The SFWA European Hall of Fame
Edited by James and Kathryn Morrow
336 pages. Tor, 2007. $27
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Some years ago, at the Utopiales festival in Nantes, France, a group of European science fiction authors were lamenting that no American publishers were interested in bringing European science fiction–let alone much European literature of any kind–to their country. As a translator, I was especially disappointed, since I have long wanted to translated fiction from French to English, but publishers generally balked at the cost of translations. A curious reaction, since so many European publishers paid both royalties and translation costs to publish American works of literature on this side of the pond…James Morrow, award-winning author of such novels as Towing Jehovah, and The Last Witchfinder, who was a guest at the festival together with his wife Kathryn, found this situation unbalanced, and suggested trying to do something about it. Over several years of attendance at the festival, a number of meetings were organized with authors and translators (including myself) to discuss the prospects of editing and publishing an anthology of science-fiction stories from Europe. The Morrows managed to convince SFWA (the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) to fund this anthology, and Jim and Kathy set out to select works, find translators, and find editors to work with the translators to make the results as polished as possible.
The results are available in this interesting and curious book, The SFWA European Hall of Fame, a collection of sixteen stories from thirteen countries. Discover works by authors from Russia to France, from Poland to Portugal, and read science fiction that, while rooted in the American tradition, features ideas with accents. What this anthology shows more than anything is that ideas of this sort are not only owned by the Americans or the English, but are present around the world. The insularity of American publishers is such that they don’t take the risk of publishing much foreign fiction, but perhaps a book like this will give them some ideas.
For the curious, you can read a couple of chapters of one of France’s best science fiction authors, Pierre Bordage, in my translation here. Pierre is not featured in this anthology, being more a writer of epic novels than short stories, but his work features a vision that deserves better recognition outside of France. (He is one of France’s best-selling science fiction authors.)