Book Review: Luděk Pešek’s Trap for Perseus (1976, trans. Anthea Bell, 1980)

Preliminary note: This review originally appeared in the second issue of Rachel S. Cordasco’s new magazine Small Planet: The SF in Translation Magazine. You can read the entire issue for free here! I plan on contributing one review of pre-1985 SFF in translation for each issue. In the first issue, I reviewed Knut Faldbakken’s harrowing dystopia Sweetwater (1976, trans. Joan Tate, 1994). Jane R. Wattenberg’s cover for the 1980 edition 3.5/5 (Good) Czech author Luděk Pešek (1919-1999), also a painter of space landscapes and photographer, emigrated to Switzerland with his wife in 1968. Due to his political beliefs and penchant to criticize the state in his early literary works, the Union of Czechoslovak Visual Artists expelled Pešek from its ranks. In Switzerland, he focused on painting space landscapes and providing illustrations for foreign publishing houses like Penguin Books and the National Geographic Society.1 He also wrote three science fiction novels in Czech, his native…