Writer
He published his first novel, Boží soud (1935, about village life), under pen name Jan Merfort. Later (1936 – 1943) he used pen name J. M. Troska (Troska means a ruin in Czech, to point out his physical suffering) and published mostly sci-fi novels. In these novels Matzal freely ignored rules of physics, used very simple and naive language, employed dramatic situations and many novel ideas of his time (powerful robots, huge underground cities constructed inside the Hollow Earth, nuclear weapons, automatically guided missiles, interplanetary travels, cosmic empires, aliens and telepathy). His books were very popular among by children and teenagers: they are similar to fairy tales where characters are crystal clear and the good always wins.
The books were illustrated by Zdeněk Burian (covers) and Jiří Wowk. Some of his books were reprinted in 1960–70 (illustrated by Miloš Novák) and 1990–2000 (illustrated by Teodor Rotrekl).
Read more about this topic: Jan Matzal Troska
Famous quotes containing the word writer:
“A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are “not for an age, but for all time” has his reward in being unreadable in all ages.... The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only sort of man who writes about all people and about all time.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writer ... something old-adamish, incompatible to the “ordinary world.””
—D.H. (David Herbert)