Fiction of real war: literature about the future is written even at the front

Back in 2023, the Kharkiv publishing house Folio offered us to compile an anthology of contemporary Ukrainian science fiction-a collection of novels and short stories. The task turned out to be unexpectedly difficult. Why?

First, Ukrainian fiction has always been dominated by "bizarre prose", the so-called magical realism with Ukrainian specifics, to which mysticism, horror, and various fantasy trends were later added. Science fiction has always been rather scarce in Ukrainian literature. And it is still scarce, unfortunately.

And the second and main reason is the war. When we started looking for authors to invite them to participate in the anthology, it turned out that many of them are either fighting in the ranks of the Armed Forces, recovering in hospitals after being wounded, or actively volunteering, getting what our soldiers need by all means and means, and delivering goods to the front under fire. Some simply live in frontline cities and towns under constant shelling and bombardment.

But!

This is where the "but" came in, which time and again allows us all to do the seemingly impossible.

Despite the war, exhaustion, sleepless nights, shelling, combat and volunteer work on the verge of, or even beyond, human strength, many of these people continued to write!

They wrote in fragments, in between duties, military missions, trips to the frontline zone; in dugouts, basements and bomb shelters; edited their work while lying in hospitals after serious operations... One of the authors of the anthology started writing while already in the military, during the fighting. And his debut novel turned out to be not just good, but also completely atypical, in some ways even "breakthrough"!