Jean-Paul L. Garnier: What was your initial attraction to works of science fiction in translation, and what made you decide to start reviewing them?

Rachel Cordasco: I started reviewing Anglophone science fiction for John DeNardo’s SF Signal in the mid-2010s. One day, he asked if I’d like to review a work of Chinese science fiction in translation—The Three-Body Problem. I jumped at the chance and absolutely loved that book. But it was only when he then sent me Jacek Dukaj’s The Old Axolotl and Marek Huberath’s Nest of Worlds that I actually started thinking about what it meant that these texts were all translated. I had never thought about where science fiction was written, and I realized that, of course, it was written around the world. This led me to think about what other works of science fiction there were in English translation. I started a list on a personal blog, and before I knew it, I had found dozens of titles. Ten years later, I’ve catalogued thousands of short-form and long-form works of SF in translation. I’ve always loved learning other languages and I read a lot of classics in English translation when I was a teenager, so bringing together two of my favorite things—speculative fiction and translation—made so much sense. I started asking John to send me as much SFT (science fiction in translation) as he could, and then, when SF Signal shut down, I started my own site dedicated to SFT.

JPG: In the ten years since founding https://www.sfintranslation.com/ what are some of the most interesting things that you’ve learned, and some of the biggest gaps in the field that you’ve identified?

RC: One of the most surprising things I learned is that there is so much SFT out there. Early science fiction texts, especially from Western Europe in the late-19^th and early-20^th centuries, were being translated into English very quickly (though apparently not very accurately, in some cases, ahem ahem Jules Verne’s stories). When you start looking into the speculative novels, anthologies, and collections that were published in translation throughout the 20^th century, you find that so many of these books just flew under the radar or went out of print quickly. This process of finding and cataloging as much SFT as I can is basically my way of excavating items that aren’t buried but just hidden in plain sight.

I’ve learned that Japanese science fiction developed at warp speed following the American occupation of the island following World War Two; I’ve learned that giants of American golden age science fiction like Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon wrote introductions to anthologies of Russian science fiction at the height of the Cold War; and I’ve learned that, despite the fact that so much speculative fiction has been translated into English, the Anglophone genre world has mostly (except for the 70s and 80s) ignored SFT…until recently. Hopefully, the tide is shifting once again toward SFT and more speculative fiction readers will learn about what people are writing and thinking about around the world.

Continue reading ” Jean-Paul L. Garnier interviews Rachel Cordasco” →