It's complete bullshit. Learn some history of your country, communist Poland was not North Korea. You're presenting some sci-fi scenario not history, There was no death penalty for possesing a book, even if it was political book. Sci-fi and fantasy were tolerated by regime, even encouraged (cause they got more important thing's to do, and they prefer people reading fantasy books over people protestiing against goverment)

And yeah you could get beaten by cops to death ,because they didn't like your, face, you could get beaten today for the same reason but it is against the law, just like it was then.

First learn what sci-fi is and then, well, I do not care what you do next. Your post made me laugh so much that I don't even feel like telling you whose books you should read to get the real idea about Poland at that time. Go back to Gazeta Wyborcza.

So tell me what book did you found the information that state of war was years long. I,m realy courious about that, you don;t need to read books to khown basic facts, wikipedia is enough for that. I'm not a Gazeta Wyborcza fan, buying them only for House M.D episodes. Your post would re ridicouled on any polish board, and there would be no discussion, just making fun of you. You wrote this on international forum, so most readers were probably thinking "he's pole, so he must khew something about that"
Science Fiction is a pretty wide term, it includes alternate history, which is something that you.re presenting. You could get fantasy foreign books from abroad preety easy, if you managed to get abroad you could just buy them and them take with you, or if you have friends living abroad to mail them to you, and you were pretty safe.There was obviously no internet so it took more than 1click, but if you have money, will and you khew some english, you could get some books, like somebody said before it was easier if you were writer/artist/scientist bacause most of them have contacts abroad and some excuse for possesing books "i need them for my work". Goverment don't care about sci-fi and fantasy fanbase, just like today's goverment don't care about pokemon fanbase, theyre just not consider them serious enough.

First - there was marital law i nPoland, and the government was USSR puppets since then end of WW2 till 1989 (ans some claim they are still :) ).

And you could get beaten or even murdered againist the law, but with permision and even on the order of government (like politically inconvenient for gov. priest Popiełuszko - which was murdered by Polish secret service).

And there were tanks on the streets during marital law, and a few hunderd - few tousands (depending on who counts) people died during that time, mostly peoople that protested againist government. And that was bad.

All that said - in Poland there never was total state like in North Korea or in USSR. Modt people lived their lives quite safely, the only problems were - no way to get passport and go to the west, no way to open buisness - so many people wasted their lifes doing menial work, when they could construct great things, do great business, etc.

There were good points too - people had work even when they were useless lazy dubfucks. Because everybody had work. So many people were doing nothing. So economy crashed. And when somebody was intelligent and ambitious he was most often "cut down to the average level" by higher management, that didn't wanted people to outgrow them.

And there were no free media. Propaganda everywhere (not that today there is no propaganda in Poland, or everywhere - it is- just see foxnews/tvn/ whatever - it's so blatant it's funny. Then it was even more blatant, and ever more funny).

Thank God we have freedom in Poland, and it's better, even if some people are worse off, because now you have to be good at something to work. But it doesn't mean Poalnd before 1989 was hell. It was perfectly possible to live in this coutnry, if you could learn to lie to officiels, and was either not ambitious, or joined the party.


Regarding Morrcook - I've read a few books of mr Moorcook, and all the books of Sapkowski, and I think the qualities that Elric and Geralt share are not the things that are defining qualities of these heroes. So I won't make a problem out of this.

But to be honest - Sapkowski was working in foreign trade state organisation under communism, he had often traveled all around the world thanks to that (most Poles couldn't get a passport then), and he speaks like 7 languages including German, Russian, English and French, so I'm sure he could have read books about Elric when they were available in original.