- Josef Nesvadba was born on June 19, 1926 in Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]. He was a writer, known for Ferat Vampire (1982), I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen (1970) and Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977). He was married to Libuse Nesvadbová. He died on April 26, 2005 in Prague, Czech Republic.
- SpouseLibuse Nesvadbová(? - April 26, 2005) (his death, 1 child)
- Children
- RelativesJirí Nesvadba(Sibling)
- Father of Bára Nesvadbová.
- His name is pronounced "Yoh-sef Neh-svad-bah".
- [on the beginnings of his writing career]: "For reasons unknown, I threw myself into writing plays that almost no one was performing. But my first book ever was actually a translation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. Many of the themes from those plays (like 'The Death of Tarzan') I later developed as short stories, without knowing I was writing any science fiction. For me, though, it started out as more of a fairy tale - there was a huge hunger in 1958 for something other than realistic novels. Within a week of publication, the first review came out, and the first edition had a print run of 30,000 copies, but then it went up to 100,000. Then a translation came out in Zagreb, where I met an American doctor whose wife was a publisher. So within two years of publication, my stories were being published in New York. That's something unimaginable today, because they've become so self-centered that they don't even accept British authors."
- [on the readers' fading interest in science fiction]: "Science fiction themes have crossed over to television. If you look at, say, The X-Files (1993), you'll find that almost everything from the science fiction themes are there - except the solution to the problem. They just bite the problem, say it's a mystery, and run away. In our country, moreover, there was a kind of political cipher in the writing of young science fiction writers in the late 1980s; what couldn't be said directly was said through story. Even that is not necessary today. Besides, I have my own theory about the disinterest in this type of literature. We actually live our science fiction today, we have cell phones, the Internet, transportation and information systems, and now disasters. In the sixties, the German publishing houses used to say to me that there were two subjects guaranteed to make big money - sex and the future. So a lot of people were predicting what would happen in twenty years. Of all those predictions, nothing came true except the use of satellites to predict the weather. I don't know if those predictions have improved, but either way, we have a scientific basis for them. And that was relatively easy to predict, because you know it takes about twenty years from idea in the lab to implementation, so the future was already there. And yet... In spite of this, the 1960s was a time of a kind of hunger for the future and the associated ferment of ideas."
- [on his parallel career as a psychiatrist]: "I was into philosophy and medicine. After 1948, however, the teaching of philosophy in our country took its toll, so I preferred to finish my medical studies. And since psychiatry is the least of medicine and is close to philosophy, after a few years of general practice I went into it. Since 1957, I've been doing what's called psychotherapy. At first I was wary of patients knowing that I was writing, afraid that they would keep quiet or lie in front of the writer, who was for them a kind of collector of human destinies, a voyeur, for fear of being taken advantage of. But in the end I found out that they were rather comfortable with it, or they didn't recognize themselves in what I wrote at all, and they had the impression that I was writing about someone else, because they saw themselves in a completely different way. And so, around the age of forty, I started to use themes that came out of my profession."
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