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SFRA Review is the flagship publication of the Science Fiction Research Association since 1971.

Review of Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 2

Nonfiction Reviews

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Review of Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times

Adam McLain

Phillip E. Wegner. Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Paperback. 264 pg. $28.00. ISBN 9781517908867.

The hope of this review of Phillip E. Wegner’s Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times, or rather this non-reading of Invoking Hope, is to not fall into the trap of the review, or the anti-reading, as the author states in his introduction: the moralizing criticism “aimed either at dissuading engagements on the part of later readers or, at least, narrowing and directing the avenues down which any future non-reading might travel” (9). Indeed, approaching a book that is so interwoven with theory and utopia can be rather daunting, for in reviewing such a delightfully dense and enjoyably ensconced text, I will most assuredly not touch on all the positive aspects of the project nor critique and construct as many future narratives and critical impositions as are possible. The main takeaway I have from Wegner’s work is that those interested in utopia, reading, or the world in general should read it; it is a book that crosses academic boundaries and allows us to refocus our efforts on striving for a better, even utopian, world.

As Wegner is very clear about in his introduction, Invoking Hope is written as a response to a(n) (un)certain time and a (non-)specific event: the 2016 inauguration of a media and real estate mogul as the President of the United States. Wegner does not necessarily make his book an anti-Trump text; instead, he weaves together a series of essays, split into two parts, that shows readers how to use utopia to (non-)read and then (non-)reading utopia through disparate texts. He wishes to show how an act of reading can be a utopian act that subverts and overcomes—by living through—even the darkest of times.

Wegner’s approach to utopia and the current moment is theoretical and philosophical rather than historical or practical (meaning a step-by-step instruction guide). This methodology is seen beautifully in the first chapter, in which he outlines a Greimas semiotic square, realized through the work of (and Wegner’s work on the work of) Fredric Jameson, to approach the Chicago school of New Critics; he then uses this approach to read with Alain Badiou’s Plato’s Republic (2013), itself a translation and re-reading (or re-writing/non-reading) of Plato, and collectively shows that one of the fundamental problems with democracy, especially in the United States, is its emphasis on individual economic prosperity rather than collective political good. Wegner, then, creates the theoretical apparatus needed to show how, with semiotic square and Lacanian orders mapped onto each other, he is able to read, or rather non-read, utopian genres in order to invoke hope.

Having established a semiotic approach to utopia, he further engages in this conundrum in chapter two by arguing for the art of non-reading, as formulated by Pierre Bayard and his reviewers. Non-reading, for Wegner, is what people do when they approach a text through literary criticism; they are at both times reading the text and remembering the text as they write their own text. He then proceeds to non-read More’s Utopia (1516) to show that “utopia is located in Utopia, More’s book itself, and most particularly in the figure of a dialogue it offers us” (84). This non-reading of Utopia echoes through the rest of the book as Wegner approaches texts as utopian inside and as the text itself, rather than attempting to create or formulate a utopian mindset or utopian way of approaching the world around them.

Establishing this practice of non-reading allows Wegner to move beyond an ethical reading, which he does in the subsequent chapters. Instead of trying to read morality out of a text, then, he is attempting to non-read utopia through the text. This effort is seen in his recapitulation of the Henry James–H. G. Wells debate during the modernist period, in which James considered novels to need strict rules, while Wells was open to more fluid motion within a text. While James, for some time, won this debate, which led, in Wegner’s argument, to the rise of ethical reading and the New Criticism discussed in the first chapter, he shows how his non-reading can overcome this approach to four specific genres: the universal history, the kunstlerroman or artist’s story, the comedy of the (re-)marriage, and the science fiction. He concludes that utopia is “never no-where, an imagined perfected future, but in fact always already potentially exists in the concrete now-here, in our collective fidelity to the project of making a world we so desire rather than a world we fear” (218): indeed, the hope of utopia that is invoked in the use of theory in the book is the striving toward the future that comes from non-reading, as Wegner shows as he non-reads such unique and seemingly unconnected texts as Du Bois, “Babette’s Feast” (1950), 50 First Dates (2004), 2312 (2013), and Cloud Atlas (2004).

While the theory in the book is astute, diverse, and vast, much of the book is rooted in and heavily relies on the work of Fredric Jameson. This reliance makes sense: Wegner’s career has been focused on Jameson’s work as the central thinker with whom he engages. And yet, it seemed as if Jameson had something to say about every single topic in which Wegner engaged. In this way, then, parts of the book feel to be utopia and theory through Jameson rather than through Wegner. Thus, I read Invoking Hope as a new and innovative text that synthesizes many literary and utopian schools of thought in brilliant ways, and it is a part of Wegner’s project, seen through his other work (Imaginary Communities [2002], Life Between Two Deaths [2009], Shockwaves of Possibility [2014], and Periodizing Jameson [2014]), that continues to develop Jameson’s (and Wegner’s) thinking together. The book does invoke the hope needed during dark days that have passed and the dark days of the future as we collectively move toward utopian ideals and theoretical advancements.

Adam McLain researches and writes on dystopian literature, legal theory, and sexual ethics. He is currently a Harvard Frank Knox Traveling Fellow, studying twentieth-century dystopian literature and the legal history of sexual violence in the UK. He has a bachelor’s degree in English from Brigham Young University and a master of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School.

Amongst You, We Are the Witnesses of Withering: Hungarian New Weird Spatial Formations in the Short Fictions of Lilla Erdei, Balázs Farkas, and Attila Veres

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1

On the Edge: The Fantastic in Hungarian Literature and Culture

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Amongst You, We Are the Witnesses of Withering: Hungarian New Weird Spatial Formations in the Short Fictions of Lilla Erdei, Balázs Farkas, and Attila Veres

András Fodor

Introduction

The weird as an approach to writing presents a relatively new angle to write about reality in contemporary Hungarian literature. From its conception in 2016, The Black Aether fanzine gathered authors who incorporate the weird into their fiction. The fanzine supports and adheres to the Lovecraftian interpretation of the weird, but this paper argues that the presented authors have started to diverge from this perspective. Lilla Erdei, Balázs Farkas, and Attila Veres introduce the New Weird to the Hungarian audience in The Black Aether. The editor-in-chief editor of The Black Aether has considered the three as noteworthy authors in the Hungarian New Weird. Their methods differ from each other; however, all of them attempt to negotiate Hungarian literary characteristics with features of the English-speaking literary world. The former literary motifs function as a base that incorporates gritty realism in which (over)use of substances and apathy in political and social issues are typical responses to past and present crises and traumatic experiences, where other coping mechanisms are absent.

The Black Aether also functions as a devoted community for the Hungarian Lovecraft fans. There is another fanzine, Azilum, which was also started in 2016. It is dedicated to other weird fiction authors that are “Lovecraftian” in their stylistics. It publishes translations from lesser known contemporaries of Lovecraft, his not yet translated essays, and also contemporary weird authors such as Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron, and Caitlín R. Kiernan. It compiled three anthologies dedicated to the weird fiction of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the Hungarian H. P. Lovecraft Society gathers the fans of Lovecraft and organises events to advertise and celebrate him. Galaktika, the Hungarian SF magazine, has also started to accept texts that can be considered as weird fiction.

This paper explores the changes of the spatial formations in the narrative spaces in the short fictions of Lilla Erdei, Balázs Farkas, and Attila Veres. The paper identifies spatial changes in an interpretive framework that is based on the works of Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja, but considers narrative space as a spatial system where subjects have to constantly relate to one another and negotiate their positions. The texts present non-anthropomorphic and monstrous others as the successful negotiators, who infiltrate and subvert the spatial systems.

In its conception, the GABO Publishing House decided that its anthology of Az év magyar science fiction és fantasynovellái [The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year] should follow the footsteps of Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Their idea was to provide an opportunity for the flourishing Hungarian science fiction, fantasy, and horror scene to get published in this form, as there is a relative lack of platforms to publish short stories in these genres. This is not the first attempt to produce such anthologies: some of them are thematically connected (Hungarian folk tales in 77–Hetvenhét) or set in a shared secondary world of a role-playing game (M.A.G.U.S), or more focused on science fiction and dystopias such as anthologies that are edited by Sándor Szélesi, Tibor Jobbágy, and Tibor Fonyódi. Furthermore, István Nemes played a significant role in popularising science fiction, fantasy, and horror by compiling short fiction collections from the 1990s. There is another anthology from the GABO Publishing House that focuses on horror and weird fiction and is thematically connected to gasping. The book titled Légszomj [Gasping] was published in 2021. 

Weird Fiction in Hungary

This paper understands weird fiction as an approach to writing. In defining weird fiction, it relies on the understanding of China Miéville from the 2009 The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction where he writes, “Weird Fiction is usually, roughly, conceived of as a rather breathless and generically slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic (‘horror’ plus ‘fantasy’) often featuring nontraditional alien monsters (thus plus ‘science fiction’)” (510). In addition to that, this paper echoes H. P. Lovecraft’s position on weird fiction from his seminal 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” which explains that the weird tale consists of:

something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space. (305)

Lovecraft defines it as “‘the literature of cosmic fear’ [that] undercuts post-Enlightenment rationalism and posits instead the co-existence of other worlds and supernatural forces” (qtd. in Weinstock 179), which as Weinstock argues, “unsettles both confidence in the modern scientific method and human pretensions to grandeur” (180). Furthermore, Benjamin Noys and Timothy S. Murphy suggest that “Lovecraft drew on modern science and on modernism to craft a weird fiction that was ‘nonsupernatural.’ Lovecraft, a keen amateur scientist and an antiquarian, creates an unlikely ‘bridging’ between an idealized past and a traumatic modernity. In the process he figures a strange ‘median’ position that is at once avant-garde and anterior to modernity” (120). Already in Lovecraft, the interstitial situation of weird fiction had been established.

Furthermore, weird fiction remains in strong connection not just with modernist modes, but also with the Gothic. Carl H. Sederholm points out that “both the Gothic and the weird thrive on themes of excess and transgression.” He adds that “[t]he Gothic and the weird interrogate the world in ways that powerfully demonstrate human limitations both in terms of understanding our place in the world and also how we perceive reality in the first place” (165.). Sederholm continues that new weird “embraced weird fiction’s general tendency to interrogate the human experience of the world and the cosmos and added to them an interest in exploring how human beings perceive the world” (161). It jettisons and subverts the anthropocentric perspective; consequently, the interrogations “point readers toward fundamental problems of representation and reality” (164). In the case of Gothic, Ljubica Matek argues that the “Victorian Gothic domesticates Gothic figures, spaces, and themes so as to locate its horrors within the world of the contemporary reader” (17). But it is never domesticated and normalised. In overcoming anthropocentrism, weird fiction relies on two approaches through which it achieves that. On the one hand, Carl Freedman points out that weird fiction is “fundamentally inflationary in tendency . . . to suggest [that] reality . . . [is] richer, larger, stranger, more complex, more surprising—and, indeed, ‘weirder’—than common sense would suppose” (14). On the other hand, Noys and Murphy argue that based on Robert Aickman’s observation “weird fiction . . . can also pursue what Samuel Beckett called the way of ‘impoverishment’ (qtd. in Knowlson, 352), reducing our world to a ‘shivering void’” (Noys and Murphy 118). 

This paper connects the Hungarian New Weird to the Finnish Weird, a notion Johanna Sinisalo coined in 2011 by arguing that these:

Courageous writers . . . are producing touching, believable and memorable stories that can’t easily be pigeonholed as belonging to any pre-existing genre. Common features of their work include the blurring of genre boundaries, the bringing together of different genres and the unbridled flight of imagination. . . . They—or perhaps I should say we—are weird and proud of it. In fact, the trend is so clear that we should give it a name all of its own: suomikumma, ‘Finnish Weird’. (n.p.)

Jussi K. Niemelä provides an elaborated approach toward the Finnish Weird, when she proposes that it is:

an umbrella term that encompasses all diagonal, that is to say, non-realistic approaches to any story we can’t label as science fiction or fantasy without being unjust to both the author and the readers. There might be, and usually are, quite a lot of realistic ingredients in the story, but something odd happens all of sudden that sheds a diagonal light on that reality and this is where the ‘weird’ steps in. (16) 

Consequently, this paper interprets Hungarian New Weird fiction as an amalgamation of the English and the Finnish Weird with strong connection to the Hungarian literary convention. While the paper should also suggest wider implications in the relations between the Hungarian New Weird and the post-Austro-Hungarian Weird, [1] it has no space to pursue this topic in its present form. The Hungarian New Weird incorporates features of horror, fantasy, and occasionally science fiction, but presents its reality differently from realist fiction. It shares characteristics with the Hungarian literary convention such as the excessive overuse of substances (e.g., alcohol), the feeling of powerlessness by being constantly subjected to authority, and the inescapable nature of the constantly oppressive Hungarian reality. Moreover, apathy in political and social issues is a typical response to past and present crises and traumatic experiences, where other coping mechanisms are absent. Traumas are never resolved, they are kept forefront to be exploited in order to gain political power. Therefore Hungarian New Weird fiction functions as a set between mimetic and non-mimetic literature, and it also presents a counterpoint to the Hungarian literary convention as it presents alternative readings of Hungarian reality. The three authors discussed in this study introduce the impossibility of the weird in the Hungarian literary convention as a valid explanation for events in the consensual reality. The examined short stories feature another space that either reveals a more intricate narrative world than the focalizor-narrator can understand or allows a peak behind the veil of the narrative space where everything becomes insignificant, thus, both approaches to overcome anthropocentrism are present. As a corollary, this new interpretation vitiates familiarity, undermines the anthropocentric vantage point, and then introduces the feeling of estrangement and awe.

This sensation of the weird is described by Mark Fisher as it “is constituted by a presence—the presence of that which does not belong” (103, emphasis in the original). Fisher declares that the weird allows “us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside” (10). He asserts that the weird spurs the “fascination with the outside, . . . which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience” (7). In the context of narratology, the diagonal perspective of the weird provides the interpretation of the narrative space that it “is ripped and unfinished. Moth-eaten, ill-made” (“Afterwierd” 4447). This lack of wholeness is noticed in the construction of narrative space. These apertures remain concealed as long as the anthropocentric vantage point is in a power position in the construction of the spatial formation of the narrative space. Once the anthropocentric vantage point can no longer establish its power position in a form of complementary distribution, through the prism of the weird “the world is always-already unrepresentable, and can only be approached by an asymptotic succession of subjective pronouncements” (“Weird Fiction” 512).

Spatial Formations

The interpretation of narrative space is through language, which formulates different spatial relations and mediates everything through them. This paper interprets the relation between weird fiction and language based on Farah Mendlesohn’s taxonomy. In her book, Rhetorics of Fantasy, Mendlesohn identifies and then concentrates on “the means by which the fantastic enters the narrated world” (13). The platform for these processes is language. I understand “rhetorics” in the Mendlesohnian sense of the word, which is a narratological viewpoint, a specific locatedness through which the focalizor-narrator attempts to make sense of the fictional reality of the narrative.

Subjects with agency participate in the construction of narrative space. This composition consists of three elements: place, space, and their corollary, the spatial system. The narrative space forms a spatial system that is a constantly ongoing negotiation between place and space. Each subject with an agency functions as a place; its position within space has to be negotiated. Place is subordinated to space and is interpreted as a meaning-making element of space. I interpret place “as experiential, or as tied to the human response to environment,” therefore, “place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience” (Malpas 31, emphasis in the original). Space and the spatial system are subjected to negotiation as their constituting subjects’ social and political power allows them to be. Otherwise subjects are jettisoned from them, they experience nothing, and are rendered as others. The spatial system is the result of the negotiations of its participating subjects. 

The success of the negotiations into space depends on the subject’s place. Political and social preconceptions play a significant part in the success. Places maintain space through the negotiation of its constituting subjects. These debates are “political in every way: governed in favour of particular interests, biased in their affordances and allocations, shot through with calculative logics and mechanisms designed to distribute unevenly, and arenas of considerable power struggle” (Amin and Thrift 207, emphasis mine). From the viewpoint of the subject, the spatial system becomes apparent after the successful negotiation of place and its insertion into space. The social and the political negotiation reveals the social and political dimension of the spatial system.

The subject’s realisation of the spatial system stems from the change of social and political framework that is identified as the Lefebvrean notion of representations of space. Lefebvre describes them as they “are tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to ‘frontal’ relations” (33). Edward W. Soja in Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places identifies a part of the spatial system with the same functions, which he terms “Secondspace.” He explains it as it is a “regulatory and ‘ruly’ discourse,” a representation “of power and ideology, of control and surveillance” and “also the primary space of utopian thought and vision, of the semiotician or decoder, and of the purely creative imagination of some artists and poets” (67).

The ultimate part of the spatial system is the lived space that “is the dominated space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate” (Lefebvre 40). Lefebvre identifies representational space as part of “space [that is] . . . directly lived through its associated images and symbols” (ibid.). It “overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” (39). On the one hand, representational space originates from the interpretation of the Firstspace through the lens of Secondspace. Consequently, it is both material and theoretical. On the other hand, it surpasses this identification and invites, as Soja argues, “all other real and imagined spaces simultaneously” to come together in Thirdspace (69). My interpretation of Thirdspace is that it is both abstract (imagined) and manifested (real) part of the spatial system; includes “subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and unconsciousness, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history” (Soja 56–57). The Thirdspace becomes infested by the sensation of the weird. The impossibility becomes possible that is realised in the successful negotiation of entities from the other space.

Hungarian New Weird in the GABO anthologies

Lilla Erdei’s first book came out in 2003, titled A ​halálművés [The Death Artists], her second one was published in 2007, A ​Nap gleccserei [The Sun’s Glaciers], her third in 2008, A ​vendég [The Guest], and the last in 2009, Veszélyes ​helyek [Dangerous Places]. She writes short fiction, poems, and novellas. She studied comparative literature at the University of Szeged, focusing on dystopias. Moreover, she has been publishing articles in relation to the topic of her PhD studies. In her interviews, she mentions Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. P. Lovecraft as inspiration. [2]

Balázs Farkas regularly writes fiction and non-fiction. He reviews movies, series, and books. He won the Zsigmond Móricz Literary Scholarship in 2015. He has four books out via different publishing houses (Nyolcasok [Eights] (2013), Ismétlés [Repetition] (2016), Lu purpu (2019),  short-listed for the Péter Zsoldos Award,and Ugatás [Barking] (2020)) and two more were self-published (Embertest [Human Body] (2018) and Maszkabál [Masquerade] (2021)[). His short fiction has been accepted by literary and genre magazines in Hungary. Four of his texts have been translated into foreign languages: one into Polish, three into English. Occasionally he translates into Hungarian. His translations of Ambrose Bierce, Lord Dunsany, and W. F. Harvey have been included in Azilum. 

Attila Veres wrote a novel,  Odakint sötétebb (2017), and a short-story collection,  Éjféli ​iskolák (2018), which won the Perished UFO Award in 2020. His fiction has been welcomed by literary and genre magazines alike such as The Black Aether magazine and kulter.hu. He writes in Hungarian and English. His story “Méltósággal viselt” [The Time Remaining] was included in the The​Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories 1, which is among the finalists of ​World Fantasy Award. He works as scriptwriter, his script of Egy másik életben [In Another Life] (2020) won the best adapted script for TV movie award of the Hungarian Movie Award. One of his examined short stories, “A világ helyreállítása” [The Reconstruction of the World] won the Péter Zsoldos Award for a short story in 2021.

The intrusion of unknown entities into the narrative space is one of the main features of the examined short stories. The first anthology (2018) includes three short stories from the authors. Balázs Farkas’s “A nevetés íze” [The Heckler] is about a young, indecisive stand-up comedian who discovers some strange movements in the interstitial space among people during one of his routines. A visitor approaches and offers him an opportunity to get on stage in a theatre, where his show is always well-received. Attila Veres’s “Fekete talán” [The Black Maybe] presents a deconstruction of the traditional Hungarian pig slaughter. A family of three spends a holiday in the Hungarian country, where they have their one of a lifetime experience helping the locals in the slaughter. Lilla Erdei’s “A jégkorszak tanúi”[The Witnesses of the Ice Age] is set in post-apocalyptic Hungary, whose climate has changed for the worse. The protagonist escapes from the attack of this clever climate.

This paper explores two texts from the anthology of 2019. Lilla Erdei’s “A tökéletes hívás” [The Perfect Call] is a story about a young woman in her thirties, who works in a call centre, where she sells language courses. One day, she makes the perfect call. It goes awry and she starts to sense that there are other forces at work during her conversation with the customer. Attila Veres’s “Horváth Etele – A nagy kacagtató élete és kora” [Etele Horváth – The Life and Times of the Great Jokester] recalls a forgotten, yet ominously known and allegedly beloved comedian in a poorly written article format. The person has no written record, they lurk in the memory of their viewers, which results in the incongruity in the reader’s mind of being the uncanny and well-respected comedian of the previous era.

In the 2020s anthology, all three authors are included. Balázs Farkas’s “A végtelen” [Unending] focuses on the idea of transition between life and death. A solemn, unnamed city dweller has been taken by a taxi through the city to stay at a hotel and wait for further instruction to be moved to the next stop. Attila Veres’s “A világ helyreállítása” [The Reconstruction of the World] invites the reader to join in the endeavour of a community to reconstruct order in the world. It is both a follow-up of an initiation ritual and a manual how to convince and involve people to join this cause. Lilla Erdei’s “Cunciróka” [Stone Foxy] introduces the reader to the depth of odd adoration of red-haired women on an online platform. The narrative follows a young woman who investigates the sudden disappearance of her girlfriend, who belongs to that group.

The spatial formation of the narratives in the 2018 anthology suggests a typology in which the idea of other space emerges as a counterpoint to consensual reality of the narrative space. There are two approaches to the introduction of other space. The one that Farkas and Veres follow is where the narrative space is complemented by another one, a weird space from which unknown entities intrude. In Farkas’s text, the protagonist moves to that space, where he receives a liquid compressed from the laughter he induced in his audience. The narrative space consists of bars, festivals, and a theatre. All of them echoe the Foucauldian idea of heterotopias in their operating methods as they “are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 24). In Veres’s narrative, the creatures to be slaughtered arrive from that space. Therefore, the texts present twofold movements between two spaces: from the outside to the inside, and vice-versa. Both of them incorporate the classical Lovecraftian framework, [3] where the outside intrudes to the consensual reality of the narrative space. But Farkas’s text also exceeds this by inserting the focalizor-narrator in that unknown space. The case of Erdei differs from the previous texts. She constructs a narrative space that is an other space. Its features recall consensual reality, however, narratological details point toward a radically different reality, a secondary world.

The texts in the 2019 anthology approach space from a diagonal angle. They highlight the importance of the negotiation of places to the spatial systems. Its corollary is always an intrusion from the outside. Both narratives rely on the movement in which an entity from the outside intrudes the consensual reality of the narrative spaces. Consequently, the spatial formation of these texts becomes weird. Erdei’s story depends on the protagonist’s linguistic acts, where she convinces her customers to buy a language course. Although in these sorts of negotiations the result is favourable, against the unknown, she cannot succeed. Veres introduces his main character as a transgressive one, providing many occasions in which this entity appears in two places at the same time. This suggests that he successfully negotiates himself into the spatial system of narrative space; furthermore, it bends the laws of physics.

In the 2020 anthology, the strategy of the authors slightly changes. In Veres’s and Erdei’s stories, the characters argue themselves to the outside from the previously known spatial formation of the narrative spaces, consequently, they move contrary to the previous practices from earlier years. All of the short stories include a non-place, a concept coined by Marc Augé, which refers to liminal spaces where all of the previously acquired identities are annulled. In these spaces there is only one power position that cannot be challenged by the characters. Farkas sets his narrative space precisely in this liminal space, in a hotel that has no distinctive marks, and from which the newly dead travel toward the unknown. The text seems to echo his previous strategy: the narrative space consists of a known space that is left behind by the protagonist to move to the threshold of the other space. The narrative space in Veres’s story signifies a conscious choice to intrude then change the spatial formations of the consensual reality of the narrative space. In the text, Veres does not specify the locality of the room that functions as a pivotal step in the process of the applicants becoming an active member of Reconstructionist community, but provides a wide array of possibilities to choose from, suggesting that the room is also a non-place that is controlled by the Reconstructionist community. Erdei’s text includes the cyberspace provided by Facebook and hints at the liminal space in which the protagonist’s girlfriend is stuck.

The Hungarian New Weird functions as a possibility to subvert and question the Hungarian consensual reality. This amalgamation of weird approaches examines the Hungarian consensual reality and sheds different light on it. These short stories present the impossibility as possible, which is realised in the successful negotiation of unknown entities from the other space into the narrative spaces. Farkas, Erdei, and Veres take different approaches to achieve the sensation of the weird. Their other spaces intrude the narrative space and overcome consensual reality in them. These narrative spaces suggest a richer, yet occasionally bleaker, Hungary than consensual reality has it.

NOTES

[1] For instance, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Alfred Kubin, and Stefan Grabiński.

[2] József, Tomasics. “Black Aether interjúk – Erdei Lilla.”. The Black Aether, 8 Dec. 2018,. https://www.theblackaether.com/2018/08/12/black-aether-interjuk-erdei-lilla/. Accessed 28 August 2021. 2018.

[3] The language becomes disoriented and/or highly metaphorical to express the changes in the narrative space.

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—. “Weird Fiction.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, Routledge, 2009, pp. 510–15.

Niemelä, Jussi K. “Finnish Weird from the Land of the North.” Finnish Weird 2014, edited by Jerrman, Toni. Helsinki Science Fiction Society, 2014, pp. 10–39.

Noys, Benjamin, and Timothy S. Murphy. “Introduction: Old and New Weird.” Genre, vol. 49, no. 2, 2016, pp. 117–34. 

Sederholm, H. Carl. “The New Weird.” Twenty-First-Century Gothic, edited by Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 161–73.

Sinisalo, Johanna. “Weird and Proud of  It.” Books From Finland, 5 Sept. 2011, https://www.booksfromfinland.fi/2011/09/weird-and-proud-of-it/. Accessed 23 July 2021. 

Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-imagined Places. Blackwell, 1996.

Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. “New Weird.” New Directions in Popular Fiction, edited by Ken Gelder, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 177–99.

András Fodor is a PhD Candidate at the University of Szeged, Faculty of Arts, Doctoral School of Literature in Hungary. He has been publishing reviews and short stories since 2010 mainly in his native tongue, Hungarian. In 2016 he won the JAKKendő Award for his manuscript collection of short stories, A mosolygó zsonglőr (The Smiling Juggler), which was published later in the same year. His research interests are spatiality, cities, the New Weird, and China Miéville.

“The Last Issue of Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal”

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1

Fiction

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“The Last Issue of Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal”

Mario Daniel Martín

Translated from the Spanish by the author. This story originally appeared in Number 11 of TerBi, Revista de la Asociación Vasca de Ciencia Ficción, Fantasía y Terror, pages 73-84. The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of Sarah St Vincent Welch, who helped him de-Spanish the English of this translation.

Trope: Last Issue of Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal

Category: Brain to Brain 1-d Open Message  

Subcategory: Text-only Pamphlet

Code: δ1256Sagg23mondragón44FCSS7θΐ –ΦΩ

Date: 23 Saggiatore, 1256AG (21 December Greg-2820)

Physical Location of First Release: Asteroide Mondragón

Author: Undisclosed (triple δ-anonymity)                           

Language: HS-Broca-I-Classical-English

Neuro-induction devices: Not applicable

3D Synesthetic Simulation: Not available

Multisensory Arrangements: Disconnected

Genital Pathway Stimulation: Disabled

Parsing Instructions: This text message is composed of 6 parts. An optional quotation (MC-0), and 5 compulsory sections (MC-1 to MC-5) are to be read in the provided order. No response or acknowledgment of parsing is required.

Rebroadcasting Status: Unknown (δ-encrypted)

Message Content 0: Quotation (Optional).

Of all these Formes of Government, the matter being mortall, so that not onely Monarchs, but also whole Assemblies dy, it is necessary for the conservation of the peace of men, that as there was order taken for an Artificiall Man, so there be order also taken, for an Artificiall Eternity of life; without which, men that are governed by an Assembly, should return into the condition of Warre in every age; and they that are governed by One man, as soon as their Governour dyeth. This Artificiall Eternity, is that which men call the Right of Succession.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (3BG; Greg-1651)

Message Content 1: Preface

This is a one-dimensional text-only pamphlet from the Space Farm Arcadia Conglomerate in the Trojan Walden IV Belt. We are using this archaic channel of dissemination to avoid the monitoring of its source of redistribution. We apologise for the lack of multi-sense meta-data. We recommend delta-encrypting when rebroadcasting the information inside the orbit of Jupiter.

To avoid confusion about the dates mentioned in the pamphlet for those residing outside the Thoureauvian Conglomerate, we have included after the standard Galilean date the corresponding date in the obsolete Gregorian calendar.

Message Content 2: Purpose of this pamphlet

Pope Urban MVIII, the Solar System Leader of the Coalition of Leviathanian Companies and Royal Chief Executive Officer of the New Australia Mining Company, announced today in his residence in Kalgoorlie IX the closure of the scientific meta-journal Interplanetary Asteroid Mining in its neural-induction multi-sensory format. The closure has been linked to the recent acquisition, and subsequent cultural refurbishment, of the Jovian Open Space University by a consortium led by the China-Cola Corporation and the New Australia Mining Company.  

As a group of scientists residing inside and outside Asteroide Mondragón, we want to repudiate this unjust measure. Also, we would like to make it known that an inter-galactic formal complaint will be lodged with the Interstellar Court of Alpha Centauri by the Thoreauvian Free-thinking Sentient Being Coalition condemning the meta-journal closure and the subsequent blocking of its archives.

Message Content 3: A brief history of the meta-journal

The journal was first published in bi-dimensional e-paper flexible display format in 955AG (Greg-2519), under the name The Interdisciplinary Journal of Asteroid Mining. The publication quickly became one of the most influential free-inquiry scientific journals in the homo-homo scientific explosion of the 9th and 10th centuries after the long climate-change-induced Penumbra Scientifica (or Scientific Dark Age) in the societies of our source planet. The open character of the journal was clear in the editorial of its first issue: ‘We aim to make asteroid mining accessible to all terrestrial sentient beings, and to stimulate the peaceful use of space resources for the benefit of science’.

The journal can be undoubtedly credited with providing the tools and discussion platform for the Terran conquest of the Inner Solar System. It also defended the now almost completely extinct assumption that space was the inheritance of all Terran inhabitants and their extra-terran descendants, irrespective of their genetic configuration and cognitive uplifting history.

The technological changes that saw the rise of neural-reasoning mental-induction science dissemination platforms in the late-10th century required the journal to change its name to Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal. There were many scientific milestones influenced by the meta-journal under its new name. It was a strategic outlet for the distribution of extra-solar first contact negentropic thermo-ethic information in 998AG (Greg-2562), and it coordinated the election of Terran representatives to the Proxima Centauri Treaty that resulted in the conditional incorporation of the Solar races to the Via Lacteal Scientific Confederation in 1003AG (Greg-2567). In the internal reconfiguration of Solar politics and scientific priorities caused by the rapid absorption of alien science, its most remembered achievement was, undoubtedly, the push to change the Solar System Unitarian Calendar to equate year zero with the birth of Galileo Galilei (1556 in the old Gregorian calendar) which was only successful among some planets and asteroids of the Thoureauvian Conglomerate. Unfortunately, the area of the Solar System controlled by Leviathanian companies preferred the Fordian calendar, and some of the Free asteroid-states inside the orbit of Venus still use the Gregorian calendar.

The meta-journal has a history of tolerance, showing an open approach to the socio-genomic changes of the 11th century, though it always had some critics. It was the first scientific meta-journal to appoint a Neanderthal-homo as editor of its Hominid sub-meta journal in 999AG (Greg-2563), and strongly supported the crucial intergalactic judicial case to grant full consciousness rights to homo-cetaceans and homo-canines in 1002AG (Greg-2566). It was also the first scientific meta-journal to produce specialised multi-sensory access options in non-brocal languages in 1017AG (Greg-2581), which eventually spawned a series of sister-meta-journals in most Solar languages. However, the Rodent and Pachyderm Leagues never agreed to create sister meta-journals in their languages, and have routinely dismissed the publication as an outlet for legitimating homocentric expansion and hegemony.

Today’s closure of the Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal can only be interpreted as a deliberate attack on multi-speciesism. The announcement is only available in homo-sapiens-based broca-I languages. And the behaviour of Urban MVIII in the last decade suggests that there could be other motives behind the decision to cancel access to one of the key sources of Terran science, in effect, it can be argued that it is the final step in rewriting scientific history to boost the personality cult of the new Pope.

Message Content 4: A brief biography of Pope Urban MVIII

Originally born in the provincial Jovian Greek Abbott Point Asteroid as Nikita-Mustafa Arredondo-Li in 944AG (Greg-2508), Pope Urban MVIII won his first reincarnation in the Broken Hill L4 branch of the New Australia Mining Company (henceforward NAMC) for being a scientist when he was only 99. He credits himself with being the chief mental architecture engineer in the legendary scientific team that pioneered the use of nano-carbon tubes with platinum and iridium axon skeletons in the quantum cerebellum GJ-88, the base of most reincarnation quantum cerebellums in operation today. A closer look at the scientific publications of the time in private repositories shows that he was consistently a third author in the papers published then, and he was clearly not the leader of the research team behind the momentous discovery. After the NAMC acquired the rights of the meta-journals Reincarnation and Transhumanism, Longevity Nature and Neuro-resurrective Science, Arredondo-Li obliterated them from the public record.

A neural-induction communication in Volume 368 of Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal outlining the procedures of implantation of the quantum cerebellum GJ-89 in homo-chimeric resurrections to speed-up the creation of new mining workforces was the only remaining evidence of the modest role the Pope had in this breakthrough. All witnesses of these facts, including the leading co-authors of the original papers, however, have been purged from the NAMC scientific institutions and denied quantum reincarnations in the Hominid Empire II. Consequently, they cannot complain about the new Pope’s crude attempts to rewrite history.

Arredondo-Li was subsequently reincarnated two times in different administrative roles during the expansion of the New Australia coalition of asteroid-states to the Hildas, when he became Chief of the Board of Directors of the new overarching company-state. He is credited with the drafting of the pact that allowed China-Cola, and its associated companies to get control of the Board of Elders in the Hominid Empire I. This resulted, among other things, in the monopoly of the mining of the Hildas and the Jupiter Greek asteroids by the NAMC after the Jovian Lagrange 5 War (better known as the Free-speech War), that restricted the exercise of open access science to the Jovian Trojan Asteroids.

Pope Urban MVIII is no stranger to controversy. In spite of being the viviparous offspring of a Hobbesian homo-homo mental police father and one of his homo-bonobo sexual slaves, he chose to reincarnate as a pure homo-sapiens entity from his first reincarnation onwards. He also changed his name to Clive Joh Abbott-Palmer and refused to speak ape-based broca-II languages in public. When accused of being a human-supremacist by the Thoreauvian Chimpanzee-Bonobo Ecological Trust in the Trojan Walden Belt League he simply responded that he had the right to moral enhancement. He later justified his choice of a homo-sapiens corporal configuration as the only way to rise in the ranks of the NAMC, a fact that is even more necessary today after he himself changed the citizenship laws of the company to require all the directors and prelates to have purely hominid brain power and corporeal configurations in 1055AG (Greg-2619). This was extended in 1078AG (Greg-2642) to the civic charities run by the New Australia Public Service.  He controversially excluded homo-kangaroos and homo-emus from the top ranks, in spite of their symbolic materialistic importance in a period of rapid expansion of the company-state to the Hildas and the massive increase in chimeric migration to the space farms that provided the ATP fuel for the increased sentient capital acquired.

Arredondo-Li’s attempt to exclude homo-dingos from the New Australia Regal Army in 1080AG (Greg-2643), however, was repudiated by a large rebellion inspired by the homo-panda rebellion of the China-Cola Imperial Army in 1079AG. After the rebellion of his own homo-Thylacine praetorian guard in 1082AG, homo-marsupials and homo-canines again became prominent in the middle ranks of the NAMC. Some of them were even allowed to progress to the corporate elite, especially in the frontier asteroids of the Hildas L3 frontier, where in 1096AG (Greg-2660) a homo-echidna was ordinated as a governor-bishop in spite of her refusal to reincarnate in a homo-sapiens configuration. In spite of this and other similar cases, hominid (mainly sapiens) assimilation after promotion remains the norm in New Australia.

As a corporate Solar System royal, Arredondo-Li (or Professor Abbott-Palmer, as he insisted on being called publicly) is predominantly remembered as the orchestrator of the ascendency of NAMC as the leading mining company in the Solar System (mainly through the destruction, acquisition or forced amalgamation of other asteroid mining companies and cooperatives). It is estimated that by the 1090s, seventy percent of the space farms’ building materials in the new frontier between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn were provided by the NAMC. The company also secured the exclusive rights for the planetisation of Saturn in 1098AG (Greg-2662), and the controversial dismantling of its rings to provide the water needed for the colonisation of the area.

The rapid expansion and forced amalgamation of independent free asteroid-states in the Greek L4 Jovian area and the new Saturnine frontier after the usurpation of Enceladus generated the need to manage a large number of prisoners and refugees, which were derived to penal colonies scattered through the company dominions, and later to franchised penal facilities in second-tier companies such as Monsanto-Burma or K-Mart-Colombia. In 1108AG (Greg-2672) the NAMC ventured into providing penal colonies for other non-mining companies and the recycling and mental retraining of chimeric and hominid sentient capital. Their mental police also franchised the cultural assimilation techniques that made it feared and revered throughout the Hominid Empire I. In fact, it has been argued that the systematic disregard of the Charta of Chimeric Rights by the enforcing consent arms of the NAMC and its close ally China-Cola created the conditions for the creation of the primate-centric Hominid Empire II.

Under Abbott-Palmer’s iron fist management, the NAMC also branched into religious-entertainment and genital technology, especially after the hostile take-over of the Berlusconi-Vatican Corporation during the collapse of the Inter-planetarian Trade-Stock Market in Ganymede in 1124AG (Greg-2688). The Amphibian Coalition denounced his subsequent transformation of the leading company of The Religiosity League into a propaganda machine for the Tantra-Biblical Movement, which, after the schism of the San Sissino Synod of Terran Churches of 1156AG (Greg-2720), effectively obliterated spirituality from the Hominid Empire II. The so-called God-spot genes were replaced with tantra-ecstasy genes in all the humanoid-based sentients, who were forced converts to Tantra-Christianity. The subsequent acquisition of the Lust and Sensibility senso-drama chain from the Disney-Monaco Corporation in 1188AG (Greg-2797) has also been linked to the need to expand the market for genital upgrading technology among the hyper-sexed newly converted chimeric masses.

In spite of his known anti-chimeric views, Abbott-Palmer stated that the new company (that resulted from the incorporation of these religious entertainment entities into the New Australia conglomerate) was open for business with all Solar System companies and Free states, irrespective of the percentage of hominids in their management ranks. This allowed him to peddle the perpetual-erection-double-penises and anal-lubrication technology that made NAMC the first exporter of those sexual enhancement devices in the Solar System since 1204AG (Greg-2768).

Abbott-Palmer is also known as a military strategist. During his second reincarnation he successfully fought with the Solar coalition that ended the brief extragalactic Vogon Empire invasion of the Jovian moons. He credited himself with leading the Solar forces in the recovery of Ganymede, even when Thoreauvian forces were the first to take over moon’s presidential palace in the last offensive against the Vogon invaders.

Following becoming a signatory to The Inter-Galactic Peace of Andromeda, Abbott-Palmer was reincarnated as a hyper-homo-sapiens-sapiens. He promptly obtained the necessary votes from all Leviathanian companies operating between the Jovian and Martian orbits to be anointed Solar System Pope in 1255AG (Greg-2819). More importantly, his choice of the papal name of Urban MVIII generated a great controversy among the dwindling free scientific community, as it was the first time since the birth of the scientific method that the name of Urban was recycled to name a Hominid Pope. The fear that this would harm the free exchange of scientific ideas, which we expressed at the moment of his anointment, has been fully realised less than eight Terran months after the Pope’s ascension. The purchase and prompt closure of Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal is another of his long list of explicit symbolic gestures to stir the hominid masses across the Solar System against multi-speciesism. In a brief communiqué, he declared ‘free-loading hominid technological information is over’. Additionally, he rebuffed the Canonical Catholic Church apology on the Galileo Affairin 428AG (Greg-1992) and promised a return to the obsolete Gregorian calendar in the whole extent of the Solar System, which was interpreted as another provocation in the Thoureauvian Conglomerate. Urban MVIII also expressed that rodent, pachyderm, equine and cetacean chimeras should stop complaining and that, instead, they should be grateful for their genetic uplifting. He is quoted to have said ‘without the help of the hominids, they would still be cannibalising each other in the Terran swamps.’

Message Content 5: A call to action

There is a call lead by Cetacean Asteroid Mining, a sister-meta-journal legally residing in the Asteroide Mondragón since 1213AG (Greg-2777), to repel the closure and restore the Interplanetary Asteroid Mining Meta-Journal archives. The call includes a request to return the benefits of space colonisation to the inheritance of all Solar System sentient beings, and not just a minority of homo-sapiens and their homo-canine and homo-marsupial allies. The call has also been strongly supported by the Eusocial Interplanetary Fraternity (and their associated meta-journal Social Insect Asteroid Recycling), as well as the Feline League, the Porcine, Bovine & Equine Guild, the Argonautoidea-Octopodoidea Network and the Bird-Dinosaur Solar Coalition (and their associated scientific meta-journals).

Science is not just a tool to reverse-engineer the magic of the alien races or to mine methane-rich planetesimals in the Oort Cloud. Nor is it just a way of having a better simulated orgasm with your favourite stellar porno-diva/o. Science is a legitimate pursuit of all the Solar System Species. It brought us to the most remote corners of our Solar environment and it is allowing us to reach and colonise neighbouring stars. More importantly, it allowed us to survive the self-destructive path of the traditional Hobbesian homo-homo anti-ecological cultures which converted our source planet into an unrecoverable rubbish bin. We encourage all our fellow scientists, irrespective of their chimeric configuration, to defend Classical Open-Source Science at this crucial moment in the history of Solar intelligence.

Cetacean Asteroid Mining has also produced a senso-documentary on the History of the Asteroid Mining Meta-Journals to exemplify what was best in Thoureauvian Terran Cultures. It also contains an attached video-manifold with a supplementary multi-sensory chronology of the development of Thoreauvian scientific achievements, including an unbiased account of the uplifting of most Terra-based species. You will be able to access it by telepathing the 1256AG (Greg-2820) archive of the Phi-Dolphin Eco-Network, where you will also find multi-sensory-hyper-link copies of the now repudiated Sustainability Pact of Terran Churches of 659AG(Greg-2223) and the badly disregarded Solar Declaration of Chimeric Rights of 1032AG (Greg-2596).

If joining this intergalactic formal complaint doesn’t jeopardise your future reincarnation prospects, we urge you to support the move, as scientists of all species have already done, and to disseminate this pamphlet among fellow researchers, scholars, digital personas and technologists. However, if open support for this cause puts the prospects of pursuing Classical Open-Source Science at risk in your area of enterprise, or will make you an easy target of the hominid mental police, simply wait until more decisive action is required in the predictably turbulent times to come. 

End of message δ1256Sagg23mondragón44FCSS7θΐ -ΦΩ

Mario Daniel Martín is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at The Australian National University. As a creative writer, he has published 12 books (4 novels, 4 books of poetry, 2 of short stories and 2 of theatre plays) as well as more than 70 individually published short stories and poems. His latest novel, “La inevitable resurrección de los cerebros de Boltzmann” can be downloaded from the website of Ediciones Ayarmanot in Buenos Aires: https://www.edicionesayarmanot.com/p/la-inevitable-resurreccion-de-los.html

Call for Papers: Sexual Violence and Science Fiction

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1

Features

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Call for Papers: Sexual Violence and Science Fiction

Adam McLain

In Redefining Rape (2013), feminist historian Estelle Freedman argues that history shows a war of words over how different groups defined sexual violence: “The history of repeated struggles over the meaning of sexual violence reveals that the way we understand rape helps determine who is entitled to sexual and political sovereignty” (11). She sees rape as a political tool used to gain power and subjugate and marginalize groups of people based on race, gender, class, and other sociological valences. Thus, in Freedman’s hermeneutic, sexual violence becomes historically contingent and unshackled from a consistent and determined definition.

Through cognitive estrangement, science fiction authors envision futures and reflect on contemporary issues. Sexual violence—or, at the very least, the act of sex itself—has been written into the lifeblood of science fictional texts from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Isaac Asimov’s Robots series (1950-1985) to K. M. Szpara’s Docile (2020). Freedman’s definitional unshackling allows scholars, authors, and thinkers of science fiction to examine and consider the sexual ethics, morals, legislations, and violence that are presented in science fiction media in a way that does not tie the creators to their own historical period nor unites them in a single definition of sexual violence. How, then, might the estranging and alternative nature of science fiction—its weirdness, its futurity, its otherworldliness—change or affect what audiences think about sexual violence? What transformations occur when an author or a creator considers the ethical, legal, or material characteristics of sexual activity in the future?

This symposium on sexual violence and science fiction seeks papers that discuss topics at the intersection of science fictional estrangement and sexual violence, an action that has real, material effects on the ways in which different sexualities, genders, races, bodies, and people interact with and are shaped by our contemporary world. Papers can, for example, position a single text (book, graphic novel, movie, tv series, etc.) of science fiction and look at its sexual activity, ethics, legislation, morals, justice, and/or violence to better understand how sex is promulgated, replicated, and/or subverted when authors use it in their work. Papers can also look at larger trends, movements throughout history, or comparatively between texts (even cross-media). Essays should not simply show how sex/sexual violence is represented in the text; they should mainly argue about what the estranged depiction means or what it does to and for the text and to and for the audience or receiver.

Submissions

SFRA Review seeks essays of c. 2,000–3,000 words for a special issue interrogating, analyzing, and critiquing the intersection of sexual violence and science fiction. Submissions can address, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Legal boundaries of sexual activity within a text’s imagined empire
  • Expanded or condensed sexual morals and ethics
  • The effect/affect of sex within a universe
  • The presentation and representation of sexual activity as dominant and/or subversive
  • The use of sex as a means to power, accomplishment, or reward
  • Types of bodies and their use in sex—for example, robots or alien bodies, gendered bodies, classed bodies, etc.
  • Sex between (or not between) alien species and the meaning of race and gender
  • Sex as work or tool and the politics of citizenship in outer space
  • Mandated or limited sexual activity, including eugenics, population control, multiple partnering, forced partnering, etc.
  • The utilization of the erotic
  • The broadening of sexual allowance and the use (or misuse) of sexual activity

Abstracts of c. 250 words and short author bios should be submitted by email to the symposium editor Adam McLain at adam.j.mclain@gmail.com using the subject line “Sexual Violence and Science Fiction” by March 1, 2022.

Abstracts should specify the text the author wishes to write about and how they will approach sexual activity within the chosen text. Prospective authors are encouraged to reach out to Adam if they wish to discuss their essay concept; however, a discussion does not mean automatic acceptance. Authors will be notified of acceptance (or rejection) by March 15, 2022.

Accepted drafts of 2,000–3,000 words will be due in mid-May and should be prepared in MLA style with a Works Cited in MLA 8th edition. A full project timeline is listed below.

Timeline

March 1, 2022 = Abstracts due

March 15, 2022 = Authors Notified of Acceptance

May 1, 2022 = First Drafts Due

May 15, 2022 = First Draft Edits Returned

June 1, 2022 = Second Drafts Due

June 15, 2022 = Second Drafts Edits Returned

July 15, 2022 = Final Drafts Due

Early August = Publication of symposium in SFRA Review 52.3

Call for Applications: Fiction Editor

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1

From the SFRA Review

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Call for Applications: Fiction Editor

The Editorial Collective

The SFRA Review would like to invite applicants for the position of Fiction Editor. To submit an application, please email Ian Campbell at sfrarev@gmail.com and briefly outline qualifications and interest.

In collaboration with the Editor and Associate Editor(s), the Fiction Editor is generally responsible for soliciting, evaluating and editing submissions to our Fiction section. They may also choose to aid the rest of the Editorial Collective in preparing each issue, though this would not be required.

Overview of Responsibilities:

  • Participate in regular meetings with the Editor and Associate Editors
  • Solicit short (< 4k words) fiction pieces from scholars and the general public
  • Be the point of contact with authors of fiction
  • Edit and copyedit submissions (generally less than ten per quarter)
  • Occasional other responsibilities

We look forward to your submission. This is a great opportunity for a graduate student or emerging scholar to gain experience in the field in a low-pressure situation.

The SF In Translation Universe #14

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1

Features

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The SF In Translation Universe #14

Rachel Cordasco

Welcome back to the SF in Translation Universe! I don’t know about you, but life’s been like a rollercoaster lately. Fortunately, though, I can now devote more time to SFT, and I have so many ideas for essays and books and so many things I want to read. I’ve figured out that I’ll need to live approximately 835 years, give or take, to read everything that looks interesting and that’s already been published, so one of you needs to start building that immortality machine.

Back to SFT. This year is starting off slowly but is rich in its SFT offerings. Case in point: French author Grégoire Courtois’s The Agents (tr. Rhonda Mullins), which came out in January. Described as “Nineteen Eighty-Four meets Tron, via The Office,” The Agents is indeed a bizarre dystopian story, with humans eating, sleeping, and “working” in highrise buildings that they can never leave (many have never been outside). Their bloody cubicle conflicts and distant machine masters seem to drain the agents’ humanity, until one small group of agents decides to try and take it back.

February offers us a new work in English by Dutch horror author Thomas Olde Heuvelt, of Hex fame. In Echo (tr. Moshe Gilula), Nick Grevers, a travel journalist and mountain climber, ventures into an uncharted area in the Swiss Alps with his climbing partner. Something grim and horrifying happens there, and when Gravers wakes up from a coma, he finds that not only was he badly injured and his partner is missing, but that something has invaded his soul—something terrible that he discovered on that lonely mountain peak.

Next, we have new Chinese and Japanese SFT in March, with an anthology edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang and a new novel by Yoko Tawada. The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation contains stories about dining out in the far reaches of the universe, finding immortality in the mountains, watching roses put on a performance of a Shakespeare play, and more. Published in English for the first time, these stories offer Anglophone readers a new window onto modern Chinese speculative fiction.

Tawada, who has brought us brilliant speculative fiction in both Japanese (The Emissary) and German (Memoirs of a Polar Bear), is out with Scattered All Over the Earth, (tr. Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani). Here, she imagines a Japan that has been figuratively (and in some ways literally) splintered and scattered across the globe. That nation, in the near-future, has vanished and its survivors are roaming climate refugees who search for others who can still remember how to speak Japanese. Roaming around Scandinavia and Western Europe, they encounter material pieces of their culture’s past and bond with one another. Compared to Alice in Wonderland and “a surreal Wind in the Willows,” Scattered is the first in an expected trilogy.

If you’re looking for short SFT published so far, look no further than Apex Magazine (Cristina Jurado’s “Lamia” and Yilin Fan’s “City Lights”), Clarkesworld (Gu Shi’s “No One at the Wild Dock”), and World Literature Today (Yuki Fuwa’s “Devour Me”).

The rest of the year promises some further wonderful SFT, including a trilogy by the one and only Shimon Adaf! Can you tell that I’m excited?

Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear what you’re reading now and what you’re looking forward to: rachel@sfintranslation.com.

Until next time in the SFT Universe!

From the Editor

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1

From the SFRA Review

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Winter 2022

Ian Campbell
Editor, SFRA Review

Welcome to Volume 52 of the SFRA Review. We’re nearly as old as the Super Bowl and filled with more content. In this issue, we have the first half of our symposium on SF from Hungary, which contains articles and interviews; in addition, we have a wide selection of papers from the LSFRC conference held recently via the virtual meeting technology that I rather doubt will ever stop being the norm.

Technology doesn’t always flatten the curves of hierarchy and privilege: all I have to do to understand this is to compare my own Facebook feed to that of my World War II veteran father. How and why it doesn’t flatten these curves is increasingly the subject of twenty-first century SF: I look forward to works published in the immediate near future where the effect of simultaneous physical isolation and constant online companionship is estranged. For the very most part, I applaud the shift to virtual meetings, precisely because they flatten hierarchy and privilege.

We can hold the upcoming SFRA conference “in” Oslo, and not worry about the prohibitive costs of travel even for privileged, tenured scholars like me: now, it’s trivial for graduate students, independent scholars, visiting/adjunct faculty and even regular faculty who don’t have access to travel funds to add their perspectives to the discourse at conferences. Nothing can quite replace the collegiality of walking into a meeting room or the hotel bar and randomly encountering colleagues: those sorts of ad hoc discussions are the best and sometimes even productive. Nevertheless, on balance the shift has made the discourse around SF better—and more importantly, fairer.

Please see our CFP on sexual violence in SF: I very much hope you’ll consider contributing. I leave you with a photograph of my daughter from 2016, when I tried to troll her into thinking that the Noah’s Ark story was real. Not all SF is cognitively plausible, even within the world of the text.

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Gerry Canavan

This is the start of my last year as president, a term which has corresponded with an incredibly tumultuous time for the globe, much less our organization. Moving on will be bittersweet, but I’m very happy about what we’ve accomplished (especially under these circumstances!) and I’m looking forward to the coming year with a lot of optimism, especially at conference in Oslo, which is shaping up to be a simply incredible, totally unique event in the history of our organization, in all the best ways.

Over the coming months we will be populating some of the new positions we added in the last bylaw revision, so please watch out for more information on that front very soon.

I wanted to formally welcome Ida Yoshinaga and Jess FitzPatrick to their new roles as vice president and treasurer and thank Sonja Fritzsche and Hugh O’Connell one more time for all the hard work they put in the last three years. I also wanted to thank Carma Spence for the heroic work she has put in (and continues to put in) migrating the SFRA website to its new home. As always, if there’s something I can promote on social media, or some other way I can put the SFRA to work for you, please, reach out! I hope to see many of you in Orlando, and the rest in Oslo.

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga

Greetings, SFRA–Hoping that your health and personal journeys thrive in the Year of the Tiger.
As vice president, I am looking forward to expanding my knowledge about the speculative and fantastical genres, as I meet with you in 2022. I hope to hear about your scholarship and artistry–so do not hesitate to be in touch, especially should I run into you (virtually or in person) at March’s ICFA or our annual summer meeting in Oslo! 

We just held SFRA’s first-of-2022 gathering of country representatives over Zoom, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out how intellectually persistent and curious SFRA members have been (thus far!) during this third year of the global pandemic. Reps from Estonia (which will host a national SFRA conference in the next few years) and South Korea testified as to how the field is growing in their regions, while others from Europe, the U.S., and Latin America spoke of intriguing hybrid and online conferences on posthumanism, AI, materialism, weird narratives, spoiler studies (!), critical futures research, and affect theory. Many have been publishing on a slew of old-reliable SF subgenres (cyberpunk, utopian studies, cinematic/televisual spec fic, area/language studies) in all kinds of fresh, necessary, fascinating collections.

Everyone has been astonishingly generative amidst the spread of corona’s variants! And calls for a hopeful speculative arts, for comforting genre stories that inspire optimism and celebrate utopian communalism, have bloomed…though these have never quite been my jam. But what public-health historians are calling a mass-disabling event are giving at least some people pause to rethink anti-science ideologies. In the U.S. south (where I now reside), we are finally seeing people queue in long car lines for free COVID-19 testing. The hardcore dystopian inside me who has waited a whole life to experience the apocalypse—that films and pop culture of a 1970s childhood had once promised—is now giving way to a fresh variant. She does not bake sourdough, but she does dig into her family recipe file to re-make ancestral meals anew. If the world is ending soon, this is not what the post-apocalyptic playbook had laid out as the first step towards humanity’s inevitable return to its own decisive mistakes.

We will try to freshen SFRA with mindful, engaged conversations about how to diversify our membership ranks, to (further) globalize our conversations and research, and to live lives  vibrant and rich with community-centered imaginative arts. Why not share your ideas with us in this growling wildcat of a year!

Interview with Theodora Goss

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1

On the Edge: The Fantastic in Hungarian Literature and Culture

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Interview with Theodora Goss

Vera Benczik and Beata Gubacsi

The interview was conducted in writing in the summer of 2021.

Guest Editors Vera Benczik and Beata Gubacsi: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Theodora Goss: I was born in Budapest to Hungarian parents, but my mother left the country when I was still a child, taking me with her. First, we lived in Brussels, and then we immigrated to the United States, where I became an American citizen as a teenager. Unfortunately, I lost my Hungarian language—at that time, people believed that bilingual children would not become fully fluent in their second language, and my mother wanted us to be as American as possible. So, I have been relearning Hungarian as an adult. I expect that I will probably be studying it for the rest of my life! My father remained in Hungary and remarried—he is still a professor at the University of Debrecen. My two sisters from his second marriage grew up in Hungary but now live and work in London.

I grew up in Maryland and Virginia, and got a B.A. in English literature at the University of Virginia. I moved to Massachusetts to attend law school at Harvard. I practiced law for a few years, then went back to graduate school for a PhD in English and American Literature at Boston University, where I still teach. While I was in graduate school, I attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, where I sold my first short story. I have been publishing steadily since. I write novels, short stories, essays, poetry—everything, really. After I graduated, I turned the research from my doctoral dissertation into the Athena Club trilogy, about a group of young women who also happen to be female monsters (Mary Jekyll, Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, and Justine Frankenstein). They meet in late nineteenth-century London and help Sherlock Holmes solve a series of gruesome murders. The second book in the series takes them to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and eventually to Budapest, to battle the villainous Professor Van Helsing. Most recently, I wrote a collection of fairy tale-inspired short stories and poems called Snow White Learns Witchcraft and edited an anthology titled Medusa’s Daughters: Magic and Monstrosity from Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle. I teach literature and writing in the Boston University Writing Program, but in the spring of 2022 I will be teaching at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest on a Fulbright Fellowship.

Guest Editors: How do you see the development of the fantastic in the past ten years? What do you think are the most important shifts in terms of how the fantastic is perceived and conceptualised?

Theodora Goss: I think there have been three significant shifts in our cultural perception of the fantastic. I would say these have taken place over the last twenty years—the past decade has seen an acceleration of these shifts, but they started some time before that. I saw them taking place while I was still in graduate school. The first is that genres of the fantastic have become wildly popular. This has had quite a lot to do with the success of the Harry Potter franchise, but there are so many examples of popular books and films that draw on fantasy elements—Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, etc. The success of these books allows other books to be written that may not capture the public imagination and rise up the bestseller lists in quite the same way, but that can be published and find their audience. So, we have a proliferation of fantastical fiction. The second is that genres of the fantastic have become much more respected as literature. They are taught in university classes, and scholars treat them with serious critical attention. This is partly because fantasy is being written by wonderful, thoughtful writers like Aimee Bender, Michael Cunningham, Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeffrey Ford, Kelly Link, Ken Liu, Helen Oyeyemi, Karen Russell, Sofia Samatar—these are just a few examples that come to mind from my own syllabi, but there are so many more. And the dividing line between fantasy writers and writers of realistic fiction is not as rigid as it used to be, although “Literature” and “Science Fiction and Fantasy” are often still separated in the bookstores. Margaret Atwood goes on the Literature shelf and Ursula K. Le Guin goes on the Science Fiction and Fantasy shelf, even though they were doing similar things in The Penelopiad and Lavinia. But writers cross over more than they used to. The third shift is that fantasy is once more an important component of children’s literature. When I was growing up, the children’s fantasy I read was quite old—the Narnia books, the Oz books, E. Nesbit. There was a cultural assumption that children should be reading about the real world. But now we seem to be in another golden age of children’s fantasy. So really, the entire landscape has changed. That change started at least twenty years ago, but it has certainly reshaped how fantasy is published and perceived in the last ten years. I haven’t mentioned a fourth shift that I think is just beginning, which is that fantasy is becoming much more international. We see this in the popularity of the Hayao Miyazaki movies and the Witcher books, games, and television series. But I think that shift will accelerate significantly in the next ten years.

Guest Editors: As a Hungarian-American SFF writer, how do you incorporate and subvert the Hungarian fantastic into the themes and tropes of Anglo-American fantastic tradition? Do you find that engaging with elements of the Hungarian fantastic influences your writing or national identity?

Theodora Goss: I honestly don’t know because I think the elements of Hungarian fantasy are so deeply buried in my head that I’m not even sure what they are. What I mean is that I read and was told Hungarian fairy tales as a child, and then after my mother left Hungary and we moved to the United States, I read Kate Seredy’s The White Stag and Hungarian and other central European fairy tales in English. I still have an old copy of Magyar Fairy Tales by Nándor Pogány, as well as Hungarian classics like Sándor Petőfi’s János vitéz and Elek Benedek’s Ezüst mesekönyv. When I started relearning Hungarian as an adult, I read fairy tales again because I could more or less understand them. My mind was formed by these tales so long ago, and in such a fundamental way, that I can’t separate them from anything else I do. For the most part, I don’t consciously incorporate them—they’re just there. It’s like my use of English. I think I write standard American English, but once a reviewer said that my stories sounded as though they were in translation, and I think my writing is still inflected by having first spoken Hungarian and then French. I still cross my 7’s and z’s because that’s what I was taught in first grade, which I attended in Brussels, and my sentence structure is, in a sense, haunted by the Hungarian language. It’s not completely standard English. A Hungarian editor once told me that my stories were easier to translate—perhaps because of that buried memory. The one place where it’s conscious, perhaps, is in my stories about the imaginary country of Sylvania, which is located somewhere in Central Europe—but that’s also deeply influenced by Le Guin’s Orsinia stories. So many things have gone into how I write that I don’t know how to untangle them. What I do incorporate deliberately is Hungary itself—the reality of it. I did quite a lot of historical research on late nineteen-century Budapest for the second Athena Club novel, and I’ve written a number of stories set in Budapest or that feature Hungarian protagonists. As for my national identity, it’s complicated. I am both American and Hungarian, and I don’t think I can untangle those identities any more than I can untangle the influences on my writing. But my Americanness only goes back to when I first arrived in New York as a seven-year-old. My Hungarianness goes back much longer, as far back as I can trace the history of my family. When I am in Hungary, I feel that I am somehow at home, even as I recognize that I am traveling with two passports.

When I was young, Hungary itself was fantastical to me. It was a distant land that I could not get back to, with magical food and a half-remembered language. In a sense, it was not that different from Narnia—there were even lions (on the Lánchíd in Budapest)! I’m certain that’s one reason I write fantasy.

Guest Editors: In the field of Anglo-American SFF, generic boundaries have become increasingly porous and experimenting with different genre-bending practices has been encouraged and celebrated. You have edited and written for slipstream and interstitial anthologies, and your work has been associated with the New Weird as well. How do you think fantastic genres appear in Hungarian fantastic literature and culture? How do you think this might affect your own writing?

Theodora Goss: My interest in interstitial fiction came in part from reading European and Latin American literature in English translation as a teenager and at university. In high school, I read Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. At university, I read and studied writers such as Milan Kundera, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende. Later, in graduate school, I read and taught Angela Carter. She was a wonderful surprise, because I was not used to that sort of boundary-crossing in English. When Delia Sherman and I edited the first volume of Interfictions in 2006, it felt as though we were doing something quite new and subversive. We were very pleased to include a Hungarian story in translation, “A Drop of Raspberry” by Csilla Kleinheincz. My impression is that the interest in interstitial, slipstream fiction developed around the same time in Hungary as in the United States. For example, Kelly Link was influential for fantasy writers like Kleinheincz, just as she was influential for American writers. That sort of boundary-crossing fiction is still the exception in the United States, and I believe the same thing is true in Hungary—what sells are books and films that rely on and often reinforce genre tropes. Readers still take a great deal of pleasure in wizards and vampires and spaceships. But you’re right that there is a greater market for experimentation, and many places where the boundaries can become porous. Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic and its sequels are a good example in the United States. In Hungary, the annual anthology Az év science fiction és fantasynovellái (The Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of the Year), published by Gabo Kiadó, gives writers a place to submit boundary-crossing, experimental fiction.

I think my own tendency to write in that interstitial space comes in part from being an immigrant, living between two national identities. Compared to my American friends, who were born and had grown up in the United States, my life seemed fantastical. Now that I regularly travel between Boston and Budapest, I feel as though I am always looking at the world from a double perspective. I often feel a sense of displacement, which I suppose one might link to the New Weird. But we are all living in the New Weird nowadays, aren’t we? Particularly now, in 2021, when so much of what we have been through recently feels disconnected from the lives we lived before. We are all suddenly living on a planet we thought we knew, but that has become strange to us—where we might be invaded by an alien life form.

But there is also something interstitial about Hungary itself, positioned as it has historically been between East and West, with fluctuating borders. It has been described that way in Hungarian literature, and of course in the Western cultural imagination as far back as Dracula. The Count is described as a Székely, a guardian of the border; however, like all vampires, he is an inveterate border-crosser. So perhaps that interstitial space is a natural fit for Hungarian fantasy.

Guest Editors: Anglo-American SFF has become the site and source of exploring women’s experiences and role in socio-political and economic systems, which appears in your own writing as well. How does the fantastic itself negotiate women’s experiences and social discussions around gender roles? How do you see the position of women’s SFF and YA in the field of the Hungarian fantastic?

Theodora Goss: I think the fantastic is about our world, just as much as realism is about our world. They are simply two ways of talking about our current reality. Realism reflects it, fantasy interrogates it and dreams up other possibilities. Realism asks “What is?” and fantasy asks, “What could be?” The fantastic has negotiated women’s experiences and roles as long as society itself has—in the late nineteenth century, with the rise of the New Women and the suffrage movement, we had fantastical representations of powerful female figures, such as Carmilla the vampire and Ayesha in H. Rider Haggard’s She. They were not all negative representations—we have good and bad and complicated female characters, like George MacDonald’s North Wind, Frank L. Baum’s Glinda, and C.S. Lewis’s White Witch. The concept of gender has itself been interrogated since at least Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, but we could go back farther to Ozma of Oz, who spent a significant part of her life magically changed into the boy Tip. I think fantasy is continually in conversation with what is going on in the real world—it is always talking back to the culture, both affecting and affected by it. In terms of literature, we see this in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willows, in the writing of Joanna Russ and James Tiptree Jr., in the ways Le Guin’s Earthsea evolved over time. All of these writers responded to the social roles available for, and the cultural construction of, women. Perhaps the difference between realism and the fantastic, in this respect, is that fantasy literature and film have greater latitude in discussing and envisioning what could be, in both dystopian and utopian directions. On the one hand we have Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, on the other a story like Seanan Maguire’s “Each to Each” in which women transformed into genetically modified “mermaids” by wealthy capitalist and the U.S. military create an underwater alternative to life on solid ground. They choose freedom over their programming. One important element of modern fantasy fiction, particularly for children, is the way it casually gives us heroines who are smart and capable, without making much of a deal about gender. Lyra Belacqua in the Dark Materials series by Phillip Pullman and September in Catherynne M. Valente’s Fairyland series are two examples.

What I see in Hungary is women writers like Kleinheincz, Ágnes Gaura, Anita Moskát, and Mónika Rusvai, to give just a few examples, doing important, interesting work in the fantasy field. They often write from a feminist perspective, redefining both the fantastic and the role of women for our new century. The storyteller Csenge Zalka, who completed her PhD in the United States, collects Hungarian folk and fairy tales that often feature active, ambitious female protagonists. There is significant pushback against redefinition of gender roles in contemporary Hungarian politics, but one function of fantasy in society is to imagine new possibilities and futures—I think it’s doing that on both sides of the Atlantic.

Guest Editors: Considering current trends in the production and consumption of fantastic literature and media, how is the Hungarian fantastic likely to change in the future? What new directions do you think are possible?

Theodora Goss: I think writers of the fantastic in Hungary are in a significantly more difficult situation than American writers. Most obviously, the market is much smaller—it’s almost impossible to make a living as a fantasy or science fiction writer in Hungary. Of course, books can make more in translation, but writers usually can’t afford to pay for translations themselves, so they have to rely on foreign publishers. Usually, only the best-known or most popular Hungarian writers are translated. There are three other structural constraints on Hungarian writers. First, the market for fantasy short stories is much smaller than in the United States. Short stories are often where writers experiment, because they are low-stakes: if something does not work, you can easily move on to the next story. Short stories are also an easier way to get your name out to readers—if they like your story, they might buy your novel. Second, there is no easy way to market your writing online, like Kindle Direct Publishing in the United States, where you can create a book and make it available through Amazon. This means one way of marketing your work to readers is not available in Hungary. Finally, the publishing system is structured around the publisher. The publisher may also function as editor, distributor, and bookstore. Most Hungarian writers do not need to go through the American system of getting an agent and publicizing not only their books, but also themselves, simply to get space on a bookstore shelf. This takes significant stress off Hungarian writers, but it also offers writers fewer ways to reach readers directly or make a business out of writing. Overall, I think the Hungarian publishing system makes it more difficult for fantasy writers, who are often in a marketing niche by nature of their genre.

There are two things I would like to see happen. The first is more publishing opportunities, particularly online, for Hungarian fantasy writers. The online environment means that we are living in one world—it should be possible for me to purchase Hungarian-language e-books on Amazon as easily as I can buy ebooks published in German. I also hope there will be more opportunities for translation in the future. Here I see hope in the final shift I identified above: fantasy is becoming much more international. If The Witcher can become an international sensation in translation, why not a work of Hungarian fantasy? There is certainly as rich a Hungarian tradition of folk and fairy tales to draw on. In terms of its place in the culture, my hope is that Hungarian fantasy will continue to gain popularity and respect in Hungary. It still does not have the respect given to realistic fiction. The second thing I would like to see is greater access to boundary-breaking, experimental English-language fantasy in Hungary. For example, Elizabeth Hand is one of the best American fantasy writers working today, but the only books of hers available in Hungarian are tie-in novels (for example, for the Star Wars franchise). Hungarian readers are missing out on her exquisite short stories or novels like Mortal Love. The English-language books available in Hungary tend to be bestsellers, so smaller but important literary works don’t make it across the linguistic border—I would love to see that change. If we can bring more English-language fantasy to Hungarian readers, and more Hungarian fantasy to English and American readers—well, that would be a wonderful cultural exchange.

I think none of us knows what the future will hold, and the last two years have certainly made me doubt my ability to prognosticate. But I can at least tell you what I would like to happen. I would like to see the Hungarian fantastic continue to draw on a rich Central European tradition, while growing bolder and more experimental in expressing the strangeness of the world we live in. I would like to see it engage contemporary issues while remaining its wonderful, fantastical self. As a genre, the fantastic expresses what it feels like to live in our world today—often more accurately than literary realism. It should be valued for what it can show us of contemporary society and the futures it can dream up. I would like to see more respect for fantasy as a genre within Hungary, and more attention to the Hungarian fantastic outside of Hungary. I suppose in the end it’s up to us, as writers and scholars, to make that happen.