of his other writings, the Romanian author adopted historical fantasy, sword and sorcery, and heroic fantasy, which he occasionally integrated within the framework of local history. The fantasy volume Pentagrama, favorably reviewed by Crohmălniceanu, evokes not only the pentagram's symbolic implication as a figure where five points on a circle always meet in nonconsecutive order, but also its presence as a cult object in many ancient traditions. The text thus aims to build connections with various mythologies, to which it constantly alludes, and is thought by Belgian critic Jean-Baptiste Baronian to take additional inspiration from the stories of Franz Kafka. Inspired in part by the style of Gérard Klein and his Overlords of War, the short novel Divertisment pentru vrăjitoare centers on the notion that the activity of a human brain can surpass that of any machine. It shows a Transylvanian witch with psychokinetic powers and the gift of precognition, whose ability to modify the future is harnessed by a group of time travelers. Ultimul avatar al lui Tristan depicts its hero, the eponymous alchemist, who is in the service of French King Henry II. Disguising his work as investigations into chrysopoeia, Tristan discovers the philosopher's stone and escapes into a fourth dimension world, from which he visits past and future, in an attempt to modify both his biography and the course of human history. With Babel, his critically acclaimed novel, Colin was returning to science fantasy. The subject shares elements with Stanisław Lem's 1961 work Solaris, showing living creatures from the Solar System being trapped on a distant planet by the tyrant scientist Scat Mor. The group of prisoners includes the Venusian female Or-alda, the Martian contract killer Idomar av Olg su Saro and the human poet Ralt Moga, all of whom are exposed to psychological torture by their captor, who increases his energy by absorbing their suffering. Although Scat Mor succeeds in making his victims live out their nightmares, his experiment is tenaciously sabotaged by Or-alda, who uses magic as her weapon. Mihai Iovănel is skeptical as to the originality of Babel 's plot, arguing that the book may have partly plagiarized The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, a 1965 novel by the American Philip K. Dick. Legacy Colin's work is one of the best-known samples of the local science fiction genre known outside Romania. British science fiction bibliographer Mike Ashley indicated that, of all the writers who