The narrative is told from the point of view of Jakub Procházka, the first independent Czech cosmonaut.
He is sent on an eight-month solo mission in space to a cloud of "intergalactic dust" near Venus that no other country is willing to risk sending their citizens to inspect.
Jaroslav Kalfař (Czech: [jaˈroˈslav kal̩ˈfar̝̊]) was born on May 20, 1988, in Prague, Bohemia, one year before the Velvet Revolution, and moved to the United States in 2003 at the age of fifteen.
He was the recipient of the 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, which granted him $25,000 in order for him to write, research, and travel.
As for reading, Kalfař's experience with X-Files fan fiction led him "to exploring the small library of [his] grandparents—Robinson Crusoe, any Jules Verne [he] could find.
After that, he discovered Tolkien, Pratchett, and Le Guin in middle school, and eventually began reading more advanced works, such as those of Kundera, Dostoevsky, and Dickens.
Kalfař's writing process does not include outlining, but, instead, sitting in silence and allowing himself to "hear the characters in [his] head shout over each other."
Specifically, his inspiration for Spaceman of Bohemia came from his fascination "with loneliness, its contradictions, how people experience it so differently.
Once he applied a different nationality, closer to his own heart, it added "depth" to the story, as the astronaut had "real issues."
[5] Jakub Procházka is a Czech astrophysicist who agrees to an eight-month mission of exploring a cloud of space dust called Chopra that was created by a comet.
Jakub must travel to its location (between Earth and Venus) to collect samples of the cloud so that scientists could determine what it is, why it is making the sky purple at night, and why it is beginning to consume itself.
The mission is deemed too dangerous by most countries to attempt, so the Czech Republic decides to take the opportunity to be the first.
He begins to drink extensively and becomes depressed, and he starts to question his mental state when he hears voices.
The spider, which Jakub decides to call Hanuš, reveals that he is an alien from another planet and was sent to research humans and their way of life.
Jakub passes his time with Hanuš while getting reports back from the spy he hired to follow Lenka.
When he finally reaches Chopra, the dust particles tear open his ship and he decides to spend his last moments with a dying Hanuš, whom he has grown very close to.
He is used in the story as Jakub's only link to Lenka, as he feeds him the information after she leaves and helps him find her once he is back on Earth.
[6][7] Kunzru states that Spaceman of Bohemia does not get hung up explaining some of the more technical aspects of the sci-fi genre; rather the "extravagant conceptual furniture" that the novel's story sets up "are merely metaphors for the human-scale issues that are its real concerns".
There are lovingly detailed passages on the mechanics of going to the toilet and cleaning your teeth in orbit, the dangers of muscle wastage and other minutiae of life in zero gravity, but all the whizzy space business is harnessed to the basic question of what it means to leave and whether it’s possible to come back.
"[8] In 2020 Netflix announced that the novel would be adapted into a feature film titled Spaceman, directed by Johan Renck, with a screenplay by Colby Day and starring Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan.