Speculative fiction in translation isn’t always easy to find.
No one is trying to hide it, of course; publishers want to market and sell their books, right? Rather, SFT gets lost in the shuffle of the new stories and books that come out each month. I started this website in 2016, specifically because Lavie Tidhar was ending the World SF Blog and I couldn’t find any other site out there that focused just on SFT. I wanted to find for myself and other interested readers the speculative fiction that was being translated and published in English. Yes, there is the comprehensive Translated SF site at Thierstein.net, but it only offers the most basic information—there are no reviews, spotlights, essays, interviews, etc. It’s important data, but just data. ISFDB is also incredibly helpful when one is searching for SFT, but one can’t search just for translations, and, like Translated SF, it provides only data. I wanted to have a site that explored the vibrant, diverse world of SFT with lists and data, yes, but also essays, reviews, original stories, and more.
I started my site just before the peak of the second golden age of SFT in the late 2010s. This was not strategic on my part—I simply happened to start reviewing speculative fiction for John DeNardo’s SF Signal in 2014 and he happened to start sending me Chinese and Polish SFT. I was intrigued about what else was out there and…my site was born. Only when I started writing Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium did I realize that there had been a previous golden age of SFT: the 1970s. This began with Japan organizing the first International Symposium on Science Fiction in 1970, which was quickly followed by a host of anthologies featuring translated SF from around the world (see, for example, Franz Rottensteiner’s View from Another Shore: European Science Fiction (1973) and David G. Hartwell’s The World Treasury of Science Fiction (1989)).
Lavie Tidhar and Francesco Verso’s anthologies and promotion of SFT at the start of the second decade of the new millennium kickstarted the second golden age, demonstrating to the Anglophone SF audience that speculative fiction is and has been written in languages other than English since people have been putting pen to paper. It wasn’t just Pierre Boulle, Stanislaw Lem, and the Strugatsky brothers who were translated into English; the height of the Cold War, in fact, brought a number of SFT anthologies featuring Russian stories to Anglophone audiences, edited by the likes of Theodore Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov. Pierre Boulle didn’t just come into English with The Planet of the Apes and then disappear; in fact, several more of his books were translated from French and published in English into the 1970s and 80s. I could go off on a long tangent here just on French SFT of the mid-twentieth century, but I won’t. That’s for a different essay.
Cheryl Morgan’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (2009-2014) was also instrumental in promoting SFT but, like Tidhar’s World SF Blog, it ended just before the second wave. I imagined that I was continuing the work that Tidhar and Morgan had done, and that Verso was continuing to do in Italy by building the SF in Translation site, and in doing so, I learned a lot of interesting things. For example, I found that I would have to scour publishers’ websites and catalogs myself in order to find works of SFT to place on my burgeoning spreadsheets. Very few publishers would specifically call out the SFT that they were publishing. New Directions, for instance, is a general fiction publisher focusing on international literature, and they also happen to publish a relatively large amount of speculative fiction.
Let me be more specific: this non-genre-fiction publisher has published more SFT than genre-specific publishers in the last few years. Some of New Directions’ recent books include Yoko Tawada’s postapocalyptic Scattered trilogy (2022-25), C. F. Ramuz’s gravitationally-defiant Into the Sun (2025), Mai Ishizawa’s unsettling The Place of Shells (2025) and, of course, the ambitious and brilliant septology by Danish author Solvej Balle—On the Calculation of Volume, the first four of which are out in English as of April of this year. Balle does a deep dive into the concept of Time, leaving the reader wanting to read the next book the minute they finish the current one. Of course, some reviewers in major outlets have been taking up Balle’s novels as literary fiction that just happens to have a science-fictional element in it—the main character (and many others, as she finds) are trapped in November 18. Why this doesn’t immediately classify the novel as speculative fiction is beyond me, but that tendency to relegate genre fiction to its corner by the reviewing and publishing worlds is still with us.
So who, exactly, is publishing SFT regularly? (I’m still on long-form fiction right now, but I’ll get to short-form in a minute). The spreadsheet I started to keep track of long-form and short-form SFT allowed me to start generating useful charts and graphs that reveal fascinating trends in this area of the publishing world. What I found was both exciting and daunting. In 2025, for instance, we had 90 works of long-form SFT (higher than usual) from almost 60 unique publishers/imprints: AmazonCrossing, Angry Robot, Apex Publications, Aqueduct Press, Astra Publishing House, Bloomsbury Publishing, Catapult, Charco Press, Coach House Books, Columbia UP, Dalkey Archive, Deep Vellum, Europa Editions, Fairwood Press, FSG, Future Fiction, Gollancz, Granta Books, Graywolf, Grove Press, Hachette, Hanover Square Press, Harper, Harper Voyager, HarperOne, HarperVia, Head of Zeus, Honford Star, Invisible Publishing, Iskanchi Press, Knopf, Liveright, MIT Press, New Directions, NYRB, NYRB Classics, Open Letter, Pushkin Press Classics, Pushkin Vertigo, Riverhead Books, Sandorf Passage, Scribner, self-published, Serpent’s Tail, Seven Stories Press, Simon & Schuster, Snuggly Books, St. Martin’s Press, Syracuse UP, Tor Books, Transworld Digital, Two Lines Press, University of Minnesota Press, University of Nebraska Press, University of Tampa Press, Wakefield Press, World Editions, and Yale UP. Thus SFT, like the characters in Tawada’s trilogy, seems to be scattered all over the Earth.
Looking at this optimistically, I see that people are probably reading SFT without fully realizing it, simply picking up books from their favorite authors or publishers or bookstores and enjoying what they’re reading. They’re not necessarily concerned about genre classification. Such a wide variety of publishers means that SFT is like a hidden gem, found here and there among literary classics and general international literature.
Short-from SFT is a bit of a different story. Though it, too, is and has been published in a wide variety of publications, many of which are not genre-specific, various SFT-focused magazines have risen and fallen over the years. Frederik Pohl’s International Science Fiction (1967-1968) and William H. Wheeler’s SF International (1987) made the attempt, and Alex Shvartsman’s Future Science Fiction Digest (2018-2022) was an excellent source for SFT. Only Samovar Magazine continues to publish only SFT, though it unfortunately only comes out twice a year. Clarkesworld Magazine regularly published SFT, though mostly Chinese, and sometimes Spanish, texts. That’s it. But then there are the international literature magazines World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, and Asymptote Journal, which regularly feature SFT amongst the general literary fiction they publish. Strange Horizons, of which Samovar is the sister magazine, and Ancillary Review of Books often feature SFT reviews and discussions of the speculative fiction being written around the world. The fact that the two publications I regularly write for are Strange Horizons and World Literature Today demonstrates that if you’re interested in speculative fiction from around the world, you need to have one foot in each world: international literature and speculative fiction.
No conferences devoted to SFT exist (that I know of) in the US. People often point to WorldCon when discussing SF from around the world, and since I’ve never attended, I don’t know how many panels are devoted to the subject. What I do know is that the Hugo Awards continues to be nearly 100% Anglophone. As I’ve written before, nearly every winner of every category is an English text, which makes one wonder exactly what WorldCon is doing to promote international speculative fiction and make connections across countries and languages. Only in the last few years have two major Anglophone awards (Locus and BSFA) included a translation category, which I and many others have argued is necessary to get these titles in front of readers. Otherwise, they’ll never learn about the richness of the SFT that is available. Most of the major awards in other countries include translation categories, so why can’t we?
More and more reviewers and scholars are discussing SFT in more publications, bringing it into the mainstream discussion. Hopefully, the trajectory will be that SFT is spoken about, read, and analyzed enough that it no longer needs its own award category, but until then, I believe it’s necessary to highlight these titles.
Why am I so enthusiastic about translated SF in particular? The art of translation should be celebrated wherever one finds it, since it is only through translation that we can read stories from other cultures and traditions. We’re all living on the same planet; shouldn’t we know what the people on the next continent over are writing and thinking about? Since I started focusing on SFT ten years ago, I’ve seen a growing interest in this area of the genre, but there’s always more that could be done to promote it. So I’ll keep scouring catalogs and asking colleagues and fellow readers online about what they’re reading in translation and then reflecting that on my site and spreadsheets. Hopefully those of you reading this find the site valuable and useful, but I’m always open to suggestions about how to improve it. Happy reading!
