The Sirius Years

The crucial year in the history of the Croatian SF was 1976. In July of that year, the first Croatian SF magazine Sirius was started. Sirius was published by Zagreb newspaper and magazine publisher Vjesnik, one of the largest such companies in socialist Yugoslavia. It was started by Borivoj Jurković (its first editor) and Damir Mikuličić, no doubt inspired by a growing interest in SF manifested in Yugoslavia in the early 1970s. Despite severe economic difficulties in the 1980s Yugoslavia (resulting in inflation and chronic shortage of paper), Sirius maintained a regular monthly rhythm throughout most of the period of its publication, lasting until December 1989, when it reached issue number 163/164. It had a circulation reaching 30 000 in its heyday, and was elected twice (in 1980 and 1984) the best European SF magazine. After Jurković edited Sirius for more than 100 issues, he was succeeded by Hrvoje Prćić, although Milivoj Pašiček was signed as an editor for some time.

Sirius was modelled after American SF magazines and published stories of various lengths, mostly by English-speaking, but also Soviet and European (particularly French) authors. In more than thirteen years, Sirius introduced the Croatian readers to the stories by the best SF writers in the world, authors both classic and recent ones. Sirius was also opened to various theoretical works, reviews, biographical texts, interviews and fandom news, and all this had considerable influence on the development of SF in Croatia.

Most important of all, Sirius offered Croatian (and Yugoslav) writers an opportunity to publish. Having the full-colour cover and later even black-and-white story illustrations, Sirius also became a sort of exhibition hall of the SF art.

Several writers became well-known on the pages of Sirius. While Branko Belan and Zvonimir Furtinger were the best of those already established on the Croatian cultural scene (Belan was a film director and lecturer, as well as writer, and Furtinger was a journalist and writer, both being in their mid-sixties when Sirius was started), Predrag Raos was certainly the greatest among the young writers beginning their career in Sirius. The most prolific Sirius authors were Branko Pihač and Živko Prodanović, and we should also mention Neven Antičević, Radovan Devlić (otherwise a comics author), Darije Đokić, Damir Mikuličić, Slobodan Petrovski, Zdravko Valjak and many others.

The pages of Sirius also revealed the significant presence of women-writers, such as Vera Ivosić-Santo (a.k.a. Veronika Santo), Vesna Gorše, Biljana Mateljan, Vesna Popović, Tatjana Vranić and several others. We can state without any doubt that women publishing in Sirius were on the average superior writers to their male colleagues, both thematically and stylistically, particularly when their relatively small outputs are considered.

Although it is really impossible to draw any common denominator for some 500 Croatian SF stories (including short short ones) published in Sirius, some trends are obvious. For instance, it’s easy to notice a large number of anti-utopias, most often post-nuclear. This was an obvious comment on the Cold War, as well as the Yugoslav single-party socialist society. (We must point out, however, that socialism in Yugoslavia was much more liberal than in other East European countries, let alone USSR. Yugoslavia was not a member of the Warsaw Pact, and indeed maintained a delicate balance between West and East, being opened to both.) Other classic SF subjects and subgenres were also present, such as space-opera, hard-SF, first contact, time travel and ESP. On the other hand, some of the then-popular subgenres were almost completely missing, such as cyberpunk. There was also a total lack of alternative histories and parallel world stories. Due to the strict editorial orientation towards SF, encouraged by contemporary readers, there was no fantasy or horror on the pages of Sirius.

Between 1976 and 1989 – years now dubbed the Sirius period – some very important SF novels appeared.

Predrag Raos published his two-part epic Brodolom kod Thule (Shipwrecked At Thula) in 1979. Mnogo vike nizašto (Much Ado About Nothing) followed in 1985 and Nul effort in 1990. Shipwrecked at Thula, almost 850 pages long, is the most important and possibly the best Croatian science fiction novel so far. Describing the utopian, but stagnant human society 600 years in the future that sends the first faster-than-light expedition to Alpha Centaury, and the disaster striking this expedition, it is brilliantly written and never boring despite its length. It is at the same time great literature and great science fiction, firmly based in sound scientific speculation. Shipwrecked at Thula, Sirius stories, Much Ado About Nothing (about an expedition to Mars) and Nul effort (about a space expedition caught in a middle of an intergalactic war) firmly established Predrag Raos as one of the finest Croatian writers.

In the mid-1980s, Neven Orhel wrote two medical-SF novels, Uzbuna na odjelu za rak (Alert At The Cancer Ward) and Ponoćni susret (The Midnight Encounter). Branko Belan published the anti-utopian Utov dnevnik (Ut’s Diary) in 1982, incorporating some of his stories previously published in Sirius. In the same year, Damir Mikuličić published a collection of his stories entitled O. Hrvoje Hitrec, well-known Croatian writer, published his SF novel Ur in 1982, and is also famous for his SF novel for children Eko eko from 1978. Some other mainstream writers also incorporated the SF and fantastic elements in their novels, most notably Pavao Pavličić and Goran Tribuson, two of the most prominent and prolific of several so-called Croatian Borgesians appearing on the literary scene in the early 1970s.

So far the only two Croatian SF movies also appeared in this period. The first was Izbavitelj (The Rat Saviour) in 1977, directed by Krsto Papić and awarded at the Trieste SF Film Festival. The second was Dušan Vukotić’s SF comedy Posjetioci iz galaksije Arkana (Visitors From The Arkana Galaxy), shot in 1980.

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