Paul Van Herck Books in Order

Paul Van Herck was born in Berchem, near Antwerp, Belgium, on May 19, 1938. He became a Flemish Belgian writer of science fiction, short stories, and radio drama at a time when the genre gave writers plenty of room to play with new technology, strange social rules, and worst-case ideas.

His day job was teaching Dutch and French. That practical grounding in language sat beside a taste for oddball speculation. His fiction often starts with one big impossible premise, then follows it far enough to show the comic, cruel, or quietly ridiculous consequences.

Radio, though, was where he first made his mark.

Van Herck began writing science-fiction radio plays for Belgian radio, then became especially associated with productions for Dutch radio. The best known followed Matt Meldon, a NASA astronaut and space reporter. The format suited him: each episode could deliver a mystery, a hazardous mission, or an unsettling discovery without losing the brisk, playful energy of an adventure serial.

That cycle included Apollo XXI, De gesluierde planeet, Tunnel der duisternis, Prometheus XIII, and De blauwe zaden. Matt's work puts him close to the action, whether the threat comes from a mission in space or something no one on Earth fully understands.

His prose career began in 1965 with De Cirkels en andere fantastische verhalen, a collection of short fiction. He went on to write many more stories, using science-fiction devices to pull at the logic of everyday life rather than treating the future as a tidy, heroic place.

His best-known novel is Sam, of de Pluterdag, published in 1968 and translated as Where Were You Last Pluterday? in 1973. The story imagines Pluterday, an extra day of the week that is available only to people with enough money and power to save time. The idea is funny at first, but Van Herck uses it to expose the way privilege can hide behind supposedly efficient rules.

In his hands, a calendar becomes a class system.

Where Were You Last Pluterday? earned a top prize at the European Science Fiction Convention in Trieste and traveled well in translation. It is the clearest place to meet Van Herck's mix of social satire and absurd invention. His later Caroline oh Caroline also pushes history and identity into strange territory, building an alternate world around a different outcome at Waterloo and putting familiar public figures in deliberately off-kilter roles. The point isn't a history lesson. It is a chance to make prejudice, power, and received ideas look as silly as they can be.

Van Herck also wrote comic-book scenarios, alongside his radio work and fiction. Across those forms, he returned to cosmic travel, alternate versions of reality, and systems that ask ordinary people to accept nonsense as normal. He died in Antwerp on June 19, 1989, aged 51. His small but unusual body of work still rewards readers who like science fiction with a sharp joke hidden inside the premise.