Science Fiction in Hungary

In the past 15 years, there has developed in Hungary the basic skeleton of a serious infrastructure for SF production in terms of an organized subculture of writers, readers, publishers, journals, other accessible media of communication, and international relations. This subculture can draw strength from a strong indigenous minority literary tradition of fantastic writing whose contributors include some of the most important Hungarian prose writers of the 20th century—among them, Mihály Babits, Frigyes Karinthy, and Tibor Déri. Writing at an international level of literary merit continues to be produced within the genre by the likes of Gyula Hernádi, Péter Lengyel, Péter Zsoldos, and Dezsö Tandori, and potentially also by a generation of young writers working near and around them. At the same time—and problematically—this creativity in SF remains generally unacknowledged, and certainly unlegitimated, by the main institutions of literary history, literary criticism, education, and official cultural transmission. This also applies, even within the SF subculture, to the more sophisticated formal experiments in Hungarian SF. (JF)