Tag Archives: Bertil Falk

A Fantastic Storm Has Abated: RIP Bertil Falk (1933-2023)

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Bertil Falk in 2022. Photo by Ahrvid Engholm.

By Ahrvid Engholm: I have never known anyone with so much energy as author-publisher-reporter-translator-sf-expert-etc Bertil Falk. Now after a long time’s illness this hurricane of a force is no longer with us. It may be of slight consolation that he managed to publish several of his life projects before finishing his 90 years on Terra, ending October 14.

His Swedish translation of James Joyce’s “untranslatable” Finnegans Wake came last year, a work of love taking 60+ years. We also saw his massive, three-volume history of science fiction in Swedish, Faktasin. Unlike earlier sf history works, it covered what’s been written in Swedish only, making it a unique study. And a little earlier came his biography Feroze: The Forgotten Gandhi. Covering Indira Gandhi’s husband, written in English and well received in India, discovering a man that really had been mostly forgotten. An interview about this book is here.

Bertil Falk and Indira Gandhi.

But Bertil Falk did so much more! I first met Bertil on the SF-Kongressen 1977 and was later contacted to help out with a very nice (lots of old-timers showed up!) Spacecon in 1980, where Bertil with companions Anders Palm and Lasse Junell launched a Captain Future pulp-sized novel. Bertil had been a fan of this “Wizard of Science” since crawling out of the cradle, finding him in the 1940’s pulp Jules Verne Magasinet. As a journalist he later met and interviewed Captain F’s author Edmond Hamilton. And when he revived Jules Verne-Magasinet in the late 1960’s he published “The Return of Captain Future”. His interest in good old space adventures made me found Bertil Falk’s Space Opera Prize (RSN winner TBA!). I hope there is enough interest to make it annual.

Edmond Hamilton and Bertil Falk.

I got to know Bertil really well after I in 1982 was engaged in the popular tech/science magazine Tekniknmagasinet. Bertil wrote lots of articles for us and though he lived in the south he often came up before deadlines to help out, beside his then dayjob at the Kvällsposten evening paper. When you heard a typewriter hammer fast, hard and relentlessly you knew that Bertil had arrived to our little office. Though at times breaking even, the lack of astronomical success made our magazine slip to another publisher. But we co-workers kept in touch.

Bertil then crossed the North Sea working for the newly started TV3 satellite channel in 1987. Transmitting from London it challenged and in effect tore down the Swedish government TV monopoly. Bertil made a fine historical report on Jack the Ripper for the station.

He wrote non-fiction on many subjects, especially popular culture history (pulps, crime fiction, comics), as well as hammering out short stories (countless cosy mysteries for the weeklies) and novels (sf and crime). He was also translator and sometimes the publisher of the results through his publishing house Zen Zat.

He was especially interested in “reviving” popular fiction writers from yesteryear, and re-printed stories and books by eg Sture Lönnerstrand, Vladimir Semitjov, August Blanche, Aurora Ljungsted, Ed Hoch, Jacques Futrelle and others. His Swedish Wikipedia entry lists ca 50 “selected writings” (mostly book titles) and 25 “selected translations”, but there’s more than those selections. Of his later production, beside Joyce and Faktasin, he was especially proud of his Viking detective stories about Gardar Gåtlösaren (“Gardar Riddlesolver”).

In Zen Zat’s planetary system of whirling massive objects, every December saw flashing falling stars in the form of Bertil’s small printrun – 100 copies tops – Christmas specials. They would have virtually anything you could wish for, e.g. a reprint of Bertil’s short story debut at age 12, “A Trip in Space” (1946, see here) and debut in longer format, “The Masked Gangleader” (1954).  A. Engholm’s first short story collection Murder on the Moon was more like a tiny asteroid in Bertil’s rich and vivid publishing space…

From the late 1990’s and for several years he continued exploring popular literature history as editor of DAST Magazine, acronym for D)etective A)gent S)cience fiction T)hriller. Bertil was no doubt among our foremost experts on early magazine fiction and the history of the sf genre in general. But it was a broad approach allowing for Joyce and modern poetry beside pulp heroes and locked-room mysteries. I often appeared in DAST (Bertil inspired my interest in genre history) and about the same time he dragged me into the newly founded Short story Masters society. It became a bubbly source of more short stories and anthologies. One example is the probably first anthology of Swedish crime fiction in English, Crime the Swedish Way, with Bertil as a main initiator. He went to the Bouchercon 2008 to hand out and promote the anthology.

“Falk” means Falcon. Bertil flew high and wide, and his sharp Falcon gazed at the the broad horizons of literature.

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Bertil Falk’s Space Opera Prize

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Bertil Falk. Photo by Ahrvid Engholm.

By Ahrvid Engholm: As our greatest advocate of space opera turns 90 years old today, May 21 (when writing this) — talking about Bertil Falk, of course —  writer, reporter, editor, scholar, translator — I’ve taken the initiative to announce a space opera prize named in his honor.

It’s aimed at Swedish writers, but here’s an idea for others: run your amazing space opera story through a translation service, those are getting very good these days with AI help! It’d be interesting if someone would experiment with it. (It won’t be disqualified.)

The Bertil Falk’s Space Opera Prize offers eternal glory, a diploma and an as yet unknown cash prize. (The prize will be crowdfunded. Another experiment…)

Bertil has done just about everything since, but had his first story published in the Stockholms-Tidningen newspaper in 1946 when he was 12! His “Trip to Space” is available here in Swedish and also in English translation: “Bertil Falk: From ‘A Space Hobo’ to ‘Finnegans Wake’”.

Besides translating the “untranslatable” James Joyce classic Finnegans Wake, he’s written a heap of books (recently a huge 3-volume history of Swedish sf), worked as publisher, magazine editor (JVM, DAST Magazine), journalist and more. 

But his first love as a little boy was those silly, daydreaming — as school teachers complained loudly! — space stories in our local pulp Jules Verne Magasinet, especially the colorful adventures of Captain Future. In later years he visited Leigh Brackett (herself a master of space opera!) and Edmond Hamilton (the main culprit behind Captain Future) and published Hamilton’s space hero in JVM and in a separate volume.

 An additional reason for a space fiction prize is that so much is happening in space right now! NASA returns to the Moon. SpaceX builds the biggest rocket in history (also reusable) ultimately aiming for Mars. Europe builds a new telescope with an eye big as a hockey rink, meanwhile the Webb space telescope takes the sharpest pictures ever. China builds a space station, and also aims for the Moon (with India, Japan and others to follow). We have rovers on Mars, take pictures of Black Holes, crash into comets, see Captain Kirk take a real space jump, have AIs to find ET phoning home. Even little Sweden now builds a launch pad for satellites, with first shot expected within a year.

The space fiction of yesterday is becoming real!

To enter Bertil Falk’s Space Opera Prize contest, send your space opera story (simply defined as a science fiction story set in space) nomination to [email protected] no later than September 21. Any length admissible. It must have been published in 2022, but yet unpublished work may also be nominated — in that case you must attach it. A jury will be formed, and it will also look on its own accord for stories that may be awarded.

You can also apply for a jury job at the E-address. Recap your connection to space and if you have been into writing space fiction yourself. At the same time all space fans are urged to make a small donation to (though I believe it’ll be more complicated or foreigners) my Handelsbanken account 330 334 578 and tell [email protected] that. Donors will be officially thanked, but you may be anonymous if you wish.

And Bertil, congratulations!

Your space dreams from boyhood are turning real.

Bertil Falk: From “A Space Hobo” to “Finnegans Wake”

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Bertil Falk. Photo by Ahrvid Engholm

By Ahrvid Engholm: Journalist, author, genre historian (and fan, certainly, from the 1940s and on!) Bertil Falk is acclaimed for performing the “impossible” task of translating Finnegans Wake to Swedish, the modernist classic by James Joyce, under the title Finnegans likvaka. As reported in DAST Magazine:

…He has worked on it since the 1950’s (a little now and then, not 24/7…). He calls the translation a “motsvariggörande” (“making equal/similar”) since the book is a huge maze in several layers difficult to really translate. Falk is known as the one reviving Jules Verne Magasinet in 1969 and recently also published a three part history of Swedish science fiction, titled Faktasin….

A few years ago fan Erik Andersson (a major fanzine publisher and fandom columnist in Jules Verne magasinet in the ‘90s) translated Ulysses, though not the easiest prose still not as difficult as Finnegans Wake. Joyce seems to fit well with sf fandom, maybe because the world of fandom is just as odd and quirky as the world of Joyce…

Then, with that introduction, we can look back to Bertil Falk’s earliest published work.

From Stockholms-Tidningen April 2, 1946. On the 75th anniversary of the publishing of his story debut, Bertil Falk posted the newspaper clip and noted that the pseudonym he picked, “Rymdluffaren” (The Space Hobo), was taken from a short story by Eando Binder published in Jules Verne Magasinet.

The following tale of the future is written by a young man of age 12, and stands well in competition with futurist stories by adults. (Translation by Ahrvid Engholm.):

A Trip in Space

The big rocketship “Stockholm” started with roaring rockets from Bromma rocketfield. “Stockholm” is one of ten Swedish rocketships on the route Earth-Mars.

And now I sat inside this rocketship. It was my first rocket journey, and I was very curious about how it would all turn out.

Thirteen minutes after take off Earth was the size of a plate and you could make out all the continents. While Earth shrank the Moon and Mars continued to grow.

The rocketship made a stop on the Moon. There I made a visit to the big Moon museum that for the moment had an exhibition of Venusian art. After about an hour the rocketship continued again, and now you could see one of the most beautiful sights in the universe. Outside it was dark, and everywhere stars were gleaming and blinking. Wonderfully beautiful comet swarms were visible almost everywhere. But even if the comet swarms were beautiful, they were still dangerous. Every rocket has a comet warner that gives a buzz as soon as a comet swarm is nearby. Without these comet warners it would be almost dangerous to go out in space.

After a trip of three hours and five minutes the rocketship landed on the international rocketfield of Mars. Several atomic cars stood and waited outside the rocketfield to take passengers to the Martian tourist hotel No 157. When I had arrived at the hotel I sat down by the TV-radio to hear the news.

I am very interested in politics and tensely follow the civil war on Venus between the marsh people and sea people. The news reported that the king of the marsh people Kara-mo and the president of the sea people Tola-kar had initiating peace negotiations. So, will there finally be peace, I said with a sigh and turned off the radio…

 –The Space Hobo

[Read Bertil Falk’s full bio here.]