This piece came out in the same volume as item 1, above, eventually reaching print in 1991. However, it started life as a talk given to the ‘World SF’ Conference in Zagreb, Croatia (then Yugoslavia), in July 1986. I have to express my thanks to the British Council for funding the trip, and to Krsto Mažuranić for running the conference and making the initial invitation. Speaking much more personally, though, that conference in Zagreb was a model for international co-operation and great good humour. Not only were the Brits and the Yanks there, like Jerry Webb and Joe and Gay Haldeman, but there was a complete representation from, as far as I could tell, all parts of the former Yugoslavia – Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins, Slovenes and Albanians too. A very few years later all that had been fragmented by nationalist politics. Sf is more important than national politics! It is more real and less imaginary. What happened is a grief to us all, on the political level, and a grief to me on the personal one, because in the turmoil I lost contact with all concerned. Krsto has died, as I have only just discovered, but if anyone does know the whereabouts and contact details for Vojko Kraljeta I would be very glad to receive them.

So there was something uneasily symbolic about delivering a talk about the collapse of one society in fiction just on the brink of the collapse of another society, in reality. Something I am aware of too – though I do not think it has occurred to any politician – is how similar, in some ways, are the former Yugoslavia and the present United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The two states are/were the most prominent examples of former Roman provinces that were taken over by non-Latin speakers from outside the Empire, and which retained marked internal divisions, with odd parallels. The Serbs and the Croats, speaking more or less the same language but with a long record of mutual hostility, are rather like the English and the Scots. The Gaelic word for Scotland, Albann, comes from the same root as Albania.