EUtopias and Other Futures: A European Journal of Science Fiction

By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** Having read this Hungarian anthology earlier on, the third in a three-part series of volumes published by Ad Astra, I felt obliged to check out what preceded it -- the "ante-logy" of this "antrilogy" (beg your pardon). I went backwards chronologically, and -- just like the last time -- I will focus here on highlighting those stories that were good or decent enough that they would, in my view, deserve a wider audience. Measured this way, the first of the three volumes was the strongest. If I take into account those stories that almost made it, or had strengths as well as values, the first two volumes were both stronger than the third (which was the one I read first). Overall, I'm glad to have found eleven stories to my liking in the overall antrilogy (5+3+3). It was certainly a good idea from the publisher and editors Sándor Szélesi and Zsolt Kádá...

At Solaris station, floating above the ocean of Solaris By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** We've written about Solaris before... And that is Stanisław Lem's Solaris. Now, thanks to a screening of the 1971 Andrei Tarkovsky movie by the Russian Studies Department at ELTE University yesterday, we are here to revisit the subject. Only, it is not quite the same subject, of course. Much has been said and written about how Lem wasn't really happy about the way his work was adapted to film, and how Tarkovsky on the other hand was in a sense making an anti-SF film, stating that he doesn't like SF -- when the world around us is full of the fantastic, anyway. Why would you wish to be on another planet when you can enjoy being in a field like this? Isn't it full of wonder? Now, Tarkovsky may have been somewhat ignorant of the diversity of approaches and themes in SF when he stated the a...

Le Quartier Haussmannien dans la "brune", as French commentators sometimes joke about the movie... By Cseperke TIKÁSZ ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** The key to a good disaster movie may be how the creators combine the bigger picture with the micro perspective of characters we can care about. Think Kate and Jack in Titanic. In this French SF movie, Just a breath away ( Dans la brume - 2018 ), we have a micro/family drama but we do not get anything like the bigger picture. We are left without answers as to the basic whys of the story. After a sudden earthquake, Paris is covered by a murderous smoke. Everyone envoloped by this mysterious smoke, breathing it in, is dead in seconds, but it stops somewhere between the 4th and 5th floor level and only very-very slowly continues to rise. So there remain survivors. One of them is the character played by Romain Duris (you might know the guy from The Spanish Apartment/L...

By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** Published by Ad Astra (a Hungarian SF publishing house that operated from 2012 to 2018) as the third volume in a series of similar, thematically organised collections, this is a much weaker anthology of Hungarian authors' works than the one I wrote about here during the holidays. Whereas that one was world-class, this one feels more like the output of a distant colony of the SF universe... with due respect to some exceptions to this mentioned below. Even so, it is very interesting to read a volume like this, because the dividing line between good and bad is very strongly visible here (this also shows the importance of editing, I guess). Some authors just don't take what they write seriously enough and what they publish feels like they just wanted to get it over with, even if that took finding the cheapest, stupidest cliché one could think of in the given situation ...