（外文电子版资料）Avram Davidson - The Odd Old_Bird.pdfVIP

THE ODD OLD BIRD Avram Davidson If there is a make-believe world to rival Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork then it is the American writer Avram Davidson’s Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania, where the Emperor’s wizard, Dr Engelbert Eszterhazy, performs his heroic tasks. Davidson has been writing about this comic fantasy land since 1975 and his inventive imagina-tion shows no sign of drying up. In an article, “The Inchoation of Eszterhazy’, written in 1988, he explained that the inspiration for the series had come from the arcane symbols seen in the classic German movie, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, which he had never been able to get out of his mind. ‘Gradually it came to me that there had been an empire in Eastern Europe which had been so completely destroyed that we no longer even remembered it like the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary; that being an empire, it had an emperor; that the emperor had a wizard; the wizard drove about the streets of Bella (BELgrade/ViennA) in a steam runabout; that the emperor’s name was Ignats Louis and the wizard’s name was Engelbert Eszterhazy.’ The concept so fired Davidson’s imagination that he wrote the first eight stories in just six weeks, developing an entire world of bizarre people, curious customs and extraordinary events that instantly grabbed the attention of fantasy readers. The success of Doctor Eszterhazy’s exploits in succeeding stories has generated a fan club in the USA, a detailed map of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania by John Westfall, and the plaudits of SF writer John Clute, who has described Davidson as one of America’s foremost contemporary writers of ‘obtrusive literacy and wit’. Avram Davidson (1923—) was born in New York and, according to his own account, ‘educated in the local schools, a process which nearly unfitted me forever for participation in any useful functions whatsoever.’ After serving wi