Bertil Falk (1933-2023)
Swedish author and translator BERTIL FALK, 90, died October 14, 2023 after a long illness.
I have never known anyone with so much energy as author-publisher-reporter-translator-SF-expert-etc. Bertil Falk. Now this hurricane of a force is no longer with us. His Swedish translationof James Joyce’s ‘‘untranslatable’’ Finnegans Wake came out last year, a work of love taking 60-plus years. We also saw his massive, three-volume history of science fiction in Swedish, Faktasin. Unlike earlier SF history works, it covered only what’s been written in Swedish, making it a unique study. A little earlier his biography Feroze: The Forgotten Gandhi was published, about Indira Gandhi’s husband, written in English and well-received in India, discovering a man who had been mostly forgotten.
But Falk did so much more! I first met Bertil on the SF-Kongressen 1977 and was later contacted to help out with a very nice Spacecon in 1980, where Bertil with companions Anders Palm and Lasse Junell launched a Captain Future pulp-sized novel. As a journalist he later met and interviewed Captain Future’s author Edmond Hamilton. When he revived Jules Verne-Magasinet in the late 1960s, Bertil published ‘‘The Return of Captain Future’’. His interest in good old space adventures prompted me to found Bertil Falk’s Space Opera Prize. I hope there is enough interest to make it annual.
I got to know Bertil really well after I working on the popular tech/science magazine Tekniknmagasinet in 1982. Bertil wrote lots of articles for us, and though he lived in the south, he often came up before deadlines to help out, beside his then-day job at the Kvällsposten evening paper. Though at times breaking even, the lack of astronomical success made our magazine slip to another publisher, but we co-workers kept in touch.
Bertil then crossed the North Sea working for the newly started TV3 satellite channel in 1987. Transmitting from London, it challenged and in effect tore down the Swedish government TV monopoly. He wrote non-fiction on many subjects, as well as hammering out short stories and novels. He was also translator and sometimes the publisher of the results through his publishing house Zen Zat.
He was especially interested in ‘‘reviving’’ popular fiction writers from yesteryear. His Swedish Wikipedia entry lists about 50 ‘‘selected writings’’ nd 25 ‘‘selected translations,’’ but he did more. He was especially proud of his Viking detective stories about Gardar Gåtlösaren (‘‘Gardar Riddlesolver’’).
In Zen Zat’s planetary system of whirling massive objects, every December saw flashing falling stars in the form of Bertil’s small print run – 100 copies, tops – Christmas specials. They would have virtually anything you could wish for, like a reprint of Bertil’s short story debut from age 12, ‘‘A Trip in Space’’ (1946), or his debut in longer format, ‘‘The Masked Gangleader’’ (1954). My own first short story collection Murder on the Moon was no more than a tiny asteroid in Bertil’s rich and vivid publishing space.
From the late 1990s and for several years afterward, he continued exploring popular literature history as editor of DAST Magazine. Bertil was namong our foremost experts on early magazine fiction and the history of the SF genre in general. Bertil was a main initiator of Crime the Swedish Way, probably the first anthology of Swedish crime fiction in English, and attended Bouchercon in 2008 to promote the anthology.
‘‘Falk’’ means ‘‘falcon.’’ Bertil flew high and wide, and his sharp falcon eyes gazed at the the broad horizons of literature.
–Ahrvid Engholm
