About
Adam Porkolab is a Hungarian writer of science fiction, horror, and dark literary fiction, and a full member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA). He writes what he calls LOVE-FI: speculative fiction as an act of hospitality, in which the machine keeps a liturgy, the bureaucracy has a soul, and Death, when it finally arrives, is shown to a chair and addressed in the formal register.
He came to it by an unlikely road: a childhood with Palóc roots in the coal country of northern Hungary, a PhD in linguistics, and a day job building enterprise software. All three leave their fingerprints on the page. He is drawn to systems: the architecture of code, the grammar under a sentence, the protocol under a life, and the precise instant a system fails a human being and something tender leaks through the crack.
His fiction lives in that leak. It maps the friction between system and freedom, the dissolving border between body and machine, and the weight of memory, faith, and inheritance: often dark, sometimes satirical, always precise. Along the way he has grown a small, stubborn subgenre of his own, liturgicore, in which the sacred is conducted in the language of the technical.
He also builds mythologies at scale. The largest is PRONEKO (Prôtē Neograikē Kosmokratoria, the First Neo-Greek Space Empire): a post-apocalyptic theocracy that worships not a doctrine but a living god that is an actual body, the Throne-body, whose rhythm the entire state must stay synchronized to. Heretics deny that sacrament, nomads on the margins answer rhythm with force, and in a later age an empathy-run order, the Empatarchia, replaces logic with resonance and makes care the basic bond of society. It is the cathedral his shorter fiction keeps building side-chapels onto.
He lives in Pécs, Hungary, with his wife and son, and refuses, on principle, to choose between his two careers.
Publications
For a full list of published works, see the Publications menu above.
Previous Work
Before entering the international market, Adam published extensively in Hungary: his short fiction appeared in numerous anthologies, spanning weird fiction, science fiction, and horror.
Influences
His writing draws on the Central European grotesque tradition and the philosophical currents of classic science fiction. For the works and authors that shaped his perspective, visit the archive.