and, to a certain degree, Ovid Crohmălniceanu (who, late in his career, also wrote various science fiction stories). In discussing the "technicist mythology" of the science fiction produced in countries of the Eastern Bloc, Stéphanie Nicot, a French writer and editor of Galaxies magazine, notes that, although being "economically backward" in comparison with Western countries, Communist Romania, alongside the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of Poland, produced a "lively" science fiction literature. Also according to Nicot, Colin, like the Soviet brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and the Polish Stanisław Lem, was able to evade "takeover by the single party", which had come to "largely suppress authors who were nevertheless not devoid of talent." With A zecea lume, a science fantasy, Vladimir Colin moved closer to the conventions of the science fiction subgenres, even though the plot was secondary to its descriptive parts. The book depicts life on a planet named Thule, located on the edge of the Solar System, where humans live side by side with Martians, Venusians, and other creatures (including local inhabitants, whose column-like bodies are made from blue silicon). With Viitorul al doilea, Colin introduces references to paranormal phenomenons and time travel. The series includes Giovanna şi îngerul ("Giovanna and the Angel"), whom some see as the masterpiece of his short prose, contains allusions to one of the main themes in Romanian folklore, that of "youth without old age" (see Legende sau basmele românilor). In it, the world-famous poet Giovanna is led to the discovery that space radiation has turned her astronaut husband into a mutant, who can never grow old or die. In Broasca, one of his few purely science fiction stories, Colin probably takes inspiration from Lovecraft's The Color Out of Space, showing alien beings attempting to contact humans, an experiment which fails when their amphibian emissary is unwittingly killed by a girl, who in turn becomes the source of a radiating purple light. Other Viitorul al doilea pieces have exotic locations on Earth for their setting. One such story is Lnaga, in which consuming an eponymous African mushroom leads the protagonist to synesthesia and an out-of-body experience, whereby he becomes his slave trading ancestor. Cetatea morţilor ("The Citadel of the Dead") shows a 17th-century mestizo man who, cheating Inca survivors into believing that he is the god Viracocha, gains access to the secret legacy of Atlantis. Babel and other late works In some