This week’s announcement that two wealthy individuals have bought their way into what could be the first lunar mission involving humans in 45 years couldn’t have been better timed for Jaroslav Kalfař. Not only does his debut novel lean heavily on the romance of the mid 20th century space race, but it transplants it to an era in which big capital, rather than state investment, is powering cosmic ambition.

“Spring of 2018. On a warm April afternoon, the eyes of the Czech nation gazed from Petrin Hill as space shuttle JanHus1 launched from a state-owned potato field.” So begins the story of Jakub Procházka, who informs us he was destined for a simple life of service to a world united in socialism before “the Iron Curtain tumbled with a dull thud and the bogeyman invaded my country with his consumer love and free markets”.



Jakub – or “skinny human” as his travel companion calls him – is an astrophysicist, who is fired into space on a mission to solve the mystery of a strange cosmic dustcloud. Jakub is both man and superman: the angsty only son of a disgraced Soviet enforcer and a projection of his nation’s ambitions to perform on the world stage. The mission is to be streamed live to the world, its every component financed through strenuously flagged product placement.

But its controllers back on earth were reckoning without his uninvited companion - an extraterrestrial spider with 34 eyes, lipstick-red lips, smoker’s teeth and a passion for Nutella, who (and despite his arachnid form, Hanus is most definitely a who) is on his own mission to investigate the strange two-legged creature, full of fear, grief and sexual frustration, that is Jakub.

Spaceman of Bohemia is certainly one of the most outlandish yarns to be spun so far this year, but it is also funny, humane and oddly down-to-earth in ways that its scenario cannot possibly convey.



Kalfař, now 28, gained his Master of Fine Arts from New York University where it’s no surprise to find that his supervisor – and a formative influence – was Jonathan Safran Foer. Reading Spaceman of Bohemia reminded me of the thrill of unearthing Everything is Illuminated from the mound of entries to the Guardian first book prize in the early noughties.

Apart from a common interest in central European history, Kalfař’s writing has the same hyperactivity, the fidgety contempt for generic boundaries, as that of the young Safran Foer. Part space opera, part folk tale, his novel is also a love song to the city of Prague, where he spent his early years with his father after his parents divorced and his mother emigrated to the US.

In [the Czech Republic]... there are people who fetishise the communist years. Jaroslav Kalfař

Kalfař himself left the Czech Republic as a teenager, and has only returned twice since, so he regards the city from a distance that is in some ways analogous to Jakub’s: “It’s my favourite city in the world but it is fascinating to see how it is becoming this beautiful architectural backdrop to a shopping mall. Some of it is disappointing but it’s interesting to see the city of my birth becoming a metropolis.”



Though ostensibly set in the future, one of the tricks of the novel is to use deep space as an arena in which to play out the hangups of a society still grappling with its communist past. Modern patriotism collides with old conspiracy theories among the detritus of abandoned missions.

But the struggle is also firmly anchored to the earth by the story of Jakub’s family. His grandparents are peasant farmers whose pig-killings are a social highlight of their small village.

The scenes from early childhood unfold like folktale, yet they are the part most closely observed from Kalfař’s own childhood. “The village, the house, these were my mother’s parents,” he says. “I spent a great deal of time with them. My grandpa always kept two pigs and when he killed them the whole village turned up.”

The tragedy of Jakub’s family is to find themselves marooned on the wrong side of history after the fall of the Soviet Union because of his father’s murky past. “I was fascinated by this idea of being from a collaborator family – having a father who suddenly goes from a hero to a villain,” says Kalfar. “In [the Czech Republic] there’s still this thing about who collaborated and benefited from betraying their country, but there are also people who fetishise the communist years.”



The novelist’s own family had a rather different experience of the dark side of history: after his grandfather refused to join the Communist party, his father was kicked out of university, consigning him to low-paid factory work. What money he had, he spent on films, so father and son would sit on the sofa together watching SF movies. “He had this crazy collection of B-movies and we would marathon through them. I could say I’ve been doing the research for the novel since I was five years old.”



But his relationship with his father was “complicated”, he says, darkly. “I know what it’s like to be disappointed by one’s father and to be tricked into believing something.” At 15, he followed his mother to Florida, where she had found work as a hotel cleaner. He dropped out of high school after a year and paid his way through community college with casual jobs as a waiter, a Target cashier and a photo-lab technician, before landing a place at the University of Central Florida to study English literature, with a minor in philosophy.

He began to write short stories and won a place to do his MFA in New York, where The Spaceman of Bohemia started to take shape – initially as a story about an American astronaut whose wife asks for a divorce while he’s in orbit. But though Kalfař had by then become a US citizen, he couldn’t resist the draw of the place he continues to regard as his homeland. “I wanted my first book to be about my people, my country,” he says.



The philosophy module stood him in good stead for a novel that is also in part a meditation on reality, as confronted by a man hurtling into deep space with a giant spider – or could it be the other way round? Hanus is not a metaphor, Kalfař says firmly. “He’s the child in the book who doesn’t understand.”

“What if our existence itself is a field of study in probability conducted by the universe?” wonders Jakub. Such questions have something in common with the comic inquiries of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and inevitably some early reviewers have classified the novel as speculative fiction. “If you can interpret speculative fiction as writing that is curious about many things then I’ll accept the label, but basically I wholeheartedly disagree.” says Kalfař, who has no time for distinctions between literary and genre fiction.

So what exactly is his novel? “It’s literary historical science fiction with a philosophical bent in a romantic tradition,” he riffs. “My biggest hope is for the book to be something the reader has never read before.”