The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

SF Signal has been running a series of fascinating articles looking at international science fiction beyond the Anglophone world which culminates in this post (which has links to the earlier parts included), which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the genre. As with comics I’ve always been aware of more going on than we see in the English language books and periodicals (that’s not a slight on them, we have a brilliant diversity of writing at the moment in SF&F from indy publishers to major publishers and the journals like Interzone) but I’m also aware of how little I really know about my favourite genre outwith the Anglophone world.

To be sure I’ve been lucky enough to read translations of foreign language SF over the years (and just last year I read a book which was both my first Finnish SF and my first Finnish graphic novel) and I’ve a couple of anthologies, like a collection of translated modern French SF short stories, but those are fairly rare, which is a shame as the short story collection and the shorts in journals have long been the backbone of SF literature; a great way for writers to hone their craft and be discovered by new readers and so,  I’d think, a particularly good way to introduce Anglophonewriters to non English language readers.

I once asked a publisher friend why they never thought about doing something similar, like best Continental SF shorts, and she told me that being fans themselves (as many publishers are) they had thought of it from time to time, but the time and costs were too prohibitive, not just hiring translators but having to dig out contacts with unfamiliar literary agents in other countries and deal with legal contracts in other languages. Which is understandable, but sadly does mean we simply don’t see these sorts of collections too often (and indeed many large publishers who might have the resources to organise such a project don’t seem to care for anthologies in general, although the smaller publishers often do rather well with them). A shame since SF is a genre built on the interchange of ideas and its often fascinating to see different ideas from different cultures. Still, kudos to SF Signal for drawing attention to world SF in this interesting way.