The Fourth Circle

Author: Zoran Å½ivkovic

Zoran Zivkovic is both writer and translator (he has translated several works of science fiction into Serbian, as well as translating his own fiction into English) so he is far better placed than many non-Anglophone writers. Even so, his often weird and inventive works have tended to appear from small presses and in short print runs, so they are not always as readily available as we might like. This was his first novel, and it's an excellent introduction to the wild and free-wheeling imagination that marks all of his work. Four very different stories intertwine: there's the painter of frescoes in a medieval monastery; a computer programmer who creates a female AI; Sherlock Holmes receives a mysterious message, but this is not quite the Sherlock Holmes we recognise; and a lone figure must cross a barren airless desert on an alien world in order to reach a strange circle. With other vignettes and anecdotes intruding into the narrative, taking us from Buddhist temples to the edge of a black hole, this is intellectually engaging science fiction of a very high order. Why it's on the list Without translation, we'd be very unlikely to encounter literature from a country like Serbia, small and war-torn as it was at the time this novel was being written; which means we would be so much the poorer.