OK, so I promised SF, so what. Here it is.
 
Just like probably many other programmers do, I'm not only a big SF fan (but no F, please, swords and demons are not my favourite dish), I also write some of my own. Since these stories were originally written in Serbocroatian language (which was renamed into just Serbian meanwhile, our neighbors took their ladder and returned our rake when they moved out), I had to translate them myself. I know, as much as poets should be fined each time they read their poems themselves, translating yourself is simply something that's not done. But then, I had no choice - first, nobody else would do it for free, and second, I've planted some nasty games within the language, so it was just fair that I fall into these traps myself.
 
front page
first paragraph
contents
This one has a long history. That's the only one that I know was published. It was in Sirius magazine, issue 84, june 1983, as a part of the 14th Mini YU-Sirius, where they were giving a chance to the domestic authors. Translated one damp virginian evening, to honor the 20 years of its first publishing.
From head to head
This is a total rework of my third story, written back then in the '80s, when it was just plain bad and unfinished. Any similarity of today's version with the movie "Brainstorm" (with Christofer Walken) is a mystery to me as well. The story was posted (in serbian) on Sezam BBS and still sits there in the forum, with a date of 1992 or 1991. Anyway, only the beginning of the basic idea is the same. I didn't feel the hollywood style urge to burn the whole set in the end. On the contrary.
 
Engar pages
(beware the language in this one... that's where I gave myself a hard time, trying to assume this is a future of a different history where Rome never got to be big... just try to clean (purge?) Latin out of English, and you'll see)
 
Ghost in the machine
(this one actually won some award, but whoever organized the contest never bothered to send it to me - I was just informed of the honor, and that's all)
 
Marathon, another round
(This is freshly, as of 2004, translated and first published here. You may be the first person ever (or at least in the first dozen) to read this.)
 
This was supposed to grow into a book, which I even started writing, in a quite loose manner, filling in episodes of the main characters's later lives, with societal changes ongoing, and with the anti-reincarnation movement growing underground, but then slowly lost interest. I got my hands on far more SF books than I ever saw in one place, and the more I read, the more I realized that I can't write the kind of stuff I like to read, not as a passtime. It takes whole day, research, dedication, and money to live through the period of writing. Once I achieve that, I'll forget all those ideas I had. So I kept writing down bits of flesh, never bothering to invent the skeleton. Now it's been at least a dozen years with less than a kilobyte a year added, and it became obvious to me that this isn't going anywhere.
 
The story, however, stands on its own quite well. It just won't grow into a novel. Stubborn beast, that.
 
The link goes to the story as last passed through the generator. It really ends in the signature, where I mention places where it was written and translated. The text below that, in quasi-numbered pages titled "x.x.___" consists of some of the bits I tried to put into sequence. Don't quite remember whether there were more of those.
 
Post on Ajthat [ite-hut]
"I have translated only these five (four and a half, actually), and there are not too many more, because I'm a very slow writer. It took me almost twenty years to write twenty stories (quite productive, eh); actually, the one you can't read completely, is still in the works... in both writing and translation."
 
"and remained so for eight years now. Though I do have some intentions with it... maybe translate bits into English and have people to add sub-stories, a little collective effort maybe, who knows. But then, I didn't post any e-mail address here, which I may probably do once I decide what do I want to do with that story. It already has 48 files and cca 400Kb, all heavily interlinked..."
 
At least that's what I wrote when I started this site once upon a time in the previous century. Now I've actually done something about it, and here's the "Post on Ajthat"... i.e. it's finally translated - although that doesn't mean it's finished.  I need more material. If you happen to find, even among the texts you wrote yourself, any more of those about Ajthat, the mission, the post, the people, planet and culture, you're welcome to send it to me (to this email which is defunct since 2002), and I may find a way to include it in this book.
So whatever you think is cool, generally sucks or is just plain stupid, illogical, too logical, whatever, or if you have a piece of a story to insert, a related „newspaper article“ or just plain anything except computer viruses, VB stuff and porn links, you may try my patience. (said I in 2002)
So now in 2021 I decided to refresh these pages a bit, not much. Halfway through checking the links and obvious typos I saw, somewhere in the headers, that in 2003 I had a generator... so the whole story was somewhere in a table and I wrote code to turn that into html... wow, forgot about that. And I found that I had a version which put all the 70-some pages together in one big, interlinked as intended, with even a couple of random links at the bottom of each chapter, so the concept of read-in-any-order-you-like was also applied. So okay, that's what I'm putting here.
 
The errors found during this check may or may not be errors:
- there are two buccaneers named Šorgelj, one by name, one by nickname. Perhaps they are the same person, just written down twice by different writers. Or they did have both. Who cares and, besides, it's possible that both accounts were true.
- SMID is listed as LMOD in its chapter. So one is a translation of the other. Both abbr. may appear, depending on whether the translator felt the name translatable or not
- the actual length of a damar should probably be somewhere between two and two hundred hartbeats. The lengths of time described in damars were variously translated into current units of target languages, and then translated back into damars when this edition was prepared. The results are obviously wrong in some cases, when the number may be a correct number - not of damars, though, but rather of trens or ahats.
 

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