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Esperanto and Science Fiction. Some more WWW resources.

© David Poulson

Introductory note for new visitors to the Esperanto Topic.

If you have only just begun to take an interest in Esperanto and wish to know some basic information about this fascinating subject, please start your reading at the first article of this series. Having already completed 48 articles, I am now at the stage of writing articles for those readers who have learned quite a lot about the Esperanto language and movement already, and who are now wanting to find out more than just the basic introductory information. To get to the beginning of this series, please just click here: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/espe... ______________________________________________________

My main purpose in writing the Esperanto Topic is to provide a brief account of the history and development of Esperanto, illustrating it with the best WWW resources I have been able to find. The readers I hope to serve best are relative newcomers to Esperanto who can read English well, because most of the resources to which I direct my readers are also in English. However, in this article I will draw your attention to some Esperanto-language resources which are just too interesting or too important to leave out.

Let me first introduce you to Federico Gobbo who, like many other people, first heard about Esperanto while he was reading a science fiction story. In Federico's own words:

"Some years ago, I started publishing a fanzine of (science)fiction short novels, named Fantastica, ('fantastic' or 'be fantastic!'). The texts were always new, and it was black and white, and without pictures. My first collaborators were my role-playing game friends. We were even mentioned by the prestigious Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (Italian edition).

After a while, we decided not to print any more but only publish the texts on the net. To increase the readership, I also decided to have the texts translated by native English speakers, who also knew Italian and who loved Italy. By chance, I heard about Esperanto in an anthology of original science-fiction stories, and so I learned this language. While Fantastica was dying my interest in Esperanto was rising more and more.

If you want, you may download the zip file containing the whole Fantastica hypertext, ready for your browser."

I downloaded this zip file myself and had a look at the contents and, as well as the original (Italian-language) stories, it includes several which have been translated into Esperanto. Here is where you will find it:

http://www.newlog.it/federico/fantastica...

If you visit Fedrico's tri-lingual page and you know a little Esperanto, you will see that the anthology mentioned above - the one from which he first learned of Esperanto - was an issue of Sferoj, edited (perhaps) by Harry Harrison and then later translated into Italian by Giulio Cappa.