EUtopias and Other Futures: A European Journal of Science Fiction

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...

Not an IR Theorist By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** A few quick notes on this recent article in Foreign Policy , about "IR Theory and the Game of Thrones", in response to some bits and pieces of it that are noteworthy mostly in a negative sense. The author of the article is Paul Musgrave, a professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is setting out to criticise IR Theory (International Relations Theory) as well as Game of Thrones for some of the same things, including (mostly) their narrow reading and consequent misrepresentation of European history as a never-ending battle royale amongst sovereigns, the soverign-like and aspirant sovereigns. This is an interesting undertaking, reason number one being that IR Theory is a set of largely deductive theories about the way the relationships of states might function, and if deductive sounds like a difficult word here,...

The movie By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** Having recently seen Ant-Man (2015, directed by Peyton Reed), I turned to the internet to find out if Bernard Werber, author of the 1991 novel Les fourmis (and the larger La saga des fourmis ), had anything to say about the movie. For me, ants in SF equal Werber's work to start with. It is a mandatory reference point to have in any conversation. And it is so for some in France, too. As I found out, this means on the one hand that he was invited to offer a critical review of the film as well as interviewed about it. On the other hand, this doesn't mean much more than that... Below, an excerpt  from the interview to explain this. This comes after Werber reveals how his work has gone on to inspire some in France who sold the idea to the US where a producer took it from one studio to the other... so Werber was completely forgotten by everyone involv...