The Lost Face: Best Science Fiction from Czechoslovakia

Josef Nesvadba is my favorite Czech science fiction writer. This book is a collection of his famous fantasy stories. The author's characters are the unacknowledged genius inventors (usually mad), Nazis looking for the ultimate weapon, shady skillful surgeons carrying out the horror-like surgeries, and many more. His stories are rather examining morality, ethics, and philosophy then the feats of any future technology. The reader will find a mix of horror, science fiction, and comedy. The book is named after one of the stories in which the criminal forcibly, with help of the skillful surgeon, acquires the face of the dead priest. The removed criminal's face is preserved in a special liquid. Later on the surgeon himself has to hide and to avoid prosecution he chooses to have the criminal's face implanted. Both the criminal and the surgeon start acquiring the other persons' face qualities, the criminal becomes the priest and the surgeon becomes the criminal. But at the end of the story when these two characters are to decide life-and-death conflict their true original characteristics surface. Their changes in behaviors were just transitional and it is concluded that people's natures are not changed by having a different face.

The Magellanic Cloud

This is a classic sci-fi novel describing the adventures of interstellar travel. Again this is my favorite sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem and the book was published in 1955. It is set in the 32nd century when humankind lives in a perfect world without any hunger or wars. Men don't know anything about greed or hatred, they are only driven by their creativity or curiosity. 227 men and women aboard a vessel called Gaia embark on a long and never-tried-before voyage to the Proxy Centauri star system. This is our nearest neighboring star at 4.22 light years distance. The purpose is to find existence of any life on its planets. The voyage will take 15 years. The whole story is as if narrated by the ship's physician. The ship crew will finally reach the destination and find out that one of the planets is inhabited by an advanced civilization. This is also the ending of the book.

The novel was filmed by the Czechoslovakian director Jindrich Polak in 1963 with the name Ikarie XB 1 (aka Voyage to the end of the Universe) and the movie became a cult sci-fi flick of that era (released in 1964 in USA).

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Who would not know Captain Nemo and his famous submarine Nautilus? I believe that this classic book written by the French author Jules Verne in 1870 still has its appeal to all readers of sci-fi nowadays. Verne was quite prophetic about many technological inventions he described in his books. The first US nuclear powered submarine was named Nautilus.
The novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has all important parts that keep any reader interested. Together with professor Aronnax, his faithful assistant Conseil, hotheaded harpooner Ned Land, and of course with mysterious Captain Nemo and his ship crew you will travel around the world seas in a comfortable and roomy submarine ship. You will admire colorful underwater world and its incredible inhabitants, fight huge squids, discover sunk remnants of legendary Atlantis, visit tropical islands, and ponder what the secret vengeance of the Captain Nemo is and why he can be sometimes so cruel. This story of Captain Nemo and his ship Nautilus made it to the movies several times. I liked the Disney's movie adaption of the book and their view of the submarine design is splendid.
Verne’s descriptions of underwater world are very vivid and definitely touch the reader’s explorer side. I have to say that Verne discovered a new beautiful world for me, full of peculiar creatures I didn’t know it existed. Captain Nemo became my favorite hero, and, that is funny, I also started thinking about building my own underwater vehicle (I was 12 years old). Fortunately I only got to extracting some electrical motor from old washing-machine and for a lack of other parts didn’t proceed to real underwater experiments.

Path into the Unknown - The Best Soviet SF

This is the best of the Soviet (former name for the Russian country) science fiction, and it was written in 1966. The book is a collection of short stories, and includes authors like brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, G. Gor, Ilya Varsahvsky, S. Gansovsky, and so on. It is a good bedtime reading, the short stories are excellent, and I managed to read one story per day. You will find out about future problems with our kids emotionally attached to robots, living spores in cosmic space that when inside a spaceship hatch into undestroyable 8-leg flies, 300-year long cosmic journeys to distant stars, and many more. It is seven stories from seven authors. Each story is actually a short philosophical essay based on a fantasy or sci-fi tale, and it makes a reader ponder what if.