At the end of the ‘70s, several books from this decade stuck with me and created a certain aura about the SF&F genre literature. Those were the books that made me want to write my own stories.
I already touched on “The Overlords of War” by Gerard Klein and H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine”, about “Stone Men’s Ranch” by Romulus Barbulescu and George Anania, “Les Robinsons du Cosmos” by Francis Carsac, and “The Voyage of the Space Beagle” by A.E. Van Vogt.
Here are some more for those hungry enough for good stories no matter the provenience.
“Squaring the Circle” (“Cuadratura Cercului” in original, published in 1975, in a heavily censored edition) by Gheorghe Sasarman, and published in the USA by Aqueduct Press, Seattle 2013 (translated by Ursula K. Le Guin). It is a story collection with a subtitle: “False Treaty of Urbogonie”, dealing with the pretext of urban civilization to follow through a series of stories of the human way to enlightenment through city and architecture.
Sqauring The Circle – Cuadratura cercului (1975) – Gheorghe Sasarman
“Entertainment for Witches” (“Divertisment pentru vrajitoare” in original, 1972) by Vladimir Colin is a sword and sorcery novel. A Transylvanian witch with psychokinetic powers and the gift of precognition is trained by a group of time travelers to use her powers to change the future.
“Ghil-Thagar” (1959, awarded with the Youth Festival Award in Moscow, so I guess now would be considered a YA) by Viorica Huber is a story in which the hero dies in the first third of the book. This shocked me, but I was already so invested in the story that I wanted to know what else could still happen. Well, there was a second hero, who dies by the midpoint and eventually we get to meet the third hero who finally overcomes all obstacles and kills the dragon, metaphorically speaking. I’ll have to read this book again and see how she does it. How does Huber convince the reader to keep on reading after killing not one, but two heroes in the first half of the book.
“The Land of the Purple Clouds” (“Tara norilor purpurii” in Romanian, 1959 the original book in the Soviet Union and translated in Romania in 1961) by Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky. It’s an adventure in space book, with a team of Soviet cosmonauts exploring Venus and trying to settle it for the motherland. They have to overcome the very adverse conditions on Venus and the competition from—who else—if not an American expedition. Despite the last part of the premise, the book is really gripping and vividly written. It was one that I re-read several times and hoped to write something similar some day in the future.
The Land of the Purple Clouds by Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky
“The Xipehuz” or “The Shapes” (1887 in original, translated in Romanian in issue 234 of CPSF and translated in English by Damon Knight initially and later by Brain Stableford in 2010), by the Belgian writer J.H. Rosny Aine and “The Navigators of Infinity” (1925 publication date, translated in Romanian in 1974 and also translated in English in 2010), also by J.H. Rosny Aine. “The Shapes” is a short story in which primitive humans encounter inorganic aliens. It’s the first time in the genre history that the aliens are not anthropomorphic. “The Navigators of Infinity” is a novel in which the term astronautics was coined for the first time and it is the masterpiece of Rosny Aine. Rosny Aine is considered by Euopean scholars of SF literature one of the founding fathers of modern Science Fiction and another reason after H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Mary Shelley and Cyrano de Bergerac, why I can never agree with the statement that Science Fiction is an American genre or for that matter an English genre. But that’s for another time.
“The Cyberiad” (“Ciberiada”, 1976 the Romanian version, 1967 the original version and translated in English in 1974) by Stanislaw Lem. It’s a collection of stories with robots and AIs, centered around the futility of achieving dreams and happiness through technological advances. This was my first Lem and I don’t remember why, but I liked it better than I liked “Solaris”, written a few years later.
“The Mind Net” (“Reteaua Gindurilor” in Romanian, 1961 the original book, 1979 translated in Romania and 1974 translated in English) by Austrian Herbert W. Franke. I don’t recall the plot or what made it memorable, but I remember that I used to talk about it with my friends for years after reading it. It was one of those books that stayed with us and was brought to discussion once in a while.
“The Mind Net” by Herbert W. Franke