Galaktika

In 1972, the first issue of Galaktika was published. This was the largest non-English science fiction magazine in print, apparently of all time. The first volume was printed in 38 thousand copies, and the peak print run was 94 thousand. All this in a language, Hungarian, spoken by less than 15 million people. To put this in perspective, one of the largest American science fiction anthologies, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, had a peak print run of ca. 110,000 copies in 1983. [1][2]

Each volume is a collection of the finest literature in the genre, selected along a topic or coming from a country or another. Everything was translated into Hungarian of course, by some of the best literary translators of the time.

It is popular to say that in the seventies, Hungarians existed behind the "Iron Curtain", [3] the boundary between the West and Soviet-controlled East, and as such, we didn't really have access to anything from the West. This could not be farther from the truth, at least not in Hungary. It is true we didn't have superhero comics -- for those, even in 1980, I had to visit a friend whose emigrant father kept sending them from Sweden.

But we had Galaktika, which published literature from all over the world, and apparently enjoyed more freedom than publishers of books in the same period. This was a window at the world of imagination that was probably the second best thing to the internet, had the internet been in existence in 1972. (Well, the technical predecessor of the internet, ARPANET [4], just came online one year before.)

My Galaktika and sci-fi in the 70s

These are some of the copies in my possession. Number 2 is an international selection of American and Soviet authors. Number 3 features French authors, in translation, of course. Number 49 (from 1983) is a collection of Italian works. Number 56 (1984) prints stories by women and is probably the most interesting of the four.

Science fiction, as the name suggests, is not always fully grounded in science fact. In fact, there is a range from hard sci-fi to high fantasy. [5] Hard sci-fi only uses minimum extrapolation from known science, while high fantasy creates its own world entirely, with little or no reference to the universe we experience.

I increasingly believe that the time period from the end of World War II to the late 1980s was dominated by rationalism [6], similarly to the decades between Descartes, through the Enlightening, ending in the French Revolution. Sci-fi was often looked at either as something superfluous (what need we have for it when real science is so exciting?) or as a vehicle of extrapolating contemporary scientific advances into the future. In popular science fiction, Star Trek is an excellent example of this.

As a result, editors felt the need to include writings in popular science among science fiction stories. I don't think this was exclusive to Eastern Bloc countries, although the view that science fiction is the product of "the decadent West" was certainly a factor. [7][8]

The Future of Computers in 1972

Galaktika practiced this from the start: issue 3 includes an essay about "The Future of Computers", written by a Hungarian engineer. Remember, we are in 1972. I got curious, and read it -- to see how it aged, if nothing else.

The age of personal computers arrived a few years later. Humanity already had integrated circuits, solid-state (transistor-based) memory modules, and even the first widely available microprocessor, the Intel 4004 [9] was released a few months earlier, in late 1971. I will not summarize the entire 8-page essay, but I'd like to highlight three thoughts that reveal more about the age than the chaos we are living through today.

The author knows about transistors and integrated circuits, so he is able to predict the imminent miniaturization. He believes that a large number of "mini-computers" (a real actual category where the legendary PDP-11 [10] belonged to, for example) will prove more useful than a few enormous mainframes. He goes on to say that an array of mini-computers will be more efficient in solving complex tasks than a single large computer. I immediately thought of the swarm of GPUs running neural networks for AI: readers in 1972 had no way to know that.

The essay makes no mention of artificial intelligence. It does ask the question if it is possible to create a thinking machine and concludes that it is not. Not because the compute isn't large or sophisticated enough: but, as the argument continues, because the engineers first need to accurately describe and implement human thinking, and that is impossible (this is the assumption of the essay, not mine). The article refers back to the attempts in the 1960s to create machine translation based on syntax rules. In 1972, they believed that rule-based machine translation failed because the engineers were not able to come to a mathematically accurate description of language. In hindsight, we know that machine translation only became successful after engineers let go of the rule-based approach altogether.

Finally, the essay makes a surprisingly clear-sighted prediction: "the [mathematical] devices and principles that become implemented in the 1990s, are already known in research laboratories" (my translation). Well, the neural networks used in today's AI were first described by none other than Alan Turing in 1948. [11]

A Note on Typography

We would not be a content agency if we didn't make note of Galaktika's design, more specifically, the title font. Galaktika uses the ITC Zipper font, which was designed in 1970 by Philip Kelly for Letraset -- not two years later, the font turns up on the cover on a Hungarian magazine... but how did I remember this font and Galaktika as such? I don't even read it these days, and our copies reside in my parents' house, not in my home or office. Well, I went on holiday, and saw this on a napkin in a seaside restaurant:

No connections are made in vain; and no connections should be left unnoticed.

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