Asimov's SF, September 2010 Read Online Free
Author: Dell Magazine Authors
found easily, but mainly for successful English-language novels. For the other languages of India and more obscure works, this is not the case. Compare this situation with the US, where a mass market paperback costs as little as 7 or 8 dollars with a median salary of around 170 dollars a day for a full-time active worker, and it is clear that the audience in a position to read books will not be the same in both countries. In one, everyone would have access to books, though not everyone will wish to buy them; in the other, buying books will have to take the place of a necessity, and thus literature will remain the province of a certain elite. In Brazil in the late eighties, though most people were literate, only about 20 percent of the population consumed books on a regular basis. (Brazil is not helped in this regard by the lack of mass-market paperbacks.)
A side effect is that the literary market will often be small, and that the notion of genre itself might well be a luxury. The classification of books can only work when you have enough books to slot into categories. So there might not be a science fiction genre per se, but that does not mean elements of science fiction are altogether absent from the literary scene.
So far, so good—but, if all those countries have science fiction, why do we know so little about it? We might argue that they are small markets for an elite, and that this small scale prevents them from exporting their SF abroad. And this might seem the case—except that more developed countries such as France or Japan do not really seem to have much success exporting their SF, either. Most English SF readers would be hard-pressed to name the luminaries of the French field; most French, Japanese, or Chinese SF readers will know who Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke or even Robert J. Sawyer are, and what they have written.
Starting from this observation, it is easy to draw conclusions that might not be the right ones. Over the internet, there have been several blog posts debating why it was that English might be the language of science fiction, somehow more suited to it than French or Chinese or Japanese. Explanations range from genre history—today's SF descends from the US Golden Age—to linguistic ones—just as English is somehow the natural language for science, so it is the natural language for writing SF.
In the light of what I have expounded above, this natural affinity does not appear to be the case. There are thriving SF communities in places where English is nowhere near an official language; and those who claim scientific words are somehow more suited to English forget that those words mostly come from Latin and Greek, and can be translated into most Western tongues—and adapted into any of the eminently flexible and creative Asian languages.
The problem is not one of available materials—the problem is one of visibility.
If an Anglophone Westerner were to walk into the speculative fiction section of any French bookshop, they would see many familiar names, all of them English-speakers. And yet France is slightly less inclined to translate than other countries: only 14.6 percent of our literature is translated. About 60 percent of these works are translated from English[11]. Worldwide, the situation is even more accentuated: 50 percent of the books translated in the world are from English into various languages—but only 3 percent of translated books are translated into English, and of those 3 percent, very few make it into the US. The rate of translations to published books in the US is usually around 0.2 percent[12]. This is abysmal by any standard.
The problem, thus, is asymmetric: there is plenty of SF being translated from English into other languages, but little of it that makes its way into Western Anglophone countries. (the UK genre is marginally better than the US in that regard, with the recent efforts of Gollancz to bring French and Russian speculative fiction into the
A side effect is that the literary market will often be small, and that the notion of genre itself might well be a luxury. The classification of books can only work when you have enough books to slot into categories. So there might not be a science fiction genre per se, but that does not mean elements of science fiction are altogether absent from the literary scene.
So far, so good—but, if all those countries have science fiction, why do we know so little about it? We might argue that they are small markets for an elite, and that this small scale prevents them from exporting their SF abroad. And this might seem the case—except that more developed countries such as France or Japan do not really seem to have much success exporting their SF, either. Most English SF readers would be hard-pressed to name the luminaries of the French field; most French, Japanese, or Chinese SF readers will know who Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke or even Robert J. Sawyer are, and what they have written.
Starting from this observation, it is easy to draw conclusions that might not be the right ones. Over the internet, there have been several blog posts debating why it was that English might be the language of science fiction, somehow more suited to it than French or Chinese or Japanese. Explanations range from genre history—today's SF descends from the US Golden Age—to linguistic ones—just as English is somehow the natural language for science, so it is the natural language for writing SF.
In the light of what I have expounded above, this natural affinity does not appear to be the case. There are thriving SF communities in places where English is nowhere near an official language; and those who claim scientific words are somehow more suited to English forget that those words mostly come from Latin and Greek, and can be translated into most Western tongues—and adapted into any of the eminently flexible and creative Asian languages.
The problem is not one of available materials—the problem is one of visibility.
If an Anglophone Westerner were to walk into the speculative fiction section of any French bookshop, they would see many familiar names, all of them English-speakers. And yet France is slightly less inclined to translate than other countries: only 14.6 percent of our literature is translated. About 60 percent of these works are translated from English[11]. Worldwide, the situation is even more accentuated: 50 percent of the books translated in the world are from English into various languages—but only 3 percent of translated books are translated into English, and of those 3 percent, very few make it into the US. The rate of translations to published books in the US is usually around 0.2 percent[12]. This is abysmal by any standard.
The problem, thus, is asymmetric: there is plenty of SF being translated from English into other languages, but little of it that makes its way into Western Anglophone countries. (the UK genre is marginally better than the US in that regard, with the recent efforts of Gollancz to bring French and Russian speculative fiction into the
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