It’s time for some more Small Planet! Issue #2 is out now, filled with excellent pieces on everything from how to become an activist translator, to what it means that major genre awards are starting to include translation categories, to forthcoming books, books we want translated, Vintage SFT reviews, and more! Enjoy!
Two Lines Press is the publishing program of the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco. Their Calico series “curates collections of translated works that explore particular themes, regions, languages, historical moments, or literary styles.” The fifteen works of SFT they’ve published since 2010 have been translated from the Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish,
Launched in 2009 by Marc Lowenthal and Judy Feldmann, Wakefield Press is an “independent American publisher devoted to the translation of overlooked gems and literary oddities.” As of 2026, they’ve published almost two dozen prose works of speculative fiction in translation. * below are all first English editions FRENCH GERMAN DANISH JAPANESE
SFT/World SF is to individual nations’ SF as Esperanto is to individual languages: the former part of each pair is its own distinct field/language, meant to include but not restrict itself to the latter part of each pair. Thus, for instance, American SF (or speculative fiction, which includes science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, weird, and
Translator Anne Thompson Melo talks to Two Lines Press about her work on Eva Meijer’s Sea Now, a novel about “three women who choose to stay behind as the ocean consumes their cities and memories. Traveling by boat in search of loved ones, they encounter a transformed landscape reclaimed by kelp forests, seabirds, and whales.
This has been on my mind a lot. I would assume that most readers lump “world SF” and “SF in translation” together, but we all know what they say about assuming… Nevertheless, “world SF” and “SF in translation” mean very different things because, obviously, the latter type of text has been translated from another language.
original publication in Korean: 역병의 바다 (Alma, 2020) translated from the Korean by Sophie Bowman this edition: Tor Nightfire, 2026 112 pages grab a copy here or through your local independent bookstore or library A Plagued Sea, Sophie Bowman’s translation of Kim Bo-Young’s 역병의 바다 , is a work of Lovecraftian cosmic horror set firmly
A Plagued Sea by Kim Bo-Young, translated from the Korean by Sophie Bowman (Tor Nightfire, August 11) While waiting for a train to Haewon, an isolated Korean seaside village, bodyguard Mu-young gets a disaster alert on her phone. TVs throughout the station report breaking news of a massive earthquake on the eastern coast. Despite the
I say this all the time, but you wouldn’t believe how much work there is to do in the SFT space. It’s way too much for just a few people. An army of SFT enthusiasts would start to put a dent in this treasure chest. Speaking of “treasure,” calling SFT a “hidden treasure” is like
translated from the Spanish (Spain) by Carolina De Robertis original publication (in Spanish): Rendición, 2017 this edition: Mariner Books, 2020 211 pages grab a copy here or through your local independent bookstore or library * Rendición won the Alfaguara Prize for 2017 (awarded to a work written in Spanish that has never before been published)
