Kontakt: An Antholgy of Croatian SF (Ed Darko Macan & Tatjana Jambrišak; various translators)

I love a good speculative fiction anthology, especially one with a theme. Kontakt: An Anthology of Croatian SF wouldn't seem to have much of a unifying theme beyond the nationality of its authors, but  while it's a hodgepodge of sub-genres and styles, some interesting similarities emerge that make it hang together brilliantly. 

Originally printed as a sort of souvenir for the 2012 European Science Fiction Convention, which was held in Zagreb, Croatia that year, it's a great showcase of a single nation's best and brightest established and up and coming writers of speculative fiction -- only a handful of whom I had heard of before grabbing this book!

From weird alternate universe godpunk-cum-Christian eschatology (Katarina Brbora's "Avaleon and the Black Feather") to Kafka-esque military sci-fi (Darko Macan's "The Corridor") to accounts of the practical impact of mind-bending metaphysics that would do Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky proud (Goran Konvični's "Time Enough, and Space"), pretty much everything that speculative fiction lovers look for in an anthology. Unlike many that are more concerned with adhering to the conventions and restrictions of English language speculative fiction publishing, several of these stories express national and regional concerns that might alienate less careful or curious readers. A few minutes of research, or at least clicking on unfamiliar words or proper names in the ebook edition, will greatly enrich the experience of reading Kontakt. 

Nowhere is this more clear than in the aforementioned tale of Brbora's, "Avaleon and the Black Feather," which the anthology's editors describe as "a breezy treatment of that trinity of heavy topics: religion, patriotism and cheap jewelry," in which a young man of Italian heritage but Croatian birth, Santino, becomes low-end jewelry store clerk Tamara's new roommate and quickly establishes himself as even stranger than he already seemed. For one thing, he has a good-sized collection of Croatian editions of books that have not yet been published in Croatia. And his Bible turns out to have content that differs somewhat substantially from the one we and Tamara are familiar with. The famous Well to Hell hoax gets discussed as Tamara discovers that in Santino's Bible, "Sataniel" isn't the obnoxious boaster and tempter we know but is in fact the supreme authority on Earth, which he rules ruthlessly from a mighty fortress near the North Pole! Before we can say "portal fantasy" Tamara has followed Santino into an alternate universe where the city of Zagreb still looks a lot like her city of Zagreb but is in much better shape and is located near the Black Sea, where an ikavian dialect is the official language and the ugly blue stone in Tamara's janky ring (which her weird boss makes her wear around for marketing purposes) actually has vitally important supernatural properties. The story is plenty engaging as translated (by the author herself, as is generally the case in this anthology. Monolingual education is not a Slavic value!) but I suspect it resonates much more with Croatian readers. 

Kontakt also contains some first rate body horror. In Danilo Brozović's "Fingers" the protagonist discovers a unique affliction waiting in his DNA like a time bomb - but too late to do anything about it. At first he has a glimmer of hope when he learns that his father had the same grotesque problem at his age but doesn't now... until he realizes that his father, who has succumbed to dementia, might not remember how he got over their condition. Brozovć is more interested in letting us contemplate what life would be like suffering from such a condition than in explaining it, though, and the story takes off in an unexpected direction, leaving us with even more questions but still satisfied as the story ends. 

Less satisfying because perverse and icky if you are, as I am, on the prudish side, is the vividly imagined "De Cadenza" (Danjiel Bogdanović) in which a crew of bon vivants in space begin their list of perversions with using living human beings as furniture, with and upon which to have imaginatively perverse zero-gravity sex, and then develop even greater manias for acts the Marquis de Sade would balk at recording because they don't have any philosophy with which to dress up their indulgences. Eventually the story dispatches with them satisfyingly, though. But still, pass the brain bleach.

For my money, the most enjoyable of the lot is Tatjana Jambrišak's exciting and ultimately hopeful tale of a group marriage of space explorers who suddenly find themselves having to plan to re-start human society on a distant and newly discovered planet. "Give Me the Shuttle Key" is maybe the most conventional story in Kontakt but that doesn't make it dull or ordinary. The characters and their imperfectly fitting agendas are engaging enough and their situation compelling enough for me to long for a much longer work exploring their relationships and how they rise to meet their fates as maybe, but hopefully not solely, the founders of humanity's second chance.

Another standout, Aleksandar Žiljak's haunting "The Dead" plays off cultural memories of Nazi concentration camps* as it sees what might well be the site of one put to use for a new purpose: the economic exploitation of zombies, the cheapest and, if you have a willing bokor on the payroll, most easily managed labor force there is. The story has a whole camp full of them toiling day in, day out, assembling cell phones under the watchful eyes of Kevlar-clad overseers, armed to the teeth and well practiced at head-shots. Double tap to, uh, select. Good science fiction should afflict the comfortable; I was more uncomfortable reading this story (on my electronic device of choice) than I was any of the other stories except maybe "De Cadenza" (because I really am more than a little prudish). Your results may vary.

One way or the other, not a single story in Kontakt left me unmoved, and most drove me to look up their authors to see if anything else they've done is available to me. Many of the writers gathered here are associated with a Croatian speculative fiction magazine called Ubiq (hooray!) and I find myself wondering how hard it would be for language nerdish little me to just subscribe and bull on through with a dictionary (once I've figured out what dictionary to buy; the intricacies of language in this part of the world are beyond what I'm accustomed to)? But meanwhile, I know the gang at Apex have already discovered and shared Alexandr Žiljak, and that Dark Horse and Marvel gave Darko Macan a whole lot of work in the 90s that I haven't read yet, so maybe I'll start there. Regardless, next time you're hankering after some spec fic that's a little stranger than you've been getting lately, look to Croatia! Because wow! They are quite familiar with our stuff, but they're not by any means just producing more of the same. 

*One of which, Jasenovac, was located in Croatia back when it was part of occupied Yugoslavia.