EUtopias and Other Futures: A European Journal of Science Fiction

Collage by yours truly: Portraits of Vladislav Surkov (top left and top right) + a portrait of Natan Dubovitsky (top middle) + screenshot of the source of the latter portrait, with the intro to Dubovitsky's short story By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** A friend sent along the link to this short story , titled "Without Sky" or Без неба in Russian. The author is indicated as Natan Dubovitsky -- a pseudonym. Keep this in mind for now. The Wikipedia page on none other than Vladislav Surkov says that "journalists in Russia and abroad have speculated that Surkov writes under the pseudonym Natan Dubovitsky, although the Kremlin denies it." If I look at the above collage, with two of Surkov's publicly available portraits and the drawn portrait of Natan Dubovitsky (from the site where the short story in question was published), I probably don't need a forensic investigation of the st...

By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** This. Is. Military. SF.  If you don't know what that's supposed to mean, feel free to quit. You can quit any time. Don't like it here? Not your genre? Go home. Why wait? Why turn even one more page? You still here?  If you're still here, it seems like you may, just possibly, be ready for this. You may even enjoy the ride. You might get an unhealthy amount of enjoyment out of it, in fact. Reading "Terms of Enlistment," you will naturally enjoy when shit blows up from time to time get that strange feeling of déja lu ("already read," that is), because of course you have: in Starship Troopers , by Robert Heinlein. The similarity is in the most positive sense. It is a cozy familiarity with some of what's going down that immediately works to suck you into the story, even though there are also some important differences compared to th...

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...