Lajkó in Space

The Representation of the Roma in Contemporary Hungarian SF stories

Abstract

As Ray Bradbury noted in a 1964 interview, the issue of race had already been articulated in cheap magazines of science fiction (SF) literature when this subject matter appeared in mainstream printed and electronic media. The representation of marginalized or disadvantaged communities have had increasing coverage in both British/American popular culture and scholarship including academic literature on SF since the second half of the 1960s. Questions such as to what extent and by what means the living conditions, adversities, worldviews etc. of such communities are represented in SF narratives as well as  the role that individuals identifying themselves as community members play in the production/consumption/reception of SF have been investigated by practitioners of quantitative and qualitative research. Nevertheless, I know of no studies that address the representation of the Roma in contemporary Hungarian SF literature. The present paper aims to accomplish the following: (1) to describe the main features of contemporary Hungarian SF short fiction; (2) to give an outline of those “semiotic” means by which Roma characters in the short stories under scrutiny are identified; (3) to characterize the particular forms of Roma representation—from “social mobility” through “invisibility” to “genocide”—that are present in the narratives in question. The texts used for the analysis are the relevant works selected from those submitted, between 2014 and 2018, as candidates for the Péter Zsoldos Award, a national annual prize awarded for the best (published) Hungarian SF novel and short story.