By 1978 I was so hooked on books that three things happened:
First, I went on a tour of all the central public libraries in Bucuresti.
Second, I began looking for books in my relatives’ libraries.
And third, I bribed my way into several bookstores, wishing to be the first one to know when a new genre book hits the shelves.
You need to understand another aspect of the communist years. Everything was in high demand and short supply. Books and magazines, garments and shoes, food, holidays, everything.
Tony Pi just let me know of a new review of the Dieselpunk anthology. One that has good things to say about our story Cosmobotica: “After Dragonfire, my favorite story was Cosmobotica, by Costi Gurgu and Tony Pi. This took me by surprise since this was the kind of story I’d have expected to find in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine or Analog,circa 1970. That’s usually not my kind of thing. The combination of an interesting story, lovely writing and a character I cared about all combined to make this a delightful read.”
Back in communism, they did not publish too many, yet a lot. Not many titles, but always around a hundred thousand copies of each. If you wonder why on Earth so many copies were published for a country with a small population of around 20 million, the answer is simple. Everything was centralized and the entire country got its sources from the center. From Bucuresti and the Communist Party. So, when they printed a book, they made sure it reached every corner of the country, every bookstore, every library, every school. And that’s a lot.
In a way the Communism was a writer’s Golden Age and Dark Ages wrapped up in a bundle.
My decade in Canada allowed me to discover a lot of misconceptions, omissions and twisted truths held by North American readers about European speculative fiction.
Let me tell you a story about me and the world I grew up in.
I know that for some of you this is old news, but for my website and blog is new. I also think this makes a good first post. So here it is:
