The Odd Old Bird

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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 imagina­tion 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.’

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