We’re delighted to announce Martin Vopenka’s tour for the US release of his acclaimed novel My Brother the Messiah, a Times Science Fiction Book of the Month. This project is supported by the Czech Ministry of Culture

“The Jewish-Czech author Martin Vopěnka is one of the leading voices in world literature, writing with ‘with a deft and compellingly simple control of sentences that is reminiscent of both Kafka and Kundera.” – Choice

It’s 2103 and Earth is baking. Scientists attempt to cool down the planet. With the coming of rain, a messiah is born. My Brother Messiah explores spirituality in the twilight of human civilization and presents a dark, vivid future of our world.

Watch this space – we’ll keep it updated with all current tour stops.

Events:

April 13th 6:30pm – Diesel Books, Brentwood, CA
In Conversation with Czech Writer and Visionary Martin Vopenka, with a reading by Czech actress Tereza Sbová. 

April 20th – T.G. Masaryk Czech School, Cicero, IL
April 22nd – T.G. Masaryk Czech School, Cicero, IL
In Conversation with Martin Vopenka.

April 27th 6:00pm – The Czech Embassy, Washington, DC
In Conversation with Martin Vopenka.

May 3rd – Czech Centre NY, Bohemian National Hall, NY
In Conversation with Martin Vopenka, about his novels My Brother the Messiah and The Back of Beyond. Sign Up

A News Bulletin from Prague in 2096, performed by Martin Vopenka:

We’re proud to share that the British Science Fiction Association took on My Brother the Messiah, Martin Vopenka’s provocative sci-fi that combines technology, religion and human nature itself. It’s a stellar review that you can read in full here

I was most struck by Matt Colborn’s comparisons of Vopenka and other titans of modern sci-fi literature, namely Cory Doctorow and Kim Stanley Robinson. He writes:

‘The style and tone of this novel contrasts significantly with some dominant voices in English-language SF. It’s instructive comparing Vopenka’s style with recent US utopian novels like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future (2020) and Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017). The moral universe of the US novels seems broadly far less ambiguous than the one presented in My Brother the Messiah.’

This final statement is deserving of some elaboration.

In The Ministry of the Future and Walkaway, the salvation of Earth’s people lies in technological advancement. The Ministry of the Future advocates geoengineering, which means altering the planet with technology to fight climate change. In Walkaway, highly advanced 3D printing undermines the power of an oppressive oligarchy.

This technocentric worldview is common in western Europe and America, I think – particularly when we conceptualise the climate crisis. We’re bombarded with information about harnessing green energies, and developing ever-improving recycling or waste apparatuses.

In My Brother the Messiah, such optimism is gone. The technocratic governments are ineffective or exacerbate the problems of Vopenka’s dying world. What’s striking about this is that it’s not pessimism, it’s grounded realism; technology hasn’t always been our salvation. The very mission of creating a utopia has caused some of our darkest days in history.

Modern sci-fi writers sometimes craft future worlds that are almost ‘post-religion’. Often, religion is used as a metaphor for complacency or ignorance; it’s conceptualised as the antithesis to technological progress. This couldn’t be farther from the case in My Brother the Messiah. Here, the spiritual movement centring on the ‘messiah’ Eli is multifaceted. It explores conviction and doubt, science and faith. It explores the internal dynamics of the religion and its public perception. Technology and religion are inextricably intertwined. These people have found faith not because they have betrayed rationalism, but because rationalism has betrayed humanity.

My Brother the Messiah challenges the entanglement of technology and salvation, and undermines the dichotomy of science and religion. This greyness is the fabric of our world today; that’s what makes this speculative sci-fi so special.

Read some more reviews of My Brother the Messiah here, or buy it here. 

by George Biggs

In the late 20^th century writers from the old Soviet bloc travelled at warp speed from communism into capitalism. What creativity comes out of that? I want to know.

Orwell found Zamyatin’s We in 1945, more than 20 years after its appearance in Russian. He read the French translation, and We immediately fired his imagination to produce 1984. That buried work from the East, discovered decades later in translation, triggered an English classic and the genre of dystopia that floods the young adult market even now.

The first UK translation of We didn’t come out till 1970. I didn’t want to wait decades for the next new venture in fiction to filter through to me. I started a small house, Barbican Press, precisely to make books happen that I want to see happen. I knew the Czech writer Hana Sklenkova. Hana was in her teens in Czechoslovakia when the Soviet world collapsed. She came to Plymouth to study creative writing in English. I taught her when she moved on to the MA course. She came away with a distinction. Her writing is fabulous. What modern Czech book-with-a-difference would thrill me? What might she like to translate?

 She came back with two: Peklo Benes by Josef Nesvatba, an alternative history in which the Czech president prevents the 1938 Munich Agreement and so Czechoslovakia becomes a neutral state; and Martin Vopenka’s Pátý rozmer. ‘The story follows a Czech millionaire who’s lost all his money,’ Hana wrote. ‘To get his wealth back, he signs up for an experiment run by a secret American corporation. As part of the experiment, the protagonist has to spend a year in barren mountains of Argentina. After some time, the seemingly dead landscape begins to reveal its hidden powers (i.e. the fifth dimension – the book’s title) … the protagonist bears witness to a groundbreaking physics theory that can change the course of human history.’

Martin Vopenka is the son of a renowned Jewish Czech mathematician. He knew he was a writer, but the Communist regime steered him into studying mathematics and physics. Years later, many books to his credit and head of the Czech publishers’ association, that early student life suddenly made sense. The bankrupt millionaire in the novel he was writing got to take one book into the Andes with him. He chose Kip Thorne’s Black Holes & Time Warps. Kip Thorne’s ideas have entered the mainstream by fuelling Chris Nolan’s film Interstellar. The Fifth Dimension engages in a dialogue with the early Thorne book in a way I have never encountered in fiction.

There’s much more in this book that I have not encountered in fiction. A translating norm is that you translate into your mother tongue. That ignores what a Conrad or a Nabokov can do for English. I wanted a translator who had adventured into English but lived through the same place and epoch as the author. Hana sent me the work chapter by chapter, and I acted as the mother-tongue ear. The Fifth Dimension came at me with the excitement of a serial adventure story.

Vopenka has been favourably compared to Kafka and Kundera. Kafka and Kundera opened up a realm of possibilities for me as writer. They unzip the imagination from its normal bounds. I’ll never read Czech, but translation opens worlds that are otherwise closed. The act of translation reveals a book, word by word. It’s a journey deep into another creative mind. The Fifth Dimension is now unlocked for an international readership. I look forward to the curious thrill of having another Czech treasure unpeeled for me, ready for sharing.