In my quest to find the origins of interest in SF in translation in the Anglophone world, I started reading SF criticism from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Eventually, I found myself reading James Blish’s More Issues at Hand: Critical Studies in Contemporary Science Fiction (1970), which then directed me to Damon Knight (translator, by the way, of 21 SF stories and 1 novel from the French) and his 1956 collection of literary criticism, In Search of Wonder. These texts helped coalesce some ideas about SFT and criticism that have been floating around in my head for a long time.
Just as SF was seeking recognition, arguing for legitimacy, and demanding attention in the Anglophone world since the 1930s, so has SFT been trying to carve out its place in the SF world since the 1960s, with the first issue of Frederik Pohl’s International Science Fiction magazine (1967). Only one other issue was published (1968). A large number of SF works had been translated into English before then, of course, but no one had made an effort, until Pohl (who was instrumental in setting up the World SF organization, as well) to deliberately gather together SFT in an effort to encourage English-language readers to think about and appreciate what is being written in the rest of the world in other languages.
So now we’re in 2026 and critics have been writing steadily about SFT over the past several decades, including those excellent reviewers who contribute to Locus, Strange Horizons, World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, and Ancillary Review of Books. The latter now features an ongoing column by Nat Harrington, focused on SFT, called “Misplaced in Translation” column. In more generalized publications, though, SFT is discussed often in terms of “oh look at this interesting book that happens to have been translated.” The time has come, now that the World SF association has come and gone, now that Lavie Tidhar has given the world eight (EIGHT) anthologies of SFT, and now that Jake Casella Brookins has continued Chris Barkley’s push for a Translated Hugo Award, to discuss what continuously high-quality SFT-specific criticism has looked like, currently looks like, and could look like in the future.
Whenever the issue of SFT reviewing and critiquing comes up, some reviewers or commentators reach for the easy argument that it’s hard to really review works in translation because how can we know how closely the translation adheres to the book in its original language? This reveals the yawning divide in literature generally between those who read only English-language books and those who read and study translation. Over in translation world, a very long-running (as in centuries-old) and robust discussion about the relation of an original work to its translation has generated many sophisticated theoretical texts and essay anthologies. Anglophone readers who don’t study translation, though, likely don’t know much about these discussions, and so the idea that a translation is just a faint copy of the original text persists. For those who have studied and practiced translation, a translated work is much more complicated than that: its creation involves a translator using a very specific creative art to render a book or story into a completely different language while keeping the target-language text as readable and vibrant as the source-language text (hopefully) is. We now, in fact, have two books or stories about the same idea or topic but through the lens of two different languages. After all, we don’t consider a child the faint copy of the parents. The child is a human being in their own right, one who walks a different path than their parents because of time, situation, and experience.
One argument that comes up from time to time states that the only real criticism of translated works must involve both the original text and its translation, so that the reviewer can point out to their readers what has been translated faithfully and what hasn’t. This could be applied to SFT reviews and criticism, with the idea that anyone who wants to write about a work of SFT must also be familiar with the book that led to that translation. In any case, this is not feasible in most cases, both because of time constraints and the lack of knowledge (on the part of many people in America, at least) of more than one language. Of course, there are people who do this admirable work: see https://readingintranslation.com/ (not focused on SF, though) and some reviewers for World Literature Today. One exciting step forward in this area involves Hache Pueyo’s “Found in Translation” column at Reactor.
How, then, should we approach a work of SFT critically? One idea is to simply write about a translated text as if it were just another text published in the language we happen to read. We would discuss it as it exists in front of us (What does it do well? What did we not like? How does it develop?) but with the added dimension that we’re coming to it from an Anglophone perspective, even though it was written in a language other than English. Which cultural references do we get and which do we not? Do our cultural blinders make it difficult to understand what the author is doing? How does the text connect to our own history and culture? One fascinating example is Swedish horror writer John Ajvide Linqvist’s references in his Places trilogy to the assassination of that country’s prime minister in 1986, an event that had the impact on Sweden that the JFK assassination had on America two decades earlier. Knowing very little about Sweden, I found myself, while reading Lindqvist, wanting to know more about Swedish history and how the author is using events and people to tell his supernatural horror stories. Another example comes from something I was just reading: the brilliant Korean writer Djuna’s short story “Under the Sphinx,” about a fake IMDB entry that takes on a life of its own. So I’m sitting there, reading a story about IMDB (which I use a lot to find interesting movies to watch with my family) by a Korean author with a very different cultural and linguistic history from myself. Djuna and I, though, like millions (billions?) of other people around the world, use IMDB. The internet, here as in so many other ways, connects us across time and space. Also, it’s now one of my favorite short stories of all time.
We could look across SFT from specific languages and do this critical work. What is being published from the French or Portuguese or Japanese or Norwegian, etc.? Is there something about the past ten years that is encouraging writers to craft stories about the environment, alien planets, strange plants? Or should we think about what Anglophone publishers are acquiring and why? Does this represent the diversity of what is actually being written around the world, and is the translation pipeline only showing us what publishers think will sell (i.e. in English, we’re getting a lot of magical realism but is this what’s really being written around the world or is hard science fiction or horror more prevalent?). To find out the answers to these questions we need to (of course) talk to people in other countries about the SF scenes there. What is happening in Bulgaria, in Israel, in Korea, in Turkey? What are the fandoms like and what is being published, and also what was being published a decade ago and why has it changed? The answers, you know, will be fascinating.
But back to writing criticism about a translation. One does not have to read a work of translation and the original text to have a critical approach to a book that now exists in another language. We must deal with what exists in the best way that we can, thoughtfully and rigorously. The added dimension of translation, though, must be acknowledged, just as many of us have been calling for publishers to put the translator’s name on the cover of each translated book. Why try to hide that a particular book has now been vetted twice? Translations have much higher standards to meet, which usually means that what we’re getting in English is excellent. In some cases, a work of SF comes into English precisely because it won an award in its home country. That, I believe, is a pretty good case for translating a book and knowing that it will be high quality. With the work of translators with decades of experience and the development over the decades of translation studies in colleges and universities across the US, we can feel confident that much of the SFT we receive will be high quality. Let’s make sure our reviews achieve that high standard, as well. In this way, perhaps, SFT will gain the recognition it deserves, at the very least in genre circles, where often it is still pushed aside and treated as a curiosity, not as the important piece in the puzzle of world SF that we are constantly assembling.
