Chiming in on non-Anglophone SF

SF Signal has a great topic for their lately Mind Meld feature, titled "Guide to International SF/F (Part I)". Lots of great books (some of which I've read, others I've heard about) mentioned over there.

In a way, posts like this frustrate me, in no small part because I had in mind pitching a post about some excellent Spanish-language spec fic that I had recently recently, only to discover recent (and excellent) posts and sites, such as Lavie Tidhar's must-read World SF News Blog, have already covered much what I would have likely discussed in such a piece. Perhaps I'll go ahead and do it someday, but I think it'll be a while.

However, there are a few gaps that I noticed in the SF Signal piece (although I suspect much of this will be addressed in the second part). The first thing that I noticed is that quite a few of the authors being held up as examples of great authors writing in other languages are really just the various countries' "superstars" for said SFF markets. In other words, the Lems, Sapkowskis, and their like tend to be older, established writers. Very little was said in that piece (although this could be due to my professed ignorance about certain language/national markets) about the actual SF "scenes" that have developed (or are developing) recently in many parts of the world.

I don't know who've they've asked to participate in Part II of this Mind Meld, but I certainly hope that the SF Signal people have contacted Brazilian writer/professor/editor Fábio Fernandes. Over the past year, I have had the pleasure of getting to know Fábio and not only do I value his friendship, but I also value the work he has been doing in various venues, ranging from his Portuguese language blog to his English language one to his reviews over at Fantasy Book Critic. He, along with fellow Brazilians Jacques Barcia and Braulio Tavares, among several others (hopefully Fábio will see this post soon and add more, as I know there are several I'm leaving off simply because I don't have their blogs saved and have forgotten their names, to my shame), would have lots of interesting things to contribute about the Brazilian SF scene, the pressures to write and publish in English, and so forth.

A second area that was relatively neglected in that post were those fictions that here in the Anglo-American markets might be slapped with "slipstream" or "interstitial" labels. Works like those of Federico Fernández Giordano's 2008 Premio Minotauro-winning novel, El libro de Nobac, which mixes several SF tropes into a meta-mystery tale, or Xavier Velasco's 2003 Premio Alfaguara-winning Diablo guardián, which features a more hip, seductive Satan-like figure. If these works had been published in English, there might have been some arguments on blogs such as this one and others about if said books and several others might fall within one market categorization or another.

But these comments are not meant to be nitpickings, but rather to serve as a complement to the discussion brewing over at SF Signal and the World SF News Blog, among others.