Career
Nesvadba had a degree in psychiatry and was a pioneer of group psychotherapy in Czechoslovakia. He originally translated poetry from English and wrote several theatrical plays as a student in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Towards the end of the 1950s he started writing science fiction short stories.
Befitting his background, psychiatry is often a theme in his San Francisco. His fiction typically revolves around such issues as human weakness and divided personalities, with a tendency toward dark humor, irony and satire, as in ", in which cars run on blood.
In the 1970s he began to move away from science fiction, which was likely inevitable, as his main interests diverged somewhat from Western views of the genre. From a commercial perspective this did not work well.
Some of his stories were made into movies, e.g. Death of Tarzan, The Half-wit of Xeenemunde, Vampires, Limited, and Tomorrow I"ll wake up and scald myself with tea.
In the last of these, which he himself scripted, Hitler and issues of causality crop up.
He also worked on several television and radio serials. He agreed overall with a Marxist analysis of things, a viewpoint he maintained even after the unraveling of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Nesvadba was registered as an agent of the coomunist secret police StB under the codename Autor.
"Captain Nemo"s Last Adventure" "The Last Secret Weapon of the Third Reich" "The Lost Face" "In the Footsteps of the Abominable Snowman" "Doctor Moreau"s Other Island" "Inventer of His Own Undoing" "The Chemical Formula of Destiny" "Expedition in the Opposite Direction".