EUtopias and Other Futures: A European Journal of Science Fiction

Above : A snapshot from "Arrowsmith", by Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco. By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** If you have not heard of the Corvinus Journal of International Affairs so far, that is perhaps because it is no magazine of science-fiction. It is a scholarly publication, with a focus on International Relations. I am bringing it up here, because the next issue, a thematic issue on the 100th anniversary of the Versailles Treaty, features my article on WWI alternative history fiction, along the following lines — as outlined in the article's summary: This article offers a brief overview of the challenges of assessing counterfactual statements in terms of plausibility, to then consider the reasons for the comparative scarcity of WWI alternative histories in published alternative history (AH) speculative fiction. The relative rarity of such fiction may be striking, given the popularity of th...

By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** A collection of stories by established writers as well as other authors (the latter were selected on a competitive basis), this book is an exciting new development on the Hungarian SF scene. It comes edited by Csilla Kleinheincz and Gábor Roboz, published by GABO (Budapest, 2018). A strong anthology, albeit with mostly not "pure SF" for contents. One may thus complain about the cover, given that astronauts do not exactly play a central role, or any role for that matter, in about 95% of the stories featured here. That slight astro-naughtiness aside, however, it's quality stuff that you find here, most of the way. Moreover, with my broad understanding of the "science" in science fiction, the dominance of fantasy and slipstream across the volume should not be such a big issue after all. The book's overall design could be, seemingly, more of a...