"Speculative fiction is a particularly international genre and an ever-increasing percentage of it is translated and published in English. Out of This World is the first book to explore this trend, highlighting novels, collections, and anthologies translated into English from fourteen different source languages since 1960. Each chapter includes text summaries, analysis, and references to secondary scholarship in an effort to reveal the diversity of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and magical realism available to Anglophone readers since the mid-twentieth century. Lay readers and scholars will discover much about Middle Eastern dystopias, Polish tales of alien encounters, French space-adventure novels, Japanese horror, and everything in between. With chapter introductions by authors, editors, translators, and scholars deeply familiar with speculative fiction in their respective source languages, Out of This World will add to the growing field of world speculative fiction studies and encourage current and future scholars to teach and write about speculative fiction in translation (SFT)"--
The twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion of speculative fiction in translation (SFT). Rachel Cordasco examines speculative fiction published in English translation since 1960, ranging from Soviet-era fiction to the Arabic-language dystopias that emerged following the Iraq War. Individual chapters on SFT from Korean, Czech, Finnish, and eleven other source languages feature an introduction by an expert in the language's speculative fiction tradition and its present-day output. Cordasco then breaks down each chapter by subgenre--including science fiction, fantasy, and horror--to guide readers toward the kinds of works that most interest them. Her discussion of available SFT stands alongside an analysis of how various subgenres emerged and developed in a given language. She also examines the reasons a given subgenre has been translated into English.
An informative and one-of-a-kind guide, Out of This World offers readers and scholars alike a tour of speculative fiction's new globalized era.
