Astronautilia

[boomboomsubban]

I wonder what inspired OudeisPloiarkhos to create an account and upload the plot summary. It's their only contribution to Wikipedia, and it's so detailed I somewhat wonder if it's really proper for the site.

I'd guess some kind of academic assignment, though it's strange that they spent a few more months editing it after the original post.

[legerdemain]

My guess is a family member. The author seems to have been a colorful and accomplished man who, nevertheless, never attained fame. The Wikipedia page, as well as the one about the author himself, might be the work of an appreciative child or relative wanting to embellish the author's memory.

In Baltimore, there's something similar with the Amaranthine Museum, dedicated to the works of the eccentric and obscure artist Les Harris by his very dedicated daughter. It's something of a hidden treasure.[1]

[1] https://amaranthinemuseum.org/

[ricardobayes]

Some weird stuff has cult-like following in some countries. Meaning, in Hungary, the Bud Spencer movies, Torrente and Ford Fairlane script punchlines are something almost every hungarian can recite by heart. I didn't occur this phenomenon anywhere else (yet).

[jamal-kumar]

https://cs.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hv%C4%9Bzdoplavba...

The Czech article is way shorter and has a bunch more different authors

[jiri]

I'd guess that some family member like son Jan Pinkava https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0684342/ or grandchildren contributed.

[NKosmatos]

That’s one of the reasons I love HN, you find some posts like this that are completely out of this world!!! Being Greek and a sci-fi fan, I need to find this book :-)

[budzes]

The book is hard to find. This copy is sold for 9000 CZK (380 Euro): https://www.trhknih.cz/kniha/9uwthe8b

Or you can read it in the study room of the National library (Klementinum): https://aleph.nkp.cz/F/83GIEU45K19XBDL2VVT6CJBMH2LA526L5YQ9U...

[owyn]

The surreal and dreamlike plot summary reminds me of this strange black and white indie sci fi movie / musical from 2001 (or 2005?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Astronaut

A throwback to vintage serials, shot as time and budget allowed over years. I pre ordered a copy of the DVD and waited a few years for it to arrive so I guess it was like a crowd funding thing long before that was easy to do.

"His mission begins with the unlikely delivery of a cat to a small outer-belt asteroid saloon where he meets his former dance partner, and renowned interplanetary fruit thief, the Blueberry Pirate. As payment for his delivery of the cat, Curtis receives a homemade cloning device already in the process of creating a creature most rare in this space quadrant – a Real Live Girl."

Oh, there's a copy hiding out on YouTube. I don't feel so bad posting this link because it's long out of print, I actually own a copy that I bought from the original artist, and it's just... pretty amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COxhvqWWxSU

After the opening credits, there's just 2 minutes of the protagonist shaving that I forgot about. But then he jumps out of his ship to bring the cat to the asteroid/saloon. I'll just link that moment because it's the moment I fell in love with this movie.

https://youtu.be/COxhvqWWxSU?t=270

[rendall]

The American Astronaut is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I have never met anyone before, online nor real-life, who has even heard of that movie much less liked it.

[TbobbyZ]

I would love to know how Czech culture influenced the novel.

[legerdemain]

My impression is that central Europe (which I apologize for lumping together) has a pretty long-running tradition of literary absurdism and surrealism. They're works that are more allegorical than "scientific" or "futuristic," even though they might be responding to (or "riffing on") actual early sci-fi of the techno-futurism variety.

As some examples, besides his R.U.R., Capek (Czech) also wrote The War with the Newts. It's an animal fairy tale that predates George Orwell's animal fairy tale by a decade.

Franz Kafka, obviously, was born in Prague and spent his life in central Europe.

Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke (1937) is a Polish analogue from the same decade. Bruno Schulz's short story anthology The Street of Crocodiles is another one.

After World War 2, you have people like Stanislaw Lem (Polish) writing a lot of farcical science fiction and Jan Svankmajer (Czech) making a lot of grotesque, farcical stop-motion animation.

[stjnvcm]

Sadly I hear about this for first time myself. The word hvězdoplavba is somehow know and used, mostly in poetic context. I don't think it had any particular affect on the society tho. I'll go check some second hand bookstores for this gem.

Edit: after reading bit more about this, the author was kind of inspired by another Czech author Karel Čapek, whose works did and keeps influencing people (also coined the word Robot for "mechanical worker" (that's enough bragging for today)

[RektBoy]

First time hearing about this book.

[867-5309]

sort-of related (scifi, poetry) is the book Tau Zero[1] and its similarities with the Swedish epic poem Aniara[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniara

[JasonFruit]

I can't help but wonder if this is a parody article inserted into Wikipedia by some brilliant vandal.

[pattisapu]

As science fiction and fantasy have evolved, they have converged.

We can see plenty of fantasy in works of science fiction in the conventional _forms_ of science fiction -- short stories, novels, TV shows, movies, video games.

It will be interesting to see science fiction in the conventional _forms_ of fantasy -- epics, ballads, poetry, fairy tales, onomastics, runic and incantatory forms of language....

(As an aside, I've heard rumors of published contemporary sci-fi written in classical Sanskrit verse but I can't find any -- is this really a thing?)

[strbean]

> It will be interesting to see science fiction in the conventional _forms_ of fantasy

I think this happened a fair amount in the forms of religious texts / mythology and mysticism in the early/mid 20th century, no?

[mjfl]

I always wonder what books there are out there, that are very interesting, with no English translation. Must be a lot of them.

[giraffe_lady]

Arabic and chinese each have literary traditions approximately as broad and deep as the western canon. I'm sure there are plenty of others. In all likelihood most excellent and interesting works are not available in english.

[yourself92]

I have the same thoughts about content on the web

[wraptile]

Seems like AI translation is will soon be good enough to explore this. Unfortunately, I think bigger barrier is culture than language and maybe we're not missing out that much in practical terms then.

[foxh0und]

Is there any work being done currently for a full English translation?

[isoprophlex]

Tell me about a complicated sheep, o Muse,

of how it bleated as it saw all of our world

and made it real just being there, a holy ewe

Maybe we'll have an Emily Wilson translation of the Astronautilia one day, I'd read that for sure!

[chadlavi]

I am too stupid to even understand the wikipedia summary of this book.

[sockaddr]

What about a sheep self-referentially observing itself and thus justifying the existence of an entire cosmos doesn’t make perfect intuitive sense to you?

[algon33]

This is the most insane thing I've read about this year.

[airstrike]

For the most insane thing you've listened to this year, try Mouth Dreams

[xwdv]

It’s been 23 days.

[tntermini]

"but a violent revolution breaks out amongst the women; one approaches the Queen and, pulling out a penis, rapes her. The other rebel women follow suit." (quoting from wikipedia summary)