Mulțumim lui Jonathan Cowie și Antuzei Genescu pentru atenția acordată, și îi asigurăm de aceeași atenție din partea noastră!A burst of SF news from Romania
FANDOM & OTHER NEWS
Romania news.
The Spring usually a quiet month in the SF calendar saw much going on in Romania. Events included:-
A two day Helion Days to mark the 30th anniversary of the Helion SF group.
A two day Helion Days to mark the 30th anniversary of the Helion SF group.
Helion (with the H. G. Wells Society) did: much of the regional organising for the 1994 Eurocon; has produced a fairly regular semi-prozine over its years; and held a number of social events as well as mini-conventions. Apparently, from those invited to this one, it went rather well.
Two SRSFF (Romanian Society of Science Fiction and Fantasy) members – Feri Balin and Dario Pecarov – received the Helion Award for their short stories, and Danut Ungureanu (who, some Concatenation groupies may remember, was a guest at the 2nd International Week of Science & SF) and Marian Truta gave talks. There was also a tribute to Ion Hobana.
SRSFF organised two meetings of the Prospectart SF Society (a Bucharest SF group run by SRSFF) at the Calderon Centre.
The first was in February, in memory of Ion Hobana.
The second was in March, and has Dan Ursuleanu as its guest. Dan was responsible for Romania’s first national radio SF show (1982) SF Radiolibrary, (in 1984 this became Explorers of Tomorrow’s World and then presented by Stefan Ghidoveanu (which for a season included a ‘Letter from London’ by one miscreant Jonathan)).
Finally there was Romania’s first book fayre dedicated to SF which was organised by bookblog.ro and called FinalFrontier.ro.
Finally there was Romania’s first book fayre dedicated to SF which was organised by bookblog.ro and called FinalFrontier.ro.
This last also saw the launch of the anthology Steampunk – A Doua Revolutie [Steampunk – The Second Revolution] and the collection H. G. Wells – Utopia Moderna [H. G. Wells – Modern Utopia] edited by Mircea Oprita, as well as the non-fiction books Alternative Critice [Alternatives in Criticism] by Catalin Badea Gheracostea, and Art Wasn’t Quite Crime: The Context, Themes and Consequences of (Post-)Cyberpunk Fiction by Florin Pitea. There were other activities at the fayre including a sumo fight with robots.
Ion Hobana, one of Romania’s academic SF grandmasters (arguably Romania’s greatest living SF academic) died of cancer in a Bucharest hospital aged 80. He was recognised as a major force in Romanian SF both before and after the 1990 revolution. Before 1990 as a writer attending Romania’s national conventions and as a genre academic. As well as after 1990 at conventions and as an author of scholarly works. Not only this, he got publishers to translate many western European science fiction novels into Romanian and provided introductory editorials for these. A number of us at SF2 Concatenation> had the privilege of meeting Ion at the 1996 and 2001 Eurocons and if you wanted to describe him in a single word then it would be as a gentleman. His is known in Romania for the quote: ‘We owe a debt to the children of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow’. He will be much missed and long remembered by Romania’s SF community as well as those of us outside of Romania in the European SF community who had the opportunity to meet him.