View from Another Shore : European Science Fiction
Page 1
View from Another Shore
Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies
General Editor DAVID SEED
Series Advisers
I. F. CLARKE EDWARD JAMES PATRICK PARRINDER
AND BRIAN STABLEFORD
1. ROBERT CROSSLEY, Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future, ISBN 0-85323-388-8 (hardback)
2. DAVID SEED (ed.), Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Pre-cursors, ISBN 0-85323-348-9 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-418-3 (paperback)
3. JANE L. DONAWERTH AND CAROL A. KOLMERTEN (ed.), Utopian and
Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, ISBN 0-85323-269-5 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-279-2 (paperback)
4. BRIAN W. ALDISS, The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy, ISBN
0-85323-289-X (hardback), 0-85323-299-7 (paperback)
5. CAROL FARLEY KESSLER, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward
Utopia, with Selected Writings, ISBN 0-85323-489-2 (hardback), ISBN
0-85323-499-X (paperback)
6. PATRICK PARRINDER, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy, ISBN 0-85323-439-6 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-449-3 (paperback)
7. I. F. CLARKE (ed.), The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-to-come, ISBN 0-85323-459-0 (hardback), ISBN
0-85323-469-8 (paperback)
8. JOSEPH CONRAD AND FORD MADOX FORD, Foreword by George Hay,
Introduction by David Seed, The Inheritors, ISBN 0-85323-560-0 (hardback) 9. QINGYUN WU, Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias, ISBN
0-85323-570-8 (hardback), 0-85323-580-5 (paperback)
10. JOHN CLUTE, Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews, ISBN 0-85323-820-0
(hardback), 0-85323-830-8 (paperback)
11. ROGER LUCKHURST, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G.
Ballard, ISBN 0-85323-821-9 (hardback), 0-85323-831-6 (paperback)
12. I. F. CLARKE (ed.) The Great War with Germany, 1890–1914: Fictions and Fantasies of the War-to-come, ISBN 0-85323-632-1 (hardback), 0-85323-642-9
(paperback)
13. FRANZ ROTTENSTEINER (ed.), View from Another Shore: European Science
Fiction, ISBN 0-85323-932-0 (hardback), 0-85323-942-8 (paperback)
14. VAL GOUGH and JILL RUDD (eds.), A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ISBN 0-85323-591-0 (hardback, 0-85323-601-1
(paperback)
15. GARY WESTFAHL, The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction, ISBN 0-85323-563-5 (hardback), 0-85323-573-2 (paperback)
16. GWYNETH JONES, Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality, ISBN
0-85323-783-2 (hardback), 085323-793-X (paperback)
View from
Another Shore
edited by
FRANZ ROTTENSTEINER
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
This revised edition published 1999 by
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Liverpool, L69 3BX
First edition published 1973 by
The Seabury Press, New York
Copyright # 1999 in this compilation by Franz
Rottensteiner; copyright in the English translations,
except for that of ‘The Land of Osiris’ by Wolfgang
Jeschke, is also held by Franz Rottensteiner.
Copyright in the individual stories is held by their
authors: see the Acknowledgements on p. vi of this
book, which constitute an extension of this
copyright notice.
All rights reserved. No part of this volume may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise
without the prior written permission of the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 0-85323-932-0 cased
0-85323-942-8 paper
Set in Meridien by
Wilmaset Limited, Birkenhead, Wirral
Printed and bound in the European Union by
Bell & Bain Limited, Glasgow
Contents
Acknowledgements
vi
Introduction FRANZ ROTTENSTEINER
vii
In Hot Pursuit of Happiness STANISL
/
AW LEM
1
The Valley of Echoes GE
ŔARD KLEIN
42
Observation of Quadragnes J.-P. ANDREVON
51
The Good Ring SVEND A
˚ GE MADSEN
69
Slum HERBERT W. FRANKE
82
The Land of Osiris WOLFGANG JESCHKE
87
Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure JOSEF NESVADBA
143
The Altar of the Random Gods ADRIAN ROGOZ
167
Good Night, Sophie LINO ALDANI
175
The Proving Ground SEVER GANSOVSKY
198
Sisyphus, the Son of Aeolus VSEVOLOD IVANOV
215
A Modest Genius VADIM SHEFNER
233
Notes on the Authors
248
Acknowledgements
Lino Aldani: ‘Good Night, Sophie’. Original title, ‘Buonanotte Sofia’. From the author’s collection, Quarta Dimensione (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1964). First published in the sf magazine Futuro, No. 1 (March/April, 1963), under the pseudonym N. L. Janda. # 1964 by Lino Aldani. By permission of the author.
J.-P. Andrevon: ‘Observation of Quadragnes’. Original title, ‘Observation des Quadragnes’. First published in J.-P. Andrevon’s Cela se produira bientoˆt (Paris: Editions Denoe¨l, 1971). # 1971 by Editions Denoe¨l. By permission of the publisher.
Herbert W. Franke: ‘Slum’. Original title, ‘In den Slums’. First published in X
magazine. # 1970 by Herbert W. Franke. By permission of the author.
Sever Gansovsky: ‘The Proving Ground’. Original title, ‘Poligon’. From Sever Gansovsky’s Tri shaga k opasmosti (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1969). By permission of Mezhdunarodnaia kniga.
Vsevolod Ivanov: ‘Sisyphus, the Son of Aeolus’. Original title, ‘Sisif, syn eola’.
From Nefantasti v fantastike (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1970). By permission of Mezhdunarodnaia kniga.
Wolfgang Jeschke: ‘The Land of Osiris’. Original title, ‘Osiris Land’. First published in Arcane (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1982), edited by Helmut Wenske
and Wolfgang Jeschke. First published in English translation, by Sally Schiller, in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1985. # 1982 by Wolfgang Jeschke. By permission of the author.
Geŕard Klein: ‘The Valley of Echoes’. Original title, ‘La Valleé des ećhos’. From Geŕard Klein’s Un Chant de Pierre (Paris: Eric Losfeld, 1966). # 1966 by Geŕard Klein. By permission of the author.
Stanisl/aw Lem: ‘In Hot Pursuit of Happiness’. Original title, ‘Kobyszcze (’. From Stanisl/aw Lem’s Bezsennosć´ (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1971). # 1971
by Stanisl/aw Lem. By permission of the author and the author’s agent.
Svend A
˚ ge Madsen: ‘The Good Ring’. Original title, ‘Den gode ring’. From S. A˚.
Madsen’s Maskeballet (Copenhagen: Glydendal, 1970). # 1970 by Svend A
˚ ge
Madsen. By permission
of the author.
Josef Nesvadba, ‘Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure’. Original title, ‘Posledni dobro-druzstvı´ kapitańa Nemo’. From Josef Nesvadba’s Vynalez proti sobe´ (Prague: Krasneĺiteratury, 1964). # 1964 by Josef Nesvadba. By permission of the
author and the literary agency Dilia.
Adrian Rogoz: ‘The Altar of the Random Gods’. Original title, ‘Altarul zeilor stohastici’. First published in Almanahul literar, 1970. # 1970 by Adrian Rogoz. By permission of the author.
Vadim Shefner: ‘A Modest Genius’. Original title, ‘Skromnyi genii’. From Vadim Shefner’s Zapozdalyi strelok (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel, 1968). By permission of Mezhdunarodnaia kniga.
Introduction
FRANZ ROTTENSTEINER
Science Fiction is a branch of literature that tries to push the borders
of the unknown out a little further. It attempts to unveil the future; to imagine worlds lying beyond the next hill, river over ocean (including
the ocean of space); to impress vividly upon the reader that the world
need not necessarily be the way it happens to be, and that other states
of existence are possible besides the one we know. Change is the
proclaimed credo of science fiction—so much so that some writers
have claimed this essential characteristic to be something that distin-
guishes SF above all other kinds of fiction. How paradoxical, then,
that science fiction should be primarily an English-language phenom-
enon, at least in the minds of the majority of readers—and not only in
the United States, but in Europe as well. A casual observer should
expect science fiction to be more international than other kinds of
popular fiction, precisely as a result of this stress on change: for isn’t it reasonable to assume that the hopes, fears and expectations of people
will be different in different countries, their ways of looking at things unlike those in one’s own country? And yet the facts point to a
different picture; while change is welcomed, obviously not all kinds of
change are welcomed: not, for instance, the change that is necessary
to adjust to the worlds presented in foreign science fiction which may
be alien enough without any deliberate attempt at further estrange-
ment. The late Donald A. Wollheim commented upon this phenom-
enon in his introduction to Sam J. Lundwall’s Science Fiction: What It’s
All About (New York: Ace Books, 1971):
We science fiction readers whose native language happens to
be English—that is to say we American, we Canadian, we
British and we Australian science fiction readers—tend to a
curious sort of provincialism in our thinking regarding the
boundaries of science fiction. We tend to think that all that is
worth reading and all that is worth noticing is naturally
written in English. In our conventions and our awards and
our discussions we slip into the habit of referring to our
favourites as the world’s best this and the world’s best that.
viii
Franz Rottensteiner
When View From Another Shore first appeared in the USA in 1973, I
noted that at least eighty or ninety per cent of all science fiction
published in Western Europe consisted of translations from the
English; but that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had their
own large and independent body of science fiction. But while the SF
of the West is now even more dominated by American (and to some
extent) British SF, the Communist paradigm has all but disappeared
with the fall of communism. In Russia, the Czech Republic, Romania,
Poland and elsewhere there are now lots of commercial publishers,
and they are printing all the thrillers, romances, fantasies, horror
novels and science fiction works that couldn’t appear during the
Communist era—partly because of censorship, but much more
because of economic restrictions: there simply was no money to
pay for licences of popular fiction. Much the same happened in
Russia during the brief flowering of the New Economic Policy during
Lenin’s time, when Edgar Rice Burroughs was one of the most
popular authors. Now most writers in these countries have difficulties
getting published at all, and print-runs and authors’ earnings are
greatly reduced. In the German Democratic Republic for instance,
which had in its last decade a number of interesting SF writers, it was
possible for a writer to make quite a comfortable living from just a
couple of books, if these got reprinted every few years; now the
royalties from one book cover living expenses for perhaps a month or
two. It is no longer possible to make a living from just writing SF, as it never was possible in the German Federal Republic (unless you
happened to be a Perry-Rhodan-author). Even well-established and
famous writers like Lem or the Strugatskys have now only very
modest print-runs in their own countries, while many lesser writers
are not published at all.
The situation of SF in the Anglophone countries has also greatly
changed, and while it might be hoped in 1973, when the works of
Stanisl/aw Lem and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were just beginning
to appear in English translation, that translated SF might play a
greater role in the future, any such expectations turned out to be
utterly wrong. In 1973, the Seabury Press had started a series of
European SF, with works by Stanisl/aw Lem, Arkady and Boris
Strugatsky, Jacques Sternberg, H. W. Franke and Stefan Wul, and
my own anthology of European SF View from Another Shore. Later
Donald A. Wollheim followed suit and published, more as a hobby
than in expectation that it would pay, a number of European SF
novels by writers like Geŕard Klein, Pierre Barbet, Daniel Walther,
Introduction
ix
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Herbert W. Franke and others, usually
in awful translations. Macmillan made a more careful effort to present
the ‘Best of Soviet SF’, most notably, a number of Strugatsky books.
None of these ventures was successful, most books went quickly out
of print, and of the hardcovers almost none had reprints in mass
market paperbacks. Avon Books failed to find a wider audience for
their Lem reprints, since then no American mass market paperback
publisher has been interested in Lem’s books, and the Harcourt Brace/
Harvest trade paperbacks sell very poorly. While Lem has received
some attention from mainstream criticism, notably The New York Times
Book Review and The New Yorker, he received little attention from the
SF field, and this can only be partly explained by his antagonism to
American SF and his quarrel with The Science Fiction Writers of
America that led to his ousting from that organization that had
originally made him an honorary member. But Lem is the only SF
writer whose works have at least been kept in print in the USA (not so
in England, where he is even less known). The Strugatskys were at
least favourably reviewed, and one of their best books, Roadside Picnic,
even made second place in the John W. Campbell Award. But one
story that Donald A. Wollheim once told me shows the resistance to
foreign SF in some rural areas of the USA. Many sales-points refused
to exhibi
t the Strugatsky books at all, and rather ripped off their
covers to return them for refund, arguing that there was enough SF
by good American boys and therefore no need to sell this foreign
trash. This is perhaps an extreme example, but among readers
translated SF has also found little attention and has mostly been
restricted to special SF series and anthologies, and the changes in
publishing of the past decades have also affected English-language
writers. Australian writers complain all the time that it is very hard for them to find American publishers. SF has become big business, and
while some works sell for enormous advances, the mid-list books and
the rest suffer. The backlist has all but disappeared, many once well-
known SF writers are no longer in-print, and many living authors
complain that they can no longer place their works with commercial
publishers; British ones perhaps more so, but even many American
authors are affected (Barry Malzberg and R. A. Lafferty are prominent
examples). Many classic SF authors have sunk into obscurity, and
attempts to start ‘classic SF’ lines have failed. The SF books of a world-famous writer like J. G. Ballard are out-of-print in the USA most of
the time, despite a Steven Spielberg box-office-success like Empire of
the Sun. SF in general seems to be on the decline, fantasy has
x
Franz Rottensteiner
infiltrated the field. Big books dominate, and what was once the rule
has now even got its own name: ‘stand-alone novel’ for a novel that
isn’t part of at least a trilogy or a series. TV and film tie-ins and gamerelated fictions abound. All of these developments make the success-
ful publication of translated SF more unlikely, and indeed it is now as
rare as ever, and in many cases authors have to pay for their own
translations if they wish their books to appear in English. Let’s admit
it, American SF has won the field, and the future most likely will
bring a further Americanization of even the SF written by European
authors who will have to adapt their writings to the American product
to remain competitive. There is little chance that such stories will be
translated, and really, what need is there to translate something into
English that is abundantly written in that language, and usually with