by Özgür Tacer
Especially since the early 2000s, we have witnessed science fiction occupying an increasingly visible place on bookstore shelves in Turkey. Over the past decade, we have also observed a growing number of Turkish authors appearing on these shelves. With high-quality bindings, professional cover designs, and engaging back-cover texts, we are now faced with a body of work that, in terms of formal standards, is virtually indistinguishable from its Western counterparts. Does this landscape represent the happy ending of a 150-year struggle for existence in Turkish science fiction? Or is it merely the beginning? Before reaching a conclusion, it is necessary to examine the development of science fiction in these lands and the stages it passed through before finding its own distinctive character.
Science Fiction in the Ottoman Empire: Entering a Dream
To trace the roots of science fiction in our geography, one must go back slightly further than the proclamation of the Republic, to the turbulent and crisis-ridden final years of the Ottoman Empire. In her study Ottoman Science Fiction: Fenni Literature (2013), Seda Uyanık notes that science fiction in the literature of the period was referred to as fenni roman (scientific novel). Considering that a large number of Jules Verne’s works were translated into Ottoman Turkish between 1875 and 1905, it can be argued that the scientific content of these novels was a defining feature,and that these translations simultaneously became foundational reference points for Ottoman fenni fiction.
The pessimism into which the country was plunged by the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912, the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, and ultimately the First World War found its reflection in literature, marking one of the first major phases of Ottoman science fiction. During these years, Utopian works were produced in Turkish literature with an intensity previously unseen. Although whether these utopias belong strictly to the science fiction genre remains debatable, it can be claimed that they contain elements of the genre insofar as they reference science. A motif common to many of these works is the use of dream narratives.
The earliest known example of the dream narrative that shaped science fiction as a mode of expression is Ziya Paşa’s “Rüya” (“The Dream”). Published in Hürriyet newspaper in 1869 and written in the form of a dialogue, the work depicts a conversation between Ziya Paşa and the reigning sultan, Abdülaziz, taking place within a dream. In this dialogue, Ziya Paşa conveys to the sultan that the country is being poorly governed, laying out his reasons. He informs the sultan about the true aims of the society known as the Young Ottomans and emphasizes the importance of constitutional governance and the will of the people. The text ends with Ziya Paşa awakening from his dream. Namık Kemal wrote a similar text under the same title while in exile in Famagusta: in his dream, the author addresses the people through the voice of a character named the Fairy of Liberty (Hürriyet Perisi), urging them to act against oppression and captivity.
Although neither text can be directly classified as science fiction, it may be argued that both function as precursors to Ottoman fenni fiction. Produced during the early years of Tanzimat literature, when efforts toward literary modernization had begun, these works serve as guiding texts that shaped fenni literature by instrumentalizing literature as a vehicle for political debate and by employing the dream form as their narrative framework.
Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s Fenni Bir Roman Yahut Amerika Doktorları (A Scientific Novel, or The Doctors of America, 1889) explicitly carries the concept of the fenni novel in its title, presenting one of the earliest examples of the genre. Rejecting materialism and warning against the harms of “excessive civilization,” this work establishes the fundamental debate of Ottoman science fiction through its stance: maintaining a critical distance from the ideal of progress while nevertheless acknowledging the necessity of keeping pace with the age.
Just as there was no single, uniform Tanzimat intellectual, the science fiction writers of the period were by no means of one mind. As a time when new political ideas were being disseminated throughout society, the Tanzimat era enabled the formation of a strong connection between thought and literature. In the works of the period, literature was almost instrumentalized as a means of conveying political messages, leading to its evaluation not primarily through aesthetic criteria but through its political propositions. Categories such as Westernization, enlightenment, civilization, Islam, and positivism—imbuing fenni narratives with political content—served as sources for authors’ attempts to construct visions of the future or alternative histories, thereby forming the nucleus of Ottoman science fiction.
Celal Nuri’s Tarih-i İstikbal (History of the Future, 1913), for instance, is a secular fantasy that narrates a journey through time undertaken after death and satirizes elements of Islamic belief. In Yahya Kemal’s short story “Çamlar Altında Musahabe” (“A Conversation Beneath the Pines,” 1913), the journey to the future Istanbul also takes place within a dream. While portraying a reconciliation between tradition and technology, Yahya Kemal characterizes the Istanbul of the future with aircrafts, futuristic mega-structures, and monuments to heroism. The story even notes—perhaps with a touch of irony—that the Galata Bridge has been made free of charge! In Molla Davudzade Mustafa Nazım’s “Rüyada Terakki ve Medeniyet-i İslamiye-i Rü’yet” (“A Dream of Progress and Islamic Civilization,” 1913), the dream journey extends to the twenty-third century. In this vision of the future, the Ottoman Empire has adopted Western technology while discarding Western morality. As a result, it has achieved prosperity without severing its ties to its roots, whereas the West – unable to nourish technological innovation with spirituality – has collapsed entirely. In Ruşeni’nin Rüyası (“Ruşeni’s Dream,” 1914), Hasan Ruşeni Barkın once again constructs a fenni Ottoman utopia: in response to Western colonialism, the Young Turk (Jön Türk) movement establishes a techno-Islamic utopia centered on Islam and science (Uyanık, 2013).
The rhetoric of revival, ascent, and awakening shared by the works discussed above is certainly not coincidental. What is at stake is the transmission, through literature, of prescriptions believed capable of leading a disintegrating empire back to an age of felicity (asr-ı saadet). At the same time, an exclusionary and often negative stance toward non-Muslim populations within the empire is markedly evident across these texts. The “West,” technologically advanced yet devoid of spirituality, is portrayed as an adversary destined to lose in the face of the Ottoman revival. The equation that associates Western culture with advanced technology, mechanization, and, consequently, moral decay proposes Islam and tradition as the conditions for the success of fenni ideals. Technology (the West) and tradition (the Ottoman world) are thus treated either as being in absolute conflict or as parties to a conditional collaboration. In other words, these two categories are imagined as either incapable of coexisting at all, or – should they meet at a middle ground – capable of giving rise to a Utopian society.
The journey of the main characters into an advanced future – most often through dreams – constitutes the primary motif used to construct a form of witnessing the future. In Ottoman science fiction, imagined science and technology are never attained through practice, nor are such achievements presented as ordinary, evolutionary stages of history. Rather, they appear almost as gifts bestowed upon the Ottomans as a reward for national consciousness and spirituality. The future emerges as a sequence of phenomena observed and interpreted from the outside, by means of a dream. At the same time, despite a certain degree of realism, there is also a realist stance that underlines the fictional nature of fenni imagination, guiding the reader through an imagined world only to return them, at the conclusion, to the reality they inhabit. The dream narrative, with its clear beginning and end, delineates a sharp boundary between reality and fiction. Moreover, by shifting responsibility for what is narrated onto the unconscious, it enables authors to establish a line of defense in the face of potential censorship or investigation.
The Early Years of the Republic: A Long Silence
Science fiction, which had displayed a certain vitality during the period of Ottoman disintegration, fell into a profound silence following the proclamation of the Republic. After all, the debates carried within those earlier texts had largely lost their immediate relevance. The approach that privileged political messaging over literature itself, instrumentalizing projections of science and technology as vehicles for ideology, proved incapable of leaving a lasting mark on literary history. In the Republican period, the only science fiction work we can identify up until the 1950s is Dr. Vedii Bilgin’s novel Rüya mı Hakikat mi? (Dream or Reality?), published in 1943. In the novel, the narrator somehow travels to Mars. There, encountering an advanced civilization, he engages the Martians in discussions on health, longevity, science, and technology, before eventually returning to Earth. As customary, the author awakens and realizes that the experience was a dream. Although little is known about the author himself, it is quite evident that the novel draws inspiration from pre-Republican science fiction and is thus recorded in our literary history as an individual experiment with the genre.
By the 1950s, a craze sparked by the Flash Gordon films led to the localization of Gordon as “Baytekin.” Despite the popularity of these films, science fiction was not regarded as a genre in its own right, but rather as a form of entertainment for children. The ten-volume novel series published consecutively by Çağlayan Publishing House bore the subtitle Yeni Dünyalar (New Worlds, 1954–55). Çağlayan introduced into Turkish a randomly assembled selection of novels produced during what is considered the Golden Age of American science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s. Presented to readers through translations that involved inserting fragments and/or excising sections deemed unnecessary, these novels were published entirely for commercial reasons. Priced very cheaply, they came to constitute the first examples of pulp science fiction in Turkey. Packaged alongside similarly disparaged neighboring genres such as detective fiction, horror, and adventure, this series neither succeeded in raising awareness of science fiction nor achieved a level of quality capable of conferring prestige upon the genre. Indeed, what followed was yet another period of silence, lasting nearly twenty years.
The 1970s: As lonely as a sci fi reader …
The second half of the twentieth century, as is well known, was marked by the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Likely propelled by the global dynamism generated by this rivalry – and ultimately by the excitement of setting foot on the Moon – Okat Publishing House launched a sixteen-volume science fiction series. Much like the earlier Çağlayan series, and in some respects even worse, these books were published with poor translations. In the 1980s, Baskan Publishing followed with its own science fiction series. Printed solely for commercial reasons, without any sense of responsibility toward authors, readers, or literature itself, these novels – some of which would otherwise be counted among the finest examples of the genre – were wasted. As a result, science fiction never quite managed to shed the label of “low literature.” Nevertheless, even their cover designs alone succeeded in drawing a considerable number of readers into the orbit of science fiction.
During the same years, science fiction television series and films, most notably Star Trek, began appearing on screens and exerted a leverage effect on science fiction literature as well. Young people eager to read and watch more science fiction formed small subcultural islets clustered around a shared definition of the genre. There were deep rifts between these circles and mainstream literature and cinema. More importantly, they were lonely. So much so that among science fiction enthusiasts there were those who, before taking a novel they had read to a secondhand bookstore, would write their name, address, and phone number inside the book in the hope of meeting its next owner.
Undoubtedly, the only remedy for this loneliness lay in the formation of platforms that could bring science fiction fans together. Yet the Internet was still thirty years away from entering daily life, and distances between cities remained considerable. Turkey’s first science fiction fanzine Antares emerged precisely under these circumstances.
In October 1971, Sezar Erkin Ergin, then a mathematics student at Middle East Technical University, duplicated a nine-page stencil and began distributing it through his own means. Circulating like a message sealed in a bottle and cast into the sea, Antares managed to reach as far as a science fiction convention in Italy and even returned from that convention with an award. Functioning simultaneously as a fan club, the magazine also began organizing meetups in Istanbul and Ankara. After a brief hiatus Antares returned in 1974 with more pages and richer content. Over the course of its thirteen-issue lifespan its circulation never exceeded 150 copies per issue. Yet through its bilingual Turkish–English content, its inclusion of both translated and original stories, its news from the science fiction world, and – most importantly – its reminder to science fiction fans that they were not alone, it secured a significant place in the history of Turkish science fiction.
Subsequently, in 1976, Selma Mine launched another science fiction fanzine in Istanbul titled X-Bilinmeyen (X-The Unknown). Gradually improving both its print and content quality, the magazine continued to be printed professionally and reached circulations in the thousands. At one point it changed its name to Evren (Universe) and ultimately ceased publication in 1981 with its sixty-fourth issue. X-Bilinmeyen featured not only domestic and foreign stories but also various essays and articles. Reader meetups, of course, were an indispensable part of the process, and through these gatherings the Turkish science fiction community began to grow richer.
Even as a readership began to take shape, the fact that local science fiction in the 1970s was still in its infancy can be inferred from the absence of even a settled name for the genre. Initially entering the language as fenni roman, “scienctific novel” it later found equivalents such as kurgu-bilim (fictional science) and bilimsel roman, following the language reforms (bilimsel is a more modern word for fenni; it still means scientific novel). Finally, the term bilimkurgu (finally they reached science-fiction!) was officially registered in the January 1973 issue of Türk Dili magazine. The person who formalized the term was none other than journalist-writer Orhan Duru (1933–2009), who would later become known for his own science fiction stories. Around the same time, the first examples of domestic science fiction began to appear: in 1970, Metin Atak wrote Gezegenler Savaşıyor (Planets at War), arguably Turkey’s first space opera. After producing several science fiction novels aimed at children, Selma Mine began serializing two new science fiction novels in X-Bilinmeyen. Alongside science fiction stories published in magazines, a domestic science fiction inventory for Turkey had effectively begun to take shape.
To convey the state of local science fiction in the 1970s through a firsthand account, we may turn to journalist, writer, and critic Zühtü Bayar:
“… this is now, for Turkey, a new art form, a new branch of literature. Such a new subject, tool, or method arriving from the West – whether in the arts or in science and technology – may initially be met with certain reactions precisely because of its foreignness. But over time it is possible to warm to it, grow accustomed to it, benefit from it, even contribute to it and surpass it. […] Moreover, if science fiction is to be produced in Turkish literature, it must be original. The stories smell of translation right now. They are largely under the influence of the West. The names are foreign. For instance, you and I – including myself – still use foreign names; because we perceive science fiction as part of a foreign culture. But this will change in the future, and original science fiction will begin to be produced in Turkish literature. We will see this in the near future, within the next few years” (Antares Magazine, Issue 4, Autumn 1974).
It can be said that both Zühtü Bayar’s observations and his predictions were remarkably accurate. What stands out here is that science fiction was constructed not only through Western codes in terms of subject matter, but also as a mode of expression, rendering the process of localization particularly arduous. Meanwhile, the literary climate of the period and prevailing literary orientations continued to exclude speculative genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In Turkey, perhaps until the 1980s, those engaged in literature seemed to be offered only two options: realist literature or socialist realist literature. To strain one’s horizon in search of a third option was to invite disparagement, to be labeled a bourgeois intellectual or an escapist writer. When combined with the thoroughly diminished prestige of translated science fiction, this situation further narrowed the space of representation for science fiction literature in Turkey. For science fiction to gain acceptance, the mentality, the mood had to change—and this change would, in one way or another, once again come through Western science fiction.
The 1990s: Good Science Fiction Is Good Literature
In 1995, under the editorship of Bülent Somay, Metis Publishing launched a new series of translated novels with the slogan “good science fiction is good literature.” During the same period, publishers such as İthaki, Sarmal, and Altıkırkbeş introduced a broad repertoire of major science fiction works to Turkish readers. Although the quality of novel translations remained inconsistent, a reservoir had begun to form that could nourish science fiction enthusiasts in Turkey with the genre’s most canonical examples.
Multichannel television, the increase in movie theaters, the widespread adoption of English-language education in higher education, the arrival of the Internet into everyday life … While the 1990s witnessed a bottleneck in Western science fiction marked by the rapid rise and fall of cyberpunk, science fiction in Turkey was more popular than ever. Fans encountered the most distinguished examples of the genre and began to be influenced by them. Readers confident in their English no longer had to wait for translations and could read science fiction in its original language. As traditional prejudices against the genre began to fade and the number of publishers willing to take the risk of publishing science fiction increased, many aspiring science fiction writers found the courage to try to fly on their own wings. The new millennium would belong to them.
The 2000s: The Age of Multiplicity
The contemporary dynamism of local science fiction must be understood through the widespread adoption of the Internet. As noted earlier, science fiction production in Turkey has functioned less as a purely literary endeavor and more as a means of social interaction. Internet forums and similar virtual platforms that entered our lives in the new millennium intensified interaction among individuals occupying the same segment of the popular culture spectrum, granting them a renewed sense of belonging. The sense of multiplicity generated by this interaction signaled that writing science fiction was no longer a futile endeavor – that there existed an audience ready to discover and internalize local science fiction.
The Türkiye Bilişim Magazine Science Fiction Short Story Contest, Turkey’s first continuously held science fiction competition since 1998, can also be counted among the factors that increased the visibility of local science fiction writers. In subsequent years, the growing number of such competitions continued to support science fiction production in both quantitative and qualitative terms by creating a competitive field.
All of these motivating factors led to a leap in domestic science fiction production. Indeed, according to the inventory research of the science fiction scholar and archivist Bülent Akkoç, whom we lost recently, the total number of science fiction works published between 1990 and 2000 is equal to the number of science fiction works published during the Republican period up until 1990. Although the figure – yes, it is twenty-three – is cause for concern, the post-2000 acceleration, resulting in a volume of production that has become impossible to document individually, points to an entirely different orientation: I read, therefore I can write.
Before opening this explosion of production in local science fiction to discussion, it is important not to overlook the fact that many works written in the 1990s and early 2000s reveal an at times overly explicit interaction with Western science fiction. Although the number of local productions increased, there were few signs of genuine localization. Variations on commonly used themes of modern science fiction, pastiches, and fan fiction inspired by popular films and novels were abundant. It would not be incorrect to describe this period as the “import-substitution era” of science fiction, for rather than forming an internal voice, many writers preferred to adapt a beloved body of literature to themselves.
This situation points to an important issue that is seldom articulated: just how local is local science fiction? The problem of “foreign character names” raised by Zühtü Bayar in the quotation above has largely been overcome. Yet a writing style reminiscent of foreign television series, the uncritical reproduction of generic science fiction themes, and the use of Turkish merely “well enough to get the point across” rather than to create a literary aesthetic remain persistent issues in local science fiction.
Identifying such problems in Turkish-language science fiction does not, of course, require overlooking opportunities. Especially over the past decade, domestic publishing has brought with it entirely new possibilities, one of which is self-publishing. In an environment where publishers receptive to science fiction are few and aspiring writers are many, increasing numbers of science fiction authors have turned to a system that allows works otherwise unable even to secure a reading to find a place in literature. Through this system, science fiction can be produced in ever greater numbers and across an expanding range of diversity. Moreover, in an era where social media is used with increasing effectiveness, science fiction writers can reach a far broader readership than ever before simply by utilizing the right channels. That said, when the growth in science fiction readership fails to keep pace with the increase in local science fiction writers, it becomes more difficult for readers to discover their own tastes and orient themselves within this multiplicity. Furthermore, the abundance of science fiction works that have not undergone editorial processes undoubtedly hinders the genre from attaining a certain level of quality.
It must be acknowledged that in every branch of literature there exists a quality spectrum that tapers off toward both mediocrity and excellence, and truly outstanding works – regardless of genre – are always in the minority. Will local science fiction, over time, attain a distinct originality, literary competence, thematic diversity, and a characteristic tonal palette? Will readers be able to recognize and embrace this palette, distinguishing it from its foreign counterparts? The future history of local science fiction will likely be shaped by the answers to these questions.
Özgür Tacer is a science fiction enthusiast and an editor who has been actively involved in the organization of the Turkish Informatics Association (TBD) Science Fiction Short Story Competition in Ankara. Through his work with the competition, he has contributed to the promotion and development of science fiction literature in Turkey. He has also taken part in events and discussions dedicated to science fiction and speculative literature. He currently lives in Luxembourg.