Hvězdné hry – Novotný František (2017)

The collection Star Games practically summarizes the entire short story oeuvre of the author from the 1980s and also includes stories from the new century, before he began to focus almost exclusively on writing novels. This retrospective collection allows readers to familiarize themselves with František Novotný's short stories in their full breadth, including the winning works of the Karel Čapek Prize and texts awarded in other competitions. It also features for the first time in book form stories that could not be published during the communist regime for political reasons. Thematically, the stories are divided into three sections. The Fall to Heaven contains works about space expansion, Queen of Šumava includes pieces set on Earth, many of which are cryptographic parodies of the communist regime, and Ramax features stories about the dangers that confronting the universe could bring to a person. For this edition, the author provided each story with a commentary, in which he explains the circumstances that prompted him to write it, and reveals that most of the stories form a kind of segments of a vast fresco in which he wanted to capture humanity's expansion into space, its beginnings, peak, and ultimately its fall. The precise classification of the stories and their interconnections was carried out in the study A Broader Empire by Ondřej Šefčík. The book also contains an afterword by the editor Zdeněk Rampas František…