First Contact and Time Travel: Selected Essays and Short Stories by Zoran Živković

Abstract

665 BOOKS IN REVIEW letter of 4 December 1898 to Wells from Joseph Conrad: “Impressed is the word, O Realist of the Fantastic” (199). There are further appendices on the biological, technological, and sociological contexts, and a list of 24 key films from 1909 to 2016 that were inspired by The Invisible Man. An up-to-date critical bibliography rounds out the volume. I conclude that, from the striking X-ray “Self Portrait” on the front cover to the eloquent blurbs on the back, the university classroom now has a portable, modestly priced edition of The Invisible Man worthy of Wells’s remarkable “grotesque romance.” And as early Wells is now in the public domain, let us hope that The First Man in the Moon (1901) and a collection of sf short stories will soon be added to the Broadview list of offerings. —Nicholas Ruddick, University of Regina Serbian Fantastika from the Banal to the Profound. Zoran Živkoviæ. First Contact and Time Travel: Selected Essays and Short Stories. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, SCIENCE AND FICTION, 2018. ix+148 pp. $27.99 pbk, $19.99 ebk. The Serbian Zoran Živkoviæ is generally shelved as a writer of sf, but he does not consider himself to be one, preferring to see himself as a writer without any prefixes—or a writer of “fantastika” for which there is not a fully satisfactory English equivalent: “The ‘fantastika’ encompasses all non-mimetic types of narratives, in the sense that worlds imagined in the literary works of this sort don’t fully coincide with what is generally considered to be reality” (148). It should be mentioned that this Slavic term is gaining wider acceptance in English, especially because of John Clute’s adoption of it. An annual “Fantastika conference” was already in its fifth year at Lancaster University in 2018. Živkoviæ started by writing on sf, translating sf, and publishing it. He wrote an MA and a PhD thesis on sf and was a reviewer and commentator on the genre. From 1975 to 1990 he published several books on sf, including a lavishly illustrated two-volume Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1990), translated some 70 books, and published more than 200 books in the publishing house Polaris which he founded. He also wrote and hosted a television series on sf cinema and taught creative writing at Belgrade University. He started to write fiction only in 1993 and has since then authored 22 books. As a writer he has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino; one might also add Dino Buzzati and Julio Cortázar. He was fortunate in finding in Alice Copple-Tošiæ a congenial translator who put many of his books into an impeccably simple and elegant English, and who is responsible for much of his reputation in English-speaking countries. Her name is carefully hidden in the book: it can be found only at the end of the last story, which is somewhat curious in view of the fact that Živkoviæ himself is of the opinion that the names of translators are not given enough prominence by publishers. And unlike for the non-fictional pieces, the book contains no information on the first publication of the stories in English, although they have appeared in many editions. But it is easy to see why Živkoviæ’s stories, despite their seductiveness, do not have wide appeal; they have been printed in tiny editions by small publishers such as Dalkey Archive Press, Aio Press, Jeff VanderMeer’s Ministry of Whimsy, and PS Publishing in the UK, and in 666 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) magazines such as Interzone. But “The Library”(2002) won the 2003 World Fantasy Award for best novella. Currently all of his books are available or appearing from Cadmus Press with beautiful covers by Youchan Ito. The sf themes that interested Živkoviæ the most are first contact and time travel or chronomotion. He postulates that the meetings between human and alien reveal anthropomorphic deficiencies, in decreasing order (anthropo-centrism, anthropochauvinism, and simply anthropomorphism) and finds them expressed in three short stories by Arthur C. Clarke. This is the topic of his 1979 MA thesis, “Anthropomorphism and the Motif of First Contact...