The World SF News Blog says …

The Apex Book of World SF has been out since November – just under three months – and some returns have started to come in. We’ve been getting good reviews, some great readers – but we still need your help.

Specifically – we need to sell 92 copies until the end of this month.

And we need your help.

Just to remind you, one of the names that appears in The Apex Book of World SF is our own Aleksandar Žiljak, whose story An Evening In The City Coffeehouse, With Lydia On My Mind, featured in the aforementioned anthology, can be read here.

You can also read interviews with Aleksandar on SF Signal and Strange Horizons.

Zoran Krušvar is best known to his native Croatian public for his stories that either have a lot of humor or a lot of vampires or both. So far he’s published 3 books: a story collection Najbolji na svijetu, a vampire novel Izvršitelji nauma Gospodnjeg, and YA novel Zvijeri plišane. The first two books were also translated and published in Poland and his Polish publisher Runa persuaded him to write a blog in English, following the Polish translation of Izvršitelji nauma Gospodnjeg (Wykonawcy Bożego Zamysłu). His interesting views on Croatian Science Fiction and history and many other more or less related musings, can be found here.

Aleksandar Žiljak is certainly not a new name in Croatian nor international SF. Recently he published a story in Lavie Tidhar’s The Apex Book of World SF, an “extraordinary anthology of 16 tales” that “introduces English-speaking readers to some of the world’s best writers of SF, horror, fantasy, and metafiction”. Charles A. Tan conducted 13 interviews for SF Signal with most of the contributors, and here’s what our Aleksandar had to say. Also, we’ve updated our Written Word section with the link to Aleksandar’s story An Evening In The City Coffeehouse, With Lydia On My Mind, featured in The Apex Book of World SF anthology.

Ivana was born in Ogulin, a town in north-western Croatia, and lived most of her life in Brod na Savi (today Slavonski Brod). She was the granddaughter of the famous politician, the Croatian ban and poet Ivan Mažuranić, and she was also the first woman accepted into what is today the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1937.

Her book Croatian Tales of Long Ago (Priče iz davnine), published in 1916, is among the most popular today in large part because of its adaptation into a computerized interactive fiction product by Helena Bulaja in 2003/2006. In the book Mažuranić created a series of new fairy-tales, but using names and motifs from the Slavic mythology of Croats. It was this that earned her comparisons to Hans Christian Andersen and J.R.R. Tolkien who also wrote completely new stories but based in some elements of real mythology.

Brlić-Mažuranić was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature twice, in 1931 and in 1938. She died on September 21, 1938 in Zagreb, committing suicide after suffering from depression.

You can find more information on the best Croatian writer for children on Wikipedia, and the links to her works in English were added to our Written Word section.

Dalibor’s novel All The Blood Of Mankind (2005) tells the story of the future of the mankind that had spread throughout the known universe, but hasn’t yet made contact with alien races. But when an artifact of an alien civilization is discovered in the deep space, a secret mission is launched …

We bring you the first 3 chapters of the novel, translated by Dalibor himself, with some aboriginal help from Ben Peake.

The World SF News Blog especially mentioned Croatian Science Fiction and Fantasy writer, illustrator and editor Aleksandar Žiljak as the Apex Book of World SF contributor. On CroSF you can read 3 stories, an essay on history of Croatian Science Fiction and an article about the new Croatian SF magazine Ubiq, all written by Aleksandar, and we must quote The World SF News Blog again by saying that they’re “an excellent resource”.

We would also like to add that one of the stories we offer here on CroSF is written by Milena Benini, who contributed to Alchemy with Words: The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy vol 1 and The Complete Guide to Writing Science Fiction: Volume One – First Contact, so be sure to include her in your readings as  well.

The goal of this site is to tell the story of Croatian SF, and to show to non-Croatian speaking world what our authors can do. Hopefully you’ll tell us that you like what we have to offer. The best case scenario, we’ll all become rich & famous.

This is only the beginning. Stay tuned for more. And have fun reading Croatian Speculative Fiction along the way.