supermoon over London ( by user Colin at Wikimedia ). By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** It's been a real struggle to get to this point, but -- finally -- here is a new post for the blogzine. Hopefully it will be followed by others over the coming period. The inspiration (and, even more importantly, the time available) came for this at a major international academic conference on the relationship between migration and poverty, as the experience interfered with my load of daily fiction which I happened to read in the evening prior to the first day of the conference, from Clarke's World's latest issue: a piece by Sara Saab , a Londoner of Lebanese origin who, by her present working location, falls under the jurisdiction of European SF. After a conference where I listened to a lot of really interesting presentations, including about OLAs (Onward Latin American migrants) in London...

MISCELLANEOUS By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** This is a post devoted to a couple of only loosely related subjects, to bring you some news. 1. Chernobyl in SF The HBO series (directed by Craig Mazin) was absolutely amazing, down to the collection of Soviet-era ashtrays used in different scenes. Russia's Ministry of Culture sponsoring a counter-series to air on Gazprom-owned NTV, with a trouble-making and (of course) entirely fictive CIA agent at the centre of its plot, is probably the best compliment it can get besides its current IMDB score of 9.6. If you're interested in reading about Chernobyl from SF authors, there is of course Frederik Pohl's Chernobyl novel , a piece of non-fiction. For fiction, check out "Cap Tchernobyl" (Direction: Chernobyl) by Sylvie Denis, a short story in French  from 1997, with intelligent robots conspiring to come together near deserted Chernobyl...