EUtopias and Other Futures: A European Journal of Science Fiction

By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** This will be an open-ended post. You're more than welcome to contribute to it in the form of suggestions in comments here or on Facebook (see the link to our group above). The aim is to collect European music videos that use sci-fi and/or fantasy themes. The image of a funny robot or monster flying by typically will not do: the connection to the speculative genre has to be more substantial. It has to be exciting enough to get us to speculate about it! So I expect the clip in question to either present a narrative or at least an interesting situation that features the performers and/or clip characters in an actual sci-fi or fantasy setting for the duration of the video. 1. The Chemical Brothers: Free Yourself (2018) Directors: Dom & Nic (Dominic Hawley and Nic Goffey) Robots with AI used as "AI Labour Solutions" by a company called Roboforce await a...

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...

See what I did there? By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** More reviews will ultimately follow -- Sam Miller's Calved and Transmissions by John Bonello are in the pipe. For now, just a brief mission statement. I am reviewing here mostly either pure science fiction or works that contain pure science fiction as a key element beside other things. I am aware of the term "speculative fiction" and how it conveniently encompasses both fantasy and science fiction; very conveniently indeed from a publisher's perspective, given that audiences of the two genres significantly overlap. To me, however, vampires, demons, dragons and fairies being involved is fantasy but not necessarily speculative fiction to any extent. I like to read speculative fiction, rather than just pure science fiction, exactly for the reason that there is not necessarily a major difference between the two. What I mean by this ...

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...