EUtopias and Other Futures: A European Journal of Science Fiction

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...

A bottle of mineral water By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** At the risk of stating the obvious, you should read this review mostly only if you're familiar with the short story it is about. So this is where you can find the story , in the April 2017 issue of Clarkesworld . The author is Bogi Takács ( link to author page ) who describes oneself as "a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person and a resident alien in the US," and prefers to be referred to with the "e" personal pronoun in the third person. *** ¡El review! Sub-genre. This is far future SF. Key themes . Being left behind. Being used. Humanity regarding animals around them as somehow not "really" intelligent or sentient beings, using this as justification to do with them and with their environment whatever seems rational to them. With the coming effects of climate change looking rather nasty now , these ...

By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** Anita Moskát 's novel, "The Anchoring Place," shares its title – in my translation of the original Hungarian Horgonyhely – with Aleksei Bogolyubov's 19th century painting, used (with that excuse) as convenient illustration above. The two works do not have too much in common, though: for example, Moskát's novel doesn't have anything to do with Russia. But there certainly are steamers and anchoring places in it (unconnected to each other). The "anchoring places" play the key role: every person has one, right on the spot where one was born. Should one try to leave it (and its vicinity within a certain radius) behind, it won't work – it pulls one back, makes one physically ill. Fatally, even, if this is stretched to the limit. There is only one exception, one segment of the population that has freedom of movement: pregnant women. The ...