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 (...

By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** If you are a member of the European Science Ficton group on Facebook, you must have seen me share a link there to this recently-published digital anthology earlier on. "Utópia 501" is a collection of texts from various Central and Eastern European authors, rather loosely organised around the apropos of Thomas More's Utopia , published 501 years ago at the time when the idea of this anthology was born (and 502 years before its actual publication this year). Hence the illustration above: the left side features the cover art of More's original work from 1516, and on the right you have the cover of Utópia 501 . What follows is a brief review and a way to highlight some of the pieces included in the volume. As to the concept of the collection: it's not bad – I'm happy to see any idea that may inspire a publisher in Central Europe to think of publishing t...