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 horror) has its own writers, publishers, editors, anthologists, conventions, awards, critics, and translators from American English into other languages. Except for a few glimmers here and there, American SF most definitely does not seem very interested in interacting with the larger World SF universe. That’s a source of frustration to some of us in America who want to read more SFT and sometimes have trouble finding it in our bookstores or libraries. But perhaps this will change in the future…
Anyway, the more I think about including SFT in Anglophone awards as its own category, the more I think that this is definitely the way to go. Otherwise, most Anglophone readers will not even hear about these texts, much less read them or vote for them. But SFT and World SF, even though they, too, are distinct entities, can be thought of together as a distinct discipline, worthy of critical and historical books and articles, classes, conferences, papers, book clubs, and shelves in the bookstores and libraries.
Think about this act of bringing people together from a variety of nations and languages in order to talk about speculative fiction. The first time this was officially done was in 1970(!) with the International Symposium on Science Fiction, organized by Japan. In 1976, Brian Aldiss, Harry Harrison, and Frederik Pohl organized the World SF association at the First World Science Fiction Writers’ Conference in Dublin. Translations of speculative fiction had been happening since the late 19th century, but it took until the 1970s for an official organization like this to emerge and bring together people from around the world.
Focusing on SFT for the moment: hunting down SFT, whether written decades ago or this year, is a job in itself [see my essay on that here]. Among other sources, I draw on Translated SF and ISFDB to find as many titles as I can from past years to put into two formats that I personally find useful on my website [here and here]. To find current SFT, I scour Edelweiss, Netgalley, individual publishers’ websites, and social media, and even then I miss a lot. A useful source for these titles is actually other readers and critics when we get together to discuss which translated titles should win awards. Just that source exploded my spreadsheet last year. It’s not easy to find SFT because there isn’t any “SFT publisher” cranking out these books (although, honestly, New Directions comes close, and they’re not even a genre publisher).
So at the moment, SFT as its own theoretical discipline is composed of academic and reference books (like Dale Knickerbocker’s, Ian Campbell’s, and my own), Cheryl Morgan’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (2009-2014), entries in the SF Encyclopedia, translation panels at various SF conferences each year, a lot of anthologies (I’m talking about the 8 that Lavie Tidhar edited), Small Planet magazine, and all of the short- and long-form SFT that is published each year (and it really is a lot, more than people think). I’m not linking to all of this because I’ve written about all of these before in various other essays.
So what does it mean for SFT to be its own “field”? As a former academic, I am, of course, thinking about SFT becoming part of literature or comparative literature departments, but also, of course, existing as its own field, like science fiction or fantasy themselves. When someone says “science fiction,” anyone listening immediately has some images or texts in mind. Does this happen with SFT? Not yet for many Anglophone readers.
“World SF” means exactly what it says: speculative fiction literally from the entire world. This includes translated texts, because that’s how texts circulate among our thousands of languages, but it also means that American genre readers, for instance, should remember that they can read SF from Canada, the UK, Australia, Nigeria, South Africa, parts of India, Israel, the Philippines, and other countries where authors often choose to write in English in order to access the world publishing market. I am so focused, myself, on translation that I have to tell myself not to forget about these texts, as well. So while Small Planet is called “The SF in Translation Magazine,” I am very interested in highlighting SF from every country I can, even if it’s Anglophone.
World SF has its own critical studies (articles and books), the World SF Blog (2009-2013), several anthologies, and the many many texts that are published from Anglophone countries and in translation.
Perhaps what is needed is one of those critical historical studies of the SFT/World SF field, as happened over the course of the 20th century as science fiction was developing and becoming more sophisticated. You know I want to write this, but it might be a while, and other people are likely working on something like this, too. Perhaps this field could be the leader in, for instance, developing a more ethical approach to reviewing translated work (despite the best efforts of many translation theorists over the past several decades, most reviews of any genre still treat the translator like an afterthought). More anthologies would always be nice (and they come out each year, but only a few). Ultimately, it’s a mindset, like ethical translation reviews–a sizeable number of people must think about SFT/World SF as its own field and then write about and talk about it as such. At the moment, to me, it all feels splayed out in a million pieces, and I’d like to gather it all together in a nice and tidy field- that’s me displaying my ridiculous organization obsession. Nonetheless, a field would point the way to a coherent future for the study of SFT/World SF and incorporate it into the fan and academic worlds in a less chaotic way.
