SFmag

Hungarian fantasy is based on the pre-existing anglophone literary traditions and did not develop independently. Hungarian fantastic literature is varied but authors did not form a movement based on the common usage of the surreal and the fantastic, and did not have a mentor-student tradition. Fantastic elements may be significant in a writer’s work and even influences can be observed between authors and writings, but these were isolated examples, and therefore lacked the influence to start a boom of fantasy writings. That came with the abundance of translated foreign fantasy.

A story about love between a man and a lake and the futility of keeping up long conversations with someone who freezes over in winter.

The editors of the Hungarian science fiction magazine Galaktika were ambitious enough to show concisely and plainly the birth, development, present, and possible future of Hungarian science fiction. The contributors managed to put together an informative and interesting issue that is not drowned in scholarly terms yet academic in depth. MetaGalaktika #11 aimed to show the history of Hungarian science fiction in its entirety from its beginnings to the present. The result is a compilation that is unique.

„You are always alone in the caverns, in the temples, in the lost cities”. A very short fiction in English, with pixels and melancholy.

The prologue and first chapter of the Hungarian science-fiction family saga, the Wondertimes (Csodaidők). The tetralogy tells the story of an important turning point of the future star-travelling humankind, placing a religious extended family in the focus of the events.

A sci-fi hero having a family is quite an exception, but this is not the only unusual aspect of the Hungarian tetralogy Wondertimes (Csodaidők).

Our Christmas present: a magical tale of Christmas’s Eve.

Extracts from Péter Kuczka’s (1923-1999) afterword to Sam J. Lundwall’s It happened tomorrow, published in Hungarian in 1984. The present tense used in the article refers to the mid-80s. Péter Kuczka was the science-fiction editor of the leading (only…) publishing houses dealing with sci-fi, and the founder of the Galaktika sci-fi magazine.

Hungary is a small country in the middle of Europe, with a population of ten million and a language that has its closest relatives in the Ural Mountains. Consequently the number of science fiction and fantasy fans is small, and the number of writers even smaller, basically everyone knows everyone else. I’ll try to give  [ More ]

Lavie Tidhar is an Israeli born writer who travelled extensively over the globe and lived in places like Laos and Vanutau. He writes poetry and published many short stories in magazines such as Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld Magazine, Postscripts, Interzone and others. He also published a novella, “An Occupation of Angels”, a collection of short stories, “HebrewPunk”, a short novel in collaboration with Nir Yaniv, “The Tel Aviv Dossier”, and he also edited a non-fiction book and two anthologies. Lavie Tidhar’s first novel, “The Bookman”, was released by Angry Robot Books in January this year.

Although a complete analysis of the Hungarian sci-fi and fantasy genres would require extensive groundwork and would fill several books, I try to give a quick overview of what happened after 1989 in the field of speculative fiction for the benefit of non-Hungarian readers.