His 1951 novel Soarele răsare în Deltă ("The Sun Rises in the Delta") was an early representative of local socialist realist school, but earned Colin much criticism from the cultural establishment of the day, for what it perceived as ideological mistakes.
He authored celebrated works such as the mythopoeia Legendele țării lui Vam [ro] ("Legends from Vamland") and fairy tale collections, making his debut in local science fiction literature with Colecția de Povestiri Științifico-Fantastice journal.
[3][10] As contributors to Orizont, Colin, Cassian and Solomon supported the view that writers were supposed to immerse themselves into social struggles, an attitude which represented one of the main literary tendencies in the post-war young literature of Romania.
[13] After he made his fantasy and children's literature debut with Basme ("Fairy Tales"), which earned him the State Prize for Prose for 1953,[9] Colin adopted the fantasy genre as his preferred means of expression, following up with Nemaipomenita bătălie dintre Papură-Împărat și Pintilie ("The Incredible Battle between Emperor Cattail and Pintilie", 1953), Toroiman (1954), Poveștile celor trei mincinoși ("The Stories of the Three Liars", 1956), Zece povești pitice ("Ten Dwarfish Stories", 1957) and Basmele Omului ("The Fairy Tales of Man", 1958).
[3] In 1968, Geo Dumitrescu included his translation from French poet Charles Baudelaire into the luxury bilingual edition of Les Fleurs du mal, released under contract with Editura pentru literatură universală.
[14] Vladimir Colin made his science fiction debut contributing short stories for Colecția de Povestiri Științifico-Fantastice, which functioned as a literary supplement for the magazine Știință și Tehnică and was edited by Adrian Rogoz [ro].
[3] Colin also continued to publish non-science fiction works, such as the 1967 mythopoeic novel Pentagrama ("The Pentagram") and the 1984 narrative poem for children, Xele, motanul din stele ("Xelar, Tomcat Stellar").
[22] Vladimir Colin's socialist realist prose debut was with Flăcări între cer și apă, a story about Communist Youth militants in the Danube Delta area, engaged in a struggle with demonized anti-communist forces.
Contimporanul 's Sami Damian opined that the writer "fails to portray in significant traits the complexity of new, advanced, phenomena which emerge in the Delta region", and that he lacked "profound knowledge of the new reality, [which] he has distorted, falsified.
"[25] This critique of Colin formed part of a larger piece about the low "ideological level" of various novels, to which Damian opposed examples of works by Petru Dumitriu and Ion Călugăru.
[26] Writing for Viața Românească, critic Eugen Campus stood against Damian's pronouncements, notably praising Soarele răsare în Deltă for its treatment of the "exploiter" as a person of "gluttonous idleness", "cruelty" and "lack of humanity".
[27] He also noted that, "in general, [Colin] avoided clichés", but expressed criticism for the novel having little narrative focus (comparing it to a "meandering river") and for a "conceptual deficiency" which, he argued, tended to favor "that which is old.
"[28] This verdict was backed by the local literary review Iașul Nou, which, although viewing the novel as an authentic work ("Vladimir Colin, we presume, is an actual son of the Delta"),[29] added similar topics of criticism.
[30] By the time when the special Writers' Union meeting was convened to discuss Soarele răsare în Deltă, Colin's case was being analyzed by the Communist Party organ, Scînteia.
"[34] In a 1953 article, Campus revisited Colin's novel, listing it among the "works which falsify reality, which are mistaken from an ideological point of view" (also included in this category were books by Eusebiu Camilar and Ben Corlaciu).
[38] Published soon after, Legendele țării lui Vam is written as a collection of myths relating to a vanished civilization, which is supposed to have lived in the Black Sea area in the neolithic period.
[39] Trapped and chained by Ormag early in the narrative, Vam and his mistress Una inspire their descendants to meet the gods' cruelty with a passive form of resistance, and obtain their own immortality in the hearts of people.
"[41] Likewise, Iovănel believes that, after the 1960s, Romanian science fiction literature, freed from the more stringent of ideological commands, was foremost represented by "survivors" whose early careers were marked by "sufficient compromises" with the regime, but whose later contributions to the genre were often outstanding.
[42] Also according to Nicot, Colin, like the Soviet brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and the Polish Stanisław Lem, was able to evade "takeover by the single party", which had come to "largely suppress authors who were nevertheless not devoid of talent.
[3] In Broasca, one of his few purely science fiction stories, Colin probably takes inspiration from Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space, showing alien beings attempting to contact humans, an experiment which fails when their amphibian emissary is unwittingly killed by a girl, who in turn becomes the source of a radiating purple light.
[3] Cetatea morţilor ("The Citadel of the Dead") shows a 17th-century mestizo man who, cheating Inca survivors into believing that he is the god Viracocha, gains access to the secret legacy of Atlantis.
[3] The fantasy volume Pentagrama, favorably reviewed by Crohmălniceanu, evokes not only the pentagram's symbolic implication as a figure where five points on a circle always meet in nonconsecutive order, but also its presence as a cult object in many ancient traditions.
[9] The text thus aims to build connections with various mythologies, to which it constantly alludes,[9] and is thought by Belgian critic Jean-Baptiste Baronian to take additional inspiration from the stories of Franz Kafka.
[43] Inspired in part by the style of Gérard Klein and his Overlords of War,[38] the short novel Divertisment pentru vrăjitoare centers on the notion that the activity of a human brain can surpass that of any machine.
Disguising his work as investigations into chrysopoeia, Tristan discovers the philosopher's stone and escapes into a fourth dimension world, from which he visits past and future, in an attempt to modify both his biography and the course of human history.
The subject shares elements with Stanisław Lem's 1961 work Solaris, showing living creatures from the Solar System being trapped on a distant planet by the tyrant scientist Scat Mor.
The group of prisoners includes the Venusian female Or-alda, the Martian contract killer Idomar av Olg su Saro and the human poet Ralt Moga, all of whom are exposed to psychological torture by their captor, who increases his energy by absorbing their suffering.
[38] Artists who have provided the original illustrations for Colin's books include Jules Perahim (for the 1945 translation from Mayakovsky)[21] and Marcela Cordescu (for both Basme and Legendele țării lui Vam).
[50] Legendele țării lui Vam has also been reissued as a comic book by the French magazine Métal Hurlant, being illustrated by the Croatian artist Igor Kordey and circulated in France and Spain.