„Colecția Povestiri Științifico-Fantastice” (The Collection of the Science Fiction Stories), the first Romanian Science Fiction Magazine, was founded on October the 1st 1955 in Bucharest, Romania by the writer Adrian Rogoz as editor and discontinued in April 1974, after 466 issues.
The first series represents the first SF dedicated magazine from Eastern Europe.
It was published as a supplement with bi-monthly publication by the popular science weekly Ştiinţă şi Tehnică (Science & Technology). There were Hungarian and German versions, for the first 80 numbers : „Tudományos-fantasztikus elbeszélések” and „Sammlung von wissenschaftlich-fantastischen Geschichten”. The collection itself was deemed “extraordinary popular” by the scholar Mihai Iovănel.
„Anticipația - Colecția Povestiri Științifico-Fantastice” was relaunched in in 1990 by Ştiinţă şi Tehnică (Science & Technology Magazine), with the SF fan and translator Mihai Dan Pavelescu as editor and again discontinued in 1999 (issues 467-569). The third series were took over by the SF author Aurel Cărăşel and were also discontinued shortly after (issues 570-578).
The fourth series (CPSFA / Colecția de Povestiri Științifico-Fantastice Anticipația) were launched in December 2012 by Nemira Publishing House from Bucharest together with Anticipația (Anticipation) Almanach itself in print from 1982 to 1999 and relaunched in December 2012. The present editor of the monthly magazine and of the yearly almanach is Marian Truţă.
Mike Ashley - The History of the Science-Fiction Magazine, volume II: Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines 1950-1970 ; Liverpool University Press, 2005 :
„For many years Romania was the only Eastern European country to have a science-fiction magazine.
Colecția Povestirilor Științifico-Fantastice (The Collection of the Science Fiction Stories) first appeared in October 1955 as a twice-monthly supplement to the weekly science magazine Știință și Tehnică (Science and Technology) and arose as a result of a literary competition for science fiction short stories. Adrian Rogoz became the editor of the magazine and saw it through nearly twenty years and 466 issues.
Also amongst the contributors to that literary competition was Ion Hobana and between them Rogoz and Vladimir Colin and Ion Hobana remained the backbone of Romanian science fiction over forty years.
Colecția Povestirilor Științifico-Fantastice usually featured a serial episode or long story plus at least one short story per issue. Soviet SF dominated the local genre until the beginning of the 60s and afterwards, the Romanian SF magazine opened towards the west-european SF with special themed issues dedicated to the French and Italian SF, to the German SF, or to American SF (Philip K.Dick, Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Clifford Simak, Ray Bradbury), to the British new-wave, Stanislaw Lem and Arkadi&Boris Strugatsky, including writers from Japan, Brazil, Burma, pre-islamist Iran, China, etc.
Colecția Povestirilor Științifico-Fantastice was one of the most cosmopolitan SF magazines of the that period and nurtured and inspired a whole new generation of SF Romanian writers. The print run was over 100,000 copies.
Adrian Rogoz recognized the value of developing young minds. He later wrote : „The most promising field to spread the seeds of science fiction are the youth”. Rogoz was following the same route as Hugo Gernsback and, like Gernsback he encouraged the development of SF fan clubs in Romania, the major ones from that period, Solaris in Bucharest and H.G.Wells in Timișoara, both being formed in 1969. Solaris SF Club organized the first National SF Convention (ROCON) in Bucharest in April 1972. But, also like Gernsback, Rogoz did not publish fiction that was juvenile, but sought out fiction that explored bold new ideas.”