EUtopias and Other Futures: A European Journal of Science Fiction

Underground springwater reservoir beneath Mount Gellért in Budapest, the author's photo (2018) By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** Seeing my reviews full of praise for writers like Bo Balder , Anita Moskát or Yuriy Shcherbak you may wonder: Can this guy bite? Does he have the guts to write something really critical for a review? Well, the wondering ends today... This will be a takedown. "Lovely," "lyrical," "beautiful," etc. These are the adjectives I've typically heard from people describing how Finnish author Emmi Itäranta's book is written. They had less to say about its substance. Now, I'm really not hard put to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good story. I like to enjoy literary values independently of plausibility issues. For a recent and good example of when I benefited from this, take Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven , another dystop...

Gagarin is greeting Hungarian youth on the cover of a Hungarian newspaper, during a visit to Hungary, on August 26, 1961, exactly 57 years ago. His related handwritten message in Cyrillic may be seen beside his left leg. By Cseperke TIKÁSZ ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** What did Yuriy Gagarin feel before his launch to space in 1961? What was Sergei Korolev (the chief Soviet spacecraft designer) thinking as the countdown proceeded? And what about German Titov, Gagarin's reserve? And Valentina Gagarina – the wife, with their two little daughters? We cannot possibly know, of course. What we know from the press coverage of the era is that an euphoric shock would soon be felt across the world, upon Gagarin's return, for Yuriy Gagarin, the first human to do so, has journeyed into outer space! In 2013, a new film on the subject was released in Russia: Gagarin: First in space (Гагарин. Первый в космосе). The production ...

By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for similar analyses and discussions. ** In the "Science Fiction" group on Facebook a question was posted recently about "powerful" biological weapons in sci-fi. There was a large number of responses – a total of 144 to date (as of August 24), showing that this kind of thread has considerable popularity. Yours truly also reacted, nominating Aldous Huxley's anthrax bombs there, because they are a very important example from the SF literature, with much in the way of contemporary relevance, and this makes them very "powerful" in a sense. Here's why, in a nutshell. In Brave New World (1932), Huxley gave a central role to anthrax bombs, even as he didn't speak about them at length. According to what we are told in the story, they were among the most horrible weapons of the "Nine Years War" that wrought devastation all around the globe, and their use h...

A mural in Kyiv, Ukraine (the author's photo, 2016) By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** Those following this blog will already know that I'm a fan of Yuriy Shcherbak – I praised him both as a writer and as a person (due to his parallel careers as epidemiologist scholar and writer, which he topped off with a role in politics and diplomacy in post-Soviet independent Ukraine).  It would be a let-down if I wouldn't write here about one of his best-known works, "The Chronicle of Yaropol Town" ( Хроніка міста Ярополя in Ukrainian). This was written after Quarantine , and takes Shcherbak and us way outside the world of the science lab. It is not genre stuff ( Quarantine wasn't that, either, of course), but it contains fantastic as well as SF elements. Shcherbak shows much technical skill here again in the sense of building complex and nicely written text, but apart from this his w...

By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** "Quarantine" ( Карантин in Ukrainian and Russian), a 1966 novelette by Yuriy Shcherbak, may be well worth a read even today. In this brief review I will give you a few good reasons for this, bullet point by bullet point, to keep my thoughts super-organised. Shcherbak is originally an epidemiologist, and as such he is the author or co-author of many scholarly papers.* Given this, when it comes to dealing with the medical and technological details of a story that begins with an incident in an early-era biosafety lab, it's like a walk in the park for him – he pulls it off without effort. He is also a pretty good writer, good at drawing characters, and providing insights about their merits and into their motives, simply by showing their actions and interactions unfold. In Quarantine , he is able to present a silent hero of humanism in chief researcher Balandin w...

By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** If you are a member of the European Science Ficton group on Facebook, you must have seen me share a link there to this recently-published digital anthology earlier on. "Utópia 501" is a collection of texts from various Central and Eastern European authors, rather loosely organised around the apropos of Thomas More's Utopia , published 501 years ago at the time when the idea of this anthology was born (and 502 years before its actual publication this year). Hence the illustration above: the left side features the cover art of More's original work from 1516, and on the right you have the cover of Utópia 501 . What follows is a brief review and a way to highlight some of the pieces included in the volume. As to the concept of the collection: it's not bad – I'm happy to see any idea that may inspire a publisher in Central Europe to think of publishing t...