Péter Zsoldos, one of the fathers of Hungarian sci-fi, was born ninety years ago
I HAVE A FEELING THAT MORE UNUSUALLY, THEY HAVEN’T STARTED COMMEMORATING A WRITER’S NINETIETH BIRTHDAY YET, BUT I THREW OUT MY FIRST MERCENARY VOLUME LAST YEAR.
It didn’t go well, in fact, I really don’t like and don’t really like to throw away a book, but in this case the time has come and the 1983 (third) edition of Remote Fire (485 pages, glued) has unfortunately been taken off the shelf. It was my favorite edition, it was thirty-seven years ago, it traveled three continents with me, it witnessed (me) historical moments, so it got into a state where pages and then whole chapters came out as a result of the fatigue of gluing and the more careless use of books over the years. he would have been attacked by some strange disease that could not be helped. So this copy has been taken off the shelf, from where, in addition to an identical 1983 and a 1990 edition, the 2017 one is also watching.
It wasn’t the first sci-fi I’ve read, this title is owned by The Psychorgans ’Dreams (Pierre Barbet) and The Last War (Kir Bulichov), but if anyone knows these two, they’ll understand why the Mercenary immediately became my absolute favorite. a novel whose protagonist, Gregor Man, is the most colloquially named protagonist in literary history. The Distant Fire is the middle volume of a trilogy, and if I can't beat it to death, why can't The Viking return?I started with the first part, but yes, that when I read the first 20-30 pages of the Distant Fire, it turned out that the antecedent would be important enough, why didn’t I put it down and went to buy the first part: because I lived in a country where the Cosmos books were rarer than the sledge, and I know this from the fact that while I saw the sledge at the Ibadan market, the Cosmos book was not. (Yes, dolphins, the Captain of the Forest, and Robin Hood, they were still stolen from us during a burglary, but it really doesn't matter now.)
THE DISTANT FIRE BECAME THE BOOK I REREAD EVERY YEAR OR TWO.
Not the whole trilogy for some reason, which doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be a great book The Viking Returns, and I wouldn’t have been happy that Mercenary wrote the story in 1988 The Last Temptationtitled, only somehow my favorite realistic fantasy, starting in the late Bronze Age and reaching the Iron Age, processing and narrating the age of the earthly city-states, of which, if I had (a lot) money, I would shoot a six-part mini-series within the last chapter. The book, which can also be thought of as a historical novel, is about one of the members of an earth expedition to a distant planet, geologist Gregor Man, being forced to stay on the planet because he would not let him take off. Gregor remained and continued to live as the king of one of the local city-states, Avana - the novel is a collection of his recollections found carved into clay tablets by local archaeologists 800 years later.
Armed with the knowledge of modern man, if he really wanted to, he could subjugate the whole world he knew within a year, but he prefers minimal intervention, going forward in the riverbed where he needs to, and making only minor adjustments to avoid plague. take away half the people and so on. The antiquity seen through the eyes of modern man is an amazingly readable, atmospheric world, even in spite of clear crosstalk (people of steppes = Mongols, tall, red-haired conquerors from the north = Vikings, etc.). Mercenary is a great storyteller, and as in all of his novels or screenplays ( The Bunker Three- Part Series), the point is man, what makes us wonder if we can live with our prejudices and want to be able to play. God, do we have a right to it if we can, and so on.
The name of Péter Zsoldos is much less known today than in the 80s, but his books were once lined up on the shelves of quite a few Hungarian families. He was born on April 20, 1930, graduated from the College of Music with a degree in music teacher and choir conductor, and from 1956 became the music editor of the Hungarian Radio, and later became a senior staff member. He graduated from Eötvös Loránd University with a degree in psychology, which can already be considered as a kind of answer to many questions related to his oeuvre. It is no accident that he said this about the science fiction genre:
It is my belief that the fantastic token does not entitle anyone to lie. With our imagination, we must create a fiction that in no way contradicts the possibilities of science.
Made for a writer but a musician, his only non-sci-fi themed biography , Portrait of Mussorgsky in Four Sessions , commemorates the great Russian composer. In addition to The Return of the Viking, this work was also published in Russian, and its name is included in three professional bibliographies edited by Vladimir Gakov, which appeared in his lifetime - the third, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Kto jeszty kto? (Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Who's Who?) Is a 1997 edition of the CD-ROM, and perhaps even available online in some form. It can be found in the archive of szentesinfo.hu The commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the birth of György Bucsány, Zsoldos, which also includes the above, and the fact that the name of Péter Zsoldos appears in the search engine of Szentes in about 36% of cases in the Russian search engine.
His novel The Task was also translated into several (seven) languages (also available on Amazon , in English) and in 1975 a three-part TV film adaptation starring Ádám Rajhona was completed . By the mid-1980s, he was a little disappointed that sci-fi had become too popular, and as a result, the profession had diluted (this view was shared by Stanisław Lem):
In 1970, I thought sci-fit was in danger of closure, of inward perfection. Instead, as I should have seen, he was overtaken by the fate of successful genres; under his banner were half-talents, unofficial parasites of subcultures, smugglers of horror and porn, pseudo-scientific myth creators, self-serving surrealist virtuosos, feather-turners producing impact-made western elements.
Almost every novel by Péter Zsoldos is an award winner: in 1972 and 1973 he received a special EUROCON award, then a Golden Meteor award, in 1988 a Hungarocon award, and in 1989 a Galaxy award. He died on September 26, 1997. The Avana Association and the Local Government of the City of Salgótarján established the Péter Zsoldos Award in 1998, with which outstanding works of Hungarian science fiction are awarded annually.
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