EUtopias and Other Futures: A European Journal of Science Fiction

By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** Review of "East of a Known Galaxy" – An Anthology of Romanian Sci-Fi Short Stories , edited by Daniel Timariu and Cristian Vicol. București (Bucharest): Tritonic, 2019. Get ready for a journey... into the unknown. A journey into the known is a semantic paradox, of course. You can only journey into the unknown. The long-established greats of sci-fi can certainly take you on such a journey and, if you're a fan, no doubt many a great English-language work has already done that for you. But — exactly in the same vein as this blogzine's introduction did back in the day — the editors of this anthology of Romanian sci-fi challenge you to read what people from very different cultural, social, political and historical circumstances might tell you in the framework of your beloved genre. No one should be so naive as to think that one only finds talent for sci-fi (...

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...

Brighton Pier, for reasons explained below - picture by Jean Housen (Wikimedia Commons) By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** Science fiction would not be what it is today if it wouldn't deal with the topic of climate change as a very prominent subject. Many stories address Europe's future as it may be impacted by related processes, and to do a comprehensive review of all those that are relevant in this respect would be... wonderful! For lack of time, and in appreciation of all the collective wisdom out there, however, this brief post only looks to sow some seeds, mention a few works, call attention to the issue, and, basically, invite others to point out further, other works that pertain to our interests here, in the comments... if there are other survivors out there ready to make such comments. (1) One of the first authors who come to mind, historically speaking, is J. G. Ballard (a.k.a. James ...