Czech SF magazine: IKARIE

[David Stein]

Czech SF magazine: IKARIE

I have the number one issue of IKARIE, "the first Czech
professional SF magazine," from March 1990. I assume some
of you might be interested in the SF scene of other countries,
though I'm sure only few of you would be able to read the mag.
As I'm one of those few, I'll try to give a review of IKARIE
here (in English, hopefully).

The magazine has a slick colorful cover and a large
format similar to the new AMAZING look. The 64 pages inside
are tightly packed with reviews, fiction, illustrations,
interviews, criticism and other articles (no ads!). The
price, 9 Korun ("crowns"), translates to less then 50 cents,
though for for a Czech it is equivalent to the expense of
about 3 dollars by American standards. So far the magazine
is only a monthly. I could not find the `# of copies printed'
figure in IKARIE, but a note in Locus gave the number at
40,000. This is very high when you consider that Bohemia has
a population of only 10 million. Assuming a 50% return rate
(extremely high) of the Czech magazine, IASFM would have
to sell close to 500,000 copies to approach the relative
popularity of IKARIE.

The magazine's contents are divided into 12 rubriks,
starting with TAKEOFF, the editorial. Described here is the
incredible obstruction and stupidity manifested by the
communist regime of Czechoslovakia towards the idea of a SF
magazine. While science fiction in general thrived during
the 70's and 80's through both official and unofficial
channels, the publication of a SF periodical stayed, for
some inexplicable reason, taboo. Therefore any periodicals
had to be published `underground' through the fandom press,
or by using loopholes in the rules, as did the predecessor
of IKARIE, the IKARIE XB-1, XB-2, etc. (The name comes from
a 1963 science fiction movie.) IKARIE itself is published
by SAF, the Syndicate of Authors of Fantastika. "Fantastika"
has a wider meaning then "fantasie" (fantasy), and refers now
mainly, it seems, to science fiction.

Next is the column STAR TOM-TOM, where leading figures of
the Czech SF scene tell us what they expect from IKARIE.

Under WORLD SF can be found David Brin's THE CRYSTAL
SPHERES, followed by an interview with the author.
Accompanied by detailed info on Brin and his work, it is
nevertheless dated, since the meeting with the author took
place in 1987 during the CONSPIRACY congress in Brighton.
It was here that Brin agreed to the eventual publication of
his story despite the ridiculous rule asserting that he must
personally pick up the money in Prague and despite the fact
that this money would hardly pay the airfare [less then
ANALOG ?!?]. "Doesn't matter", laughed Brin, "we'll use it
as beer money there".

WINDOW TO THE WORLD is devoted to FANTASTIKA, a Polish SF
magazine which IKARIE seems to emulate to a degree. It dates
from 1982, and has published a number of translations from
Czech besides the mandatory Anglo-American and Polish fare.

In an interview, the chief editor of FANTASTIKA notes that
both Soviet and American cosmonauts have admitted reading
science fiction and think they would have become engineers
otherwise.

As an example of FANTASTIKA, the story LAW OF SURVIVAL by
G. Drukarczyk is printed - it won a prize for the best
Polish SF in 1985, - and illustrations by A. Brzezicky are
shown.

CZECH SF is represented by _SWAN OF AVON_ COMPANY, a
novelette written by J. Olsansky, and by the short ONE DAY
OF ZOJA ANDREJEVNA from E. Hauserova.

J. Velinsky's THE ISLAND OF CAPTAIN DOUGHERTHY is the
SERIALIZED NOVEL.

The middle two-page is dedicated to COMICS - in this case
there is BRIDGE INCIDENT by K. Saudek. Black & white, the
style is reminiscent of some better HEAVY METAL stuff. It
is typical of the feeling about the future many shared
before the `velvet revolution': a taxi (the wheels are
missing) stops and a passenger gets out; we recognize that
he is in the middle of Prague's well known, extremely high
bridge, inside of which the metro runs. The bridge is now
desolate. The passenger lights a cigarette and looks down
- he sees a dirty city amidst incredible pollution. As he
jumps, a soviet TU144 flies overhead and and we notice a
gaping hole in the bottom of the bridge.

VIVISECTOR contains `minireviews' (though by American
standards these are full-fledged reviews) of Bradbury,
Clarke and Jules Verne.

TEORIE first discusses the connection between three
similar novels: the Strugatsky brothers' _Limping Fate_ (?),
Bulgakov's _The Master and Marguerita_, and Orlov's _Maestro
Danilov_. This serves as a starting point for an overall
criticism of the Strugatskys' writings.

The column ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CZECH SF AUTHORS will try to
list alphabetically all those who published SF since WWII.
The information includes both description and evaluation of
their SF works. Each issue will also contain an example
from one of the author's writings - this issue contains V.
Babula's very short ASTROLETTER FROM THE YEAR 2059.

In SCIENCE & NON-SCIENCE, devoted to the more popular
aspects of SF, an article Sex from Flying Saucers samples
the many erotic `encounters' with space aliens reported over
the years in the Western press.

FANDOMANIA gives a brief history of fandom in
Czechoslovakia and supplies the information on most of the
important SF clubs together with a calendar of SF events and
cons. One of these is PIVOCON - `beercon' - in Pilsen, the
city where the best beer in the world is made. It is held
each year on Friday the thirteenth, so that the attendees
may "communally resist the onslaught of bad luck through the
use of beer-energetic force fields." Fandom was vital to
the survival of SF in Czechoslovakia, especially when the
regime was in a bad mood. The first modern official fan
club was founded in '79, and now there are over 80 clubs all
over the republic. Through their semi-legal amateur
fanzines a wide body of SF has been published: over 600
Czech works during the 80's, and about the same number of
translations (!). All clubs and cons give out a variety of
prizes, the most important being the "Ludvik" for lifetime
achievements (Ludvik as in Ludvik Soucek, one of the most
important post-war proponents of SF in Czechoslovakia), and
the "Salamander" for the best literary achievements during
the past year. `Salamander' refers to "The War with the
Newts", one of K. Capek's SF novels. Capek has written some
of the most important SF between the wars, and is best known
in the U.S. for his play R.U.R., from which the word `robot'
originates - it means roughly "forced work" in Czech.

The front inside cover contains the STARS ON THE SHELF,
i.e. the new books of the month. These include the first
publication of Dune, and the re-issues of Non-stop (Aldiss)
and Lunar Dust (Clarke).

The back inside cover is devoted to `BEMIK', the prize
given for best comics serial. BEMIK is a diminutive of the
Bug Eyed Monster initials. Another instance of Czenglish
might be the term `scifista', i.e. a member of SF fandom.

The back cover is reserved for GALERIE, featuring A.
Brzezicky's art in full color, together with short info
about him.

I think the format and contents of IKARIE look quite
promising, and on a par with Asimov's, Analog, and Amazing
in the U.S. The inside is enlivened with illustrations,
photographs, and cartoons. (In one of the cartoons a
cosmonaut sits on a chair in front of a table behind which
is a typical BEM. "So, you maintain you are an intelligent
being." says the BEM. "Can you prove it?") There is a
commitment to cover not only fiction but also history,
criticism, fandom, foreign magazines, interviews and SF art
in general. This indicates that the SF scene in
Czechoslovakia is understood as a whole, as an area where
people with common interest in the `possible', (while living
so long in the `impossible',) can (and have to) work
together. Balkanization into narrow sub-genres and small
cliques eying each other with disdain has not yet occurred.

I do wish that more space would have been given to
fiction, however, and I did expect the fiction to be of
slightly higher quality. Discounting the serialized novel
and the very short Babula story in the Encyclopedia section,
there are only four pieces of fiction, which seems
insufficient for a monthly publication. Finances might be
the reason, as might be the chronic shortage of paper.

I assume I do not have to say too much about Brin's story,
except that the translation seemed good but that I found the
style rather dry and a bit boring. In other words, I would
probably enjoy reading someone else's exposition of the
ideas behind the story more than Brin's rendition itself. I
do think, however, that Brin was a valid and representative
choice.

I can say less of _The Law of Survival_. In a sense it is
the opposite of Brin's story. There's plenty of action, but
the science is only a gimmick. The protagonist is one of
the few survivors of a nuclear attack. After a few weeks
these survivors are, for some unclear reason, repeatedly
thrust back in time to a moment before the destruction
begins. While they are somehow immune to the effects of the
blasts, they must quickly gather supplies and weapons in
order to live through the aftermath. The story is not such
pure nonsense as it might seem at first - one must consider
the society it comes from. The pessimistic and cynical
outlook is quite appropriate for the state of things in
Poland circa '85, as is the scene where the protagonist
tells others of the coming doom only to be laughed at. Nor
is it surprising that the second main concern of the
survivors is to murder each other. The action is fast and
brutal. After a rather eventful day, during which the
`hero,' Pat, finally manages to eliminate one of his rivals,
we see him return home to his one soft spot, his `woman.'
With tears in her eyes, she shows him something she found
outside - a bible. As they open it, it explodes.

Garnier quietly watched the falling debris.
Good work. There was nothing left of Pat's bunker.
It was a nice idea - a gift from the other world.
An explosive hidden inside the black bible. Two
months of preparation, but it was worth it. Even
the best Hunter will one day arrive at his own funeral.
Garnier stood up and sneered towards the ruins:
"You forget your principles. Never believe in good!
Not even in the bible!"

The story makes no pretension of explaining the
implausible elements, but I do think that their use was
justified by the symbolism they allowed. However, real
science fiction it ain't, and I'm sure that a more eligible
representative of Polish SF could have been found. Indeed,
when the editor of FANTASTIKA was asked to name the most
promising new Polish SF authors, the young Drukarczyk was
not among them.

The four stories in Czech are of various nature and
quality.

The worst, in my opinion, was Velinsky's serialized novel
_The_Island_of_Captain_Dougherthy_, or rather the first part
printed. I think it might have been written in the 30's
(judging by the author's name), and the age shows. The
place is Antarctica in a future served by Asimov-like robots
who can't lie and are extremely rational, but where
otherwise everything else seems like 1930's at best, 19'th
century at worst. There is a preoccupation with exotica and
money, and the text is saturated with geographical
locations, foreign names and English expressions and brand
names at every opportunity. The characters are stereotyped
both culturally and economically: a rugged Australian
sailor, a Chinese android-servant equipped with a queue and
accent, a bored rich housewife, and a narrator whose typical
observation is:

"How nice of you to come - even if you are not...
one of our employees any more," she said sleepily in a
way that elicits inordinate desire to carry her to the
nearest bed, even among the graduates of Harvard.

Perhaps the plot gets more thrilling later on, but I doubt
that the setting or the style can improve much. This was
certainly the most disappointing part of IKARIE, and I
wonder why it was printed.

_One_Day_of_Zoja_Andrejevna_, on the other hand, is very
much a product of our time. Clearly written originally for
the samizdats, this short story is a satire whose target is
the pre-velvet rulers themselves. Set in the Stalinist
fifties, two young workers in "T.D. Lysenko's Institute for
the Research of the Communist Future" deploy a machine
which, by electric discharge, induces brain tissue to
predict the future. They feed it all the party texts and
declarations, and demand of the machine that it produce a
diary entry from a day of a woman-mother, woman-worker.

What they get might well complement Orwell's _1984_ as a
description of the proletariat's life, via Monty Python:

The date is 1990, the temperature a whopping 16
Celsejev. It's a beautiful day in our "Czechoslovak
Communist Federal Imperium". Zoja, the narrator,
obviously trusts all the propaganda and for this is
hated by everyone else. It is easy to deduce from her
record that Bohemia is in desolate state, the
environment is destroyed, the kids have genetic
diseases or at least suffer from pollution, and the
people serve as cheap labor producing exports to the
West so that the elite can gain some hard currency.
Zoja's day ends with a beating from her drunk husband,
and so she falls asleep with the thought of artificial
insemination as the only solution to the needs of the
state for more workers.

The two comrades back at the institute are suspicious
after reading the print-out. Quickly they decide that the
brain tissue must have come from an execution of a
*diverzant*. "But where can we get a brain of a politically
mature citizen?" asks one of the scientists. He realizes
the answer as he's falling out of the window down to the
pavement....

The most ambitious and satisfactory fiction work in IKARIE
is Olsansky's _SWAN OF AVON_ COMPANY. The company referred
to in the title is a traveling theater troupe with
Shakespearean repertoire. They travel from planet to planet
and hibernate during flights. Their shows are less and less
attended as human civilization is in decay and interest in
culture is declining rapidly. Most people now hope to get
converted into robots, who have separated their existence
from humanity but whose technology is far superior.

So when a robot Guildenstern offers the troupe to perform
Hamlet for the robots, they gladly accept. The stage is
Earth itself, which, now desolate, is transformed by the
robots into a copy of the world of Shakespeare's time.
During the play, however, some of the robots' heads begin to
explode, and this culminates when Hamlet's famous monologue
starts - so much so that the actors flee the scene.

When they ask Guildenstern, who turns out to be a convert,
for an explanation, he replies that the play was needed to
weed out the true robots in a power struggle with the new
converts.

Robots, who were originally used for colonization of
remote corners of the universe, were kept in touch with
human culture and traditions through didactic plays
performed by the predecessors of the "Swan of Avon" company.
The original robots had in their program a weakness for
theater, and Hamlet contrasted fundamentally (and fatally)
with the direction in which the robot society was now pushed
by the ex-human converts.

Guildenstern offers the actors conversion as well. Will
they be able to play theater, they ask. Of course, replies
Guildenstern, though he indicates that the texts will have
to be adjusted a bit here and there - after all, certain
moral imperatives are clearly out-dated in a `modern robotic
society,' and the actors themselves saw the destructive
effects some ideas might have.

Needless to say, the actors decline and leave in search of
the Globe.

The above outline does little justice to the story. A
satire, it profits from the way it is told and from the
humor it contains. Admirers of Shakespeare should
appreciate the homage paid to many of his characters.
Shakespeare, referred to as `the Maestro' by the actors,
becomes a guide to their decisions, and quotations from his
scripts are often used to support arguments.

The science fictional elements also serve to enhance the
grotesque in the story. The company is small and its
younger members may be victims of in-breeding - Yorik Gobbo,
who narrates the story, is a hunch-back whose hump just
might be a secondary brain, and his cousin Richard suffers
from anoftalismus. When the principal of the company
apparently dies - one of the effects of hybernation is the
myth, which Gobbo believes, that all actors are immortal -
the troupe is taken over by Richard, who promptly kicks
Gobbo out for financial reasons. Gobbo, stranded on a
satellite Betelgeuza, witnesses the eagerness with which
others await and accept the conversion to robot-hood. Naive
and trusting, Gobbo nevertheless provides a lucid and
humorous insight into the corruption of both the human, and
later the robotic, society.

Members of the troupe are not the only victims of
mutation. Shakespeare's work itself often undergoes
hilarious changes in the hands of the actors. These occur,
of course, in the Czech translation of Shakespeare, and I'm
unfortunately not another Kandel to find effective English
equivalents. As an example, here is a poor attempt to
translate the reincarnation of Hamlet's most famous line:
"To live or not/ matters a lot."

Language games are also present in the story's other
dimension, the one less visible to an American audience.
There are some delightful imitations of Czech communist
jargon, which serve to draw a parallel to the deterioration
of culture in communist societies and to the way many
individuals in these societies accept consumerism while
sacrificing moral values and beliefs. The converts become
truly unhuman, prizing the advantages and ease of the
robots' life, while at the same time rejecting any traces of
humanity left in the original robots. It is during the
monologue "Angels, servants of God, protect us ...," that
the first heads explode - the reference to angels in
Shakespeare is evidently assumed to mean the robots
themselves.

This story placed 10th for the yearly Capek's literary
prize in 1987. If each year there will be 10 Czech SF
stories of a similar quality, then I think that Czech SF
will be in good shape.

SF satire may often be viewed as not pure enough for
Science Fiction. I disagree, as I see science fiction in
terms of `thought experiments,' and therefore free to
disregard factors not important to the matter being
investigated. Unlike Hauserova's story, Olsansky's novellete
examines universal issues that are of genuine
science-fictional interest, and that are independent of
their current manifestations. In this sense, it qualifies
as true science fiction.

The shortest entry, only a page or two long, is Babula's
Astroletter_from_the_Year_2059, written exactly a hundred
years before the date in the title. Described here is the
initial stage of an expedition to Sirius, whose start
commemorates the centenary of the first Sputnik. The story
concludes with the remembrance of all those who dreamed of
space exploration, and of those who had to pay for their
belief in Science with their lives, as Bruno did, or with
humiliation, as Galileo, whose retraction is partially
reprinted, had to.

While from the details we may deduce that Communism is,
of course, the state of things in the future, and while the
adoration of the Sputnik reminds us of other, much bigger
satellites, the only `propaganda' the story really contains
is in the name of Science and Progress. More importantly,
the story shares with its Western counterparts the `sense of
wonder' in its poetic description of the cosmos and
technology.

My point is that the fifties' utopistic SF should not be
automatically dismissed as worthless. Not surprisingly,
most of this SF had a hard time with the censors - the true
topic of these works was science and not ideology, and the
idealistic convictions voiced here often proved too
subversive for the tastes of those in power.

I do not have other issues of IKARIE, nor do I have much
information on the changes in the SF scene over the last two
years. I believe there were many. If I get my hands on any
new material or info, I'll be happy to post an article
again. I hope you found the above of interest, and I hope
that an English translation of some recent Czech SF will be
published soon, so that I'll have the opportunity to review
it for you.

- David

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[ I sent this post originally to rec.arts.sf.reviews, but it seems dead ]

%T Ikarie
%A O. Neff [editor]
%C Prague
%D March 1990
%I Syndika't autoru' fantastiky
%O Magazine, 9 Korun
%G ISSN not available
%P 64pp

I dropped the diacritics in the Czech names. Here are
the names in their full spelling, together with a guide to
their pronunciation:

~ stands for the "hacek", i.e. the inverted hat.
' stands for the acute (long) accent.

J. Olsansky J. Ols~ansky' [Olshunskee]
E. Hauserova E. Hauserova' [Hawserovah]
J. Velinsky J. Velinsky' [Velinskee]
K. Saudek K. Saudek [Saudek]
V. Babula V. Babula [Babula]
L. Soucek Souc~ek [Souchek]
K. Capek C~apek [Chapek]

~ usually similar to placing an 'h' after the letter.
' makes the pronunciation of the vowel longer.
Czech names are usually accented on the first syllable.

Some notes:

Koruna = "crown"
metro = subway
TU144 = the Soviet answer to Concord.
anoftalismus = cyclopism =
one big eye in the middle of your forehead
Kandel = a superb translator of most of
S. Lem's work into English.

Czecho-Slovakia has mainly two related but distinct
language groups, the Czechs and the Slovaks.
The Czechs live in Bohemia and Moravia. The capital is
Prague.

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I'm not a native speaker of English, so I'll appreciate
any corrections of my grammar through e-mail. Flames will
be cheerfully ignored unless you post them in perfect Czech.

- David

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