There’s a great big world out there! So we decided to ask folks from all over about the sf/f scene in their own countries/languages. This week we’ve got answers from Israel, Greece, Cuba, Peru, Poland, Turkey, Spain and France… And we’ll have more in the weeks to come! Many thanks to Paweł Dembowski for helping get us started on this.
Q: What is going on right now in the international sf/f scene that anglophone readers might be missing out on?
Lavie Tidhar
Lavie Tidhar is the author of linked-story collection
HebrewPunk (2007), novellas “An Occupation of Angels” (2005), and forthcoming “Cloud Permutations” (2009) and “Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God” (2010) and, with Nir Yaniv, short novel
The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009). He also edited anthologies
A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults (2008) and the forthcoming
The Apex Book of World SF (2009). He’s lived on three continents and one island-nation, and currently lives in South East Asia.
I think what’s great is not what people are missing but how much is actually available. There’s been an increase in recent years of both non-English writers making a conscious choice to write in English (in order to reach a wider/different audience) and also an increase in translators into English, or even people translating their own fiction. In short fiction, writers like (Dutch) Jetse de Vries and (French) Aliette de Bodard are writing and publishing in English (de Bodard is even nominated for a John W. Campbell award this year), Vandana Singh and Anil Menon from India, Dean Alfar from the Philippines, Sergey Gerasimov from Ukraine – it’s a small but select list. And then there are more translations, too – (Serbian) Zoran Živković’s work is widely available in translation, as is (French) Mélanie Fazi’s, and I’ve been translating some of Nir Yaniv’s stories from the Hebrew, which led to his being the first Israeli to be published in Weird Tales magazine. Maybe there isn’t much, but there is more than before – and online magazines are leading the trend, publications like Clarkesworld and Fantasy Magazine publishing a higher percentage of non-Anglophone writers. And that’s just the short stories – more novels are making their way into the English market, either by translation (we’re finally getting to read Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski in English) or again, by writers choosing to write in English, like Finnish writer Hannu Rajaniemi. On my own part, there’s both the forthcoming Apex Book of World SF, the first such anthology in a long, long time, and the related World SF News Blog which showcases some of what is available from around the world.
But to answer the question properly – what are we missing out on – my own regret is that I don’t get to read French steampunk!
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