In the Green Kingdom, stimulation through the sense of taste has become a powerful and complex art form that rules the lives of the males—the phrils. Not only does it bring pleasure, it can change a phril’s destiny, even guide him into death and beyond. But only if he can afford the services of the artists called Recipears. Without a Recipear, a phril will live and die a pagan, with no chance of an afterlife. The female of the species, called phriliras, cannot experience RecipeArium; they replace it with their faith in one God with changing names. In the world within the huge body of a monstrous beast, the Recipears rule society.
RecipeArium is a tale of sensation and flesh, in which the very hope of an afterlife is determined by one’s sex. The novel takes us on a journey to discover the meaning of love in a boldly imagined world where art is transformative and immortality the destiny of the few.
Carrying the soul of his RecipeArium master within him, Morminiu comes to the royal Court with two objectives: to exact revenge on his master’s enemies and to win for himself the most desired and treacherous position in the realm: Master Recipear of the Kingdom.
Costi Gurgu, launching at Pierre Leon Gallery
My own testimonial of the book follows:
Gurgu delivers a full course meal of epic transcendence in an alien landscape that is at once grotesque and wondrously compelling.
From the vast and forgotten lands of the Edge of the World to the corrupt decadence and intrigue of the nobility who dwell inside the monstrous Carami, Gurgu’s Recipearium unveils a fascinating world in transformation. Recipearium is a sensual metaphoric tale that explores the dialectic quest of duality to realize itself as whole.
Imaginative. Outrageous. Original.
Gurgu subverts traditional fantasy and SF with the promise of new heights in storytelling.
Costi Gurgy signing his book at launch in Pierre Leon Gallery
The publisher, White Cat Publishers interviewed Costi recently; a few choice questions and answers appear below:
Regarding his aspirations for the book, Costi responded:
First of all, this new release will bring Recipearium to the English speaking market, which is quite a big aspiration in itself. And through Recipearium I hope to open the hearts of North American readers to the rest of my fiction as well as to Romanian Speculative Fiction in general.
To their mention that RecipeArium is considered the “new weird” (even in science 
fiction, which is itself considered strange), Costi responded:
Several publishers told me that they hadn’t read anything like it, and therefore they couldn’t compare it to any other book. Yes, at first I wanted to thank them because they practically told me it really was an original novel, but only later I realized that they meant they wouldn’t know how to market it and sell it. They didn’t even know if it would sell, because nobody has sold something similar before.
When I signed the contract in Romania, my Romanian publisher also didn’t know how to market it. So, my editor decided to write and talk about it like any other book and completely ignored that one thing that made it different. He hoped that when the readers discovered it, they would already be hooked and therefore it would be too late for them to freeze in awe. J
It paid off. The story proved a success. Not only because of the awards and the numerous reviews but mostly because of the satisfied readers … So, as a conclusion, I won’t tell you what makes it different from the rest. I want my readers to discover it for themselves. And I promise you it’s not the kind of surprise that goes BANG! It creeps on you slowly.
White Cat then asked Costi to elaborate on his earlier comment about the difference between European and American genre writing. Here’s what Costi said:
Sure. In my opinion there are two major differences. The first one is of perception. In Europe we read fiction works by writers from over seventy countries from all around the world. That is over seventy different cultures in which their authors write stories without worrying that maybe a foreign reader would not understand a certain social, political or cultural event, or a certain attitude, habit or tradition.
Yes, maybe the South American characters act according to a different code of social conduct than Romanians, or maybe French characters’ attitude is strange for a Bulgarian reader, or Chinese motivations are weird to Greeks. But if the story or the characters are gripping enough, all those things don’t stop us from getting the underlying concept from the context and we just keep reading.
The stories we read can take place in real cities or villages from different and unfamiliar parts of the world. Usually the European writer doesn’t care that his readers may have never been in his city and he keeps telling the story as if all his readers are his co-nationals, or even his neighbours.
We embrace the exotic, the foreign, the strange, the unknown… the alien.
American editors have rejected translating huge names from European speculative fiction because they’re considered too strange and not easily understood by North American readers. Because the North American readership has read only North American genre writers for the past fifty years and they wouldn’t accept something different than an American way of perceiving reality and interpreting information. Something that may be too far from the North American system of values.
“But they’re readers of Science Fiction! I mean, they read Science Fiction or Fantasy because they want to be transported to different worlds. You mean that the American readers better understand a story happening on a strange planet or in the underworld, but they will find it difficult to follow a story happening in Bruges, or Warsaw?” I replied.
North American editors don’t appear to have that confidence in their readers. I, on the other hand, have that confidence. It has been proven to me over and over again, that the true SF&F reader, European or North American, is thirsty for new and exotic, and strange, and alien.
The second aspect is technical. It’s about the writing techniques, the story structure, the point of view approach, and so on. It’s an aspect I will not detail here. Suffice to say that while in North America a writer is supposed to write according to a certain and more strict system of technical rules if she’s to be accepted by professional markets, in Europe the editors don’t care if the writer abides by the rules or breaks them, as long as it’s good writing and the readers want more of that author.
In December 2017, “Water”, the first of Reality Skimming Press’s Optimistic Sci-Fi Series was released in Vancouver, BC. I was invited to be one of the editors for the anthology, given my passion for and experience with water.
In the years that followed, Reality Skimming Press published several works, including the “Megan Survival” Anthology for which I wrote a short story, “
Nina Munteanu is an ecologist, limnologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit 
Blika lived in Mossland with her clone sestras, gathering and sucking the delicious juices of detritus and algae. Never in a hurry, she lumbered from frond to frond on eight stubby legs in a gestalt of feasting and being. Blika led a microscopic life of bloated bliss—unaware of forests, human beings, quantum physics or the coming singularity…
“Because we are ALL sestras! You are a Tardigrade, aren’t you?” She waved all eight arms at Blika. “Well, I am your queen!” She looked self-pleased. “You are in Tunland now! The land of awareness. And now that you are self-aware, you can do anything! We’re special,” the queen ended in smug delight. The folds of her body jiggled and shimmered.
They entered a strange place of giant blocks and whining sounds beneath a dark swirling sky.
As if she knew what Blika wanted, the queen quickly added, “But you can never go back home!”
The water came in a giant wet wave of blue and silver and frothy green. Tunland sloshed then totally dissolved. Blika surfed the churning water. That green! She knew what it was! Blika reached out with her deft claws and snagged a tumbling moss frond. It finally settled and there were her sestras! So many of them clinging to the same green moss! She’d found her family! She was home! Yes, it was a different home and different sestras, but it was also the same. Love made it so…
Tardigrades, also known as water bears or moss piglets, are plump, microscopic organisms with eight clawed legs. Fossils of tardigrades date to the Cambrian period over 500 million years ago. Over 900 species are known. Tardigrades were first described by the German pastor Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773 and given the name Tardigrada, meaning “slow stepper,” by the Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani. Tardigrades reproduce asexually (parthenogenesis) or sexually. They mostly suck on the fluids of plant cells, animal cells, and bacteria.
Tardigrades respond to adverse environmental stresses through “cryptobiosis”, a process that greatly slows their metabolism. Tardigrades survive dry periods by shriveling up into a little ball or tun and waiting it out. They make a protective sugar called trehalose, which moves into the cells to replace the lost water. You could say that the water bear turns into a gummy bear.
My Book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press explores this creature and many other interesting things about water. Look for it on Amazon, Chapters, Kobo and in bookstores & libraries near you. If it’s not in your local library, ask for it.
Arizona State University’s Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative is again hosting a Climate Fiction Short Story Contest. In years past they invited writers from around the world to submit speculative fiction stories that explore climate change to narrate a world in flux. Previous contests received submissions from 67 different countries and 12 finalists were published in a digital anthology “Everything Change”.
Hi-Sci-Fi Radio (a podcast radio show out of CJSF 90.1FM in Burnaby, British Columbia) interviewed Nina Munteanu about the paradoxes of her eco-thriller 
When I first heard the writer’s edict “write what you know” I rejoined: but I write science fiction—I write about the unknown. What I still had to learn was that by describing “the other” SF really describes “us”. We explore ourselves through our relationship with the unknown. We do this by ensuring that all our plotlines reflect theme.
“In his introduction to this all-original set of (at times barely) futuristic tales, Meyer warns readers, “[The] imaginings of today could well become the cold, hard facts of tomorrow.” Meyer (Testing the Elements) has gathered an eclectic variety of eco-fictions from some of Canada’s top genre writers, each of which, he writes, reminds readers that “the world is speaking to us and that it is our duty, if not a covenant, to listen to what it has to say.” In these pages, scientists work desperately against human ignorance, pockets of civilization fight to balance morality and survival, and corporations cruelly control access to basic needs such as water. The most affecting tale, Wendy Bone’s “Abdul,” is also the least futuristic, an emotional story that touchingly contrasts Western guilt against the life of a captive orangutan. The anthology may be inescapably dark, but it is a necessary read, a clarion call to take action rather than, as a character in Seán Virgo’s “My Atlantis” describes it, “waiting unknowingly for the plague, the hive collapse, the entropic thunderbolt.” Luckily, it’s also vastly entertaining. It appears there’s nothing like catastrophe to bring the best out in authors in describing the worst of humankind.”
She imagines its coolness gliding down her throat. Wet with a lingering aftertaste of fish and mud. She imagines its deep voice resonating through her in primal notes; echoes from when the dinosaurs quenched their throats in the Triassic swamps.
A limnologist (lake ecosystem biologist) by trade, Munteanu recognizes the incredible way that water shapes life and brings attention to the fact that water connects us to each other just as water connects with other water, forming bonds. She evokes in the reader a sense of reverence for water and an awareness that the same water that flows through our bodies have flowed through the bodies of our ancestors, cycling through life since the first life forms coalesced.
“Water covers every aspect of this science fiction story that pits the vulnerable citizen against the evil multinational corporation in a dystopian Canada sometime in our future. Water is presented in its multiplicity of facets: in the science behind its composition, in its history, in it’s symbolic nature and different physical states; water is a giver and taker of life, and is the form in which the friendship of protagonists Hilda and Hanna functions. Water is also magic and the ultimate righter of wrongs committed to it and to a humanity it gives life to. Within this framework, Munteanu spins a thought-provoking tale that projects where our headlong pursuit of profit may one day lead us to, and how nature will ultimately, with a little human coaxing, be the only one to correct the balance.”—Shane Joseph, Canadian author of Fringe Dwellers
love; a story to read, not only to deal with the possible but, above all, to understand that the time still available for “love” might be less than what you believe.”—Simone Casavecchia, 
Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit 
Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit 
I brought up the notion of history’s quantum properties, a braided flow of multi-dimensional and entangled realities. This served as premise for my alternative historical time-travel fantasy 
Wonder Woman uses a unique weapon, the Golden Lasso, known as the Lasso of Truth—because it compels anyone wrapped by it to reveal the truth.
Nina Munteanu Writing Coach 