International SF

This month Words Without Borders — The online magazine for international literature is celebrating International Science Fiction. This is great, although the title seems rather odd to me. Given that popular authors like Greg Egan, Nancy Kress, Alastair Reynolds, and Robert J. Sawyer, all come from different countries isn't sf already "international"? And isn't the preferred term "speculative fiction"? It seems to me a better title would have been "Non-Anglo-American SF." Oh well, enough nit-picking. I'm glad they're doing this feature and it's well worth checking out. I plan to read the whole thing.

This month we’re traveling in the world of science fiction. From nineteenth-century Pakistan to twenty-first century Russia, authors rocket through time and space to explore worlds uncharted yet oddly familiar. Replicants and aliens, spaceships and shapeshifters are all in play; the future mirrors the present, and the intelligence is anything but artificial. Lift off with Stanisław Lem, Tomasz Kołodziejczak, Olga Slavnikova, Zoran Živković, Hiroshi Yamamoto, Machado de Assis, Liu Cixin, Pablo A. Castro, and Muhammad Husain Jah, and prepare to be launched into the fantastic.

[via SF Signal and Charles Tan]