With the days flying by as we race towards the official appearance of The Coode St Podcast team at the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto in two weeks, award-winning author and critic James Bradley joined us in the Waldorf Room to discuss science fiction, literary fiction and all sorts of other stuff. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!
Dear Jonathan, James, and Gary,
It’s Elizabeth (Libby) Ginway here–I was interested in hearing you mention Brazilian and Mexican science fiction. I have just finished co-editing a collection of essays with J. Andrew Brown that will appear in December. It has a piece by Chilean author Alvaro Bisama comparing Bolaño with James Tiptree Jr. as well as one about cyberpunk in Mexico–by BEF (author Bernardo Fernandez). I think that these essays demonstrate the connections of perhaps mainstream and SF/first and third world.. or center and periphery for lack of better terms…. I also think that the collection Three Messages and a Warning has more fantasy stories than SF and that Cosmos Latinos is much more representative of science fiction. We are perhaps limited by language barriers and cultural traditions, but I appreciated your view of utopia, apocalypse and the future of SF. I know what James means when he says he must keep abreast of so many cultural scenes: Australia, US, UK, mainstream and genre trends… Best of luck Libby
A couple of quick komments on international sf and translations. The Finnish sf-researcher Jari Koponen has written a bibliography on non-angloamerican sf translated in English, Finnish and Swedish. The book has just now been published as World SF in translation (ISBN 978-951-692-944-9), and yes, it is in English.
And for those interested in Finnish sf I recommend The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy edited by
Johanna Sinisalo.