Why do we need to read speculative fiction from around the world?

 by Asmae Ghailan

A specter is haunting speculative fiction—the specter of Anglo-Saxon hegemony. Volunteers worldwide have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: writers and publishers, translators and literary agents. The pessimist would assume that getting rid of him is a fantasy in and of itself. 

Still, the situation is far from hopeless. Though Anglo-Saxon works saturate the international speculative fiction scene, their monopoly is not total. Despite the factors limiting their reach, thousands of brilliant stories from beyond the Anglosphere continue to be published worldwide.

But why do we need to exorcise Anglo-Saxon hegemony from international speculative fiction? How can this eviction benefit humanity? For a long time, although I enjoyed reading stories written in languages other than English, I rarely went out of my way to seek them out, making do with what looked the most interesting among what was readily available to me. Recently, including such stories in my reading list has become a priority - not to tick a box, but for reasons involving a horse and a literary festival. 

Bear with me.

Allow me to introduce the horse. During races, horses are often made to wear blinkers (or blinders) on either side of their head, which restricts their vision to what is immediately in front of them. When a horse wears blinders, its vision and direction are so limited to its master’s whims that the existence of alternate paths and views and flavors of reality have no way of occurring to it.

The literary festival is none other than Confluences, an online international science fiction and fantasy festival organized by Hikaya Editions. The festival consisted of a cycle of panels bringing together translators, authors, publishers and researchers of speculative fiction working in languages often overlooked by the publishing industry. I watched all the panels and hosted one, and in most cases I had little prior knowledge about the theme. Listening to the talks had the side effect of making me notice that I was actually wearing blinders. Although I hadn’t put them on all by myself, I had become so used to them that I had forgotten they were there.

The problem is that when a horse walks through a city wearing blinders, it has no way of knowing that what it sees as a long, single-lane road is really an intersection with many exits and other interesting paths. I am writing in case I want to retrace my steps and my thoughts, and because you might very well want to take a walk down some of these paths yourself.

The first panel was a talk about Italian science fiction with Francesco Verso. After discussing writing inspiration and cyberpunk, Verso gave his analysis of the over-importation of Anglo-Saxon sci-fi and the inability to export local sci-fi, from Italy and from almost everywhere else. He compared the American market to a white hole, “from which everything gets out and nothing gets in”, and the rest of the world to a giant black hole “where everything gets in and nothing gets out”.

It would not be unreasonable to assume that speculative fiction’s radical distance from reality should make its appeal universal. Why would the nationality, ethnicity, or language of its real-life writers and the way they flavor the story be relevant to a reader accustomed to the nationless, borderless world of imagination, where the only toll they pay is cracking a book’s spine open? Because of the process Verso calls the colonization and occupation of the imagination of others—the immediate, massive translation and dissemination of American science fiction at the expense of works written by the global majority.

Hearing this, I was immediately reminded of a recent incident. 

In Tangier, I visited a bookstore recommended to me for its wide array of books. I asked the bookseller in our shared mother tongue if he had any sci-fi or fantasy written by our fellow countrymen. He pulled down the Arabic edition of Game of Thrones, almost as if he hadn’t heard the second part of my sentence. He recommended another famous American series, and when I repeated that I was looking for Moroccan writers, he gave me a sci-fi series that looked quite interesting but had been written by someone from the opposite side of the continent. Likewise, during the panel on Italian fantasy, the host mentioned that when she asked a Roman bookseller for some SFF, he gave her Dune and Fahrenheit 451. When she specified she was looking for Italian SFF, he exclaimed: “Oh, that doesn’t exist!”

Ultimately, in the international speculative fiction scene, the Anglo-American imagination is the international default and very little is translated into English. To quote Ruth Oldenziel, America has the uncanny ability to be omnipresent globally, but territorially deterritorialized,[1] on billboards, in bookstores, and in military bases. The primary issue of this ubiquity is that Anglo-Saxon hegemony haunts and constrains our imagination, our empathy, our creativity, and our freedom.

Imagination endangers those who profit from the status quo because it can show that there could be alternatives to the present state of affairs. The specter of the United States looms over the status quo, but its reach is so wide that in many cases, our imaginings of the far future struggle to differ from those it has sanctioned. Le Guin writes that “The way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary”. The diversity of the human race would make it reasonable to think the way we imagine things to be in the future is not universal, either. But despite the evolution of the post-Cold War international order, the hegemony of the United States means that the specter’s reach is so wide that his claws even reach into the future. A vast proportion of American works of sci-fi in the past few decades have tended to share a vision of the future that flirts with the apocalyptic, and this trend has spread far and wide.

If one takes at face value the fearmongering of some of the loudest voices in U.S. politics, today’s biggest, realest horror is the rise of China. For some U.S. politicians may catastrophize about China being an existential threat to the future of humanity, the world outside of China doesn’t seem to have an inkling about how China itself imagines the future of humanity. From shoelaces to smartphones, China’s products are omnipresent in our homes, but what of its imagination? If American speculative fiction often has an aftertaste of horror and dystopia, what is the unique flavor of Chinese speculative fiction?

Journalist and literary scholar Lukas Dubro gave an interesting answer to this question during the panel on International Collaborations. Since Chinese literature in general is rarely translated, at the beginning of his academic research, he didn’t even know how dynamic the sci-fi scene was in China: full of young people and new names with very diverse ideas, writing about very different topics in different styles. Workshops and discussions with Chinese writers invited to Berlin left a strong impression: “It’s really refreshing to see people who are not afraid of the future, who don’t think technology is a threat and we’re all going to die, but where humanity evolves, we travel to distant planets, we leave our body—so many cool ideas,” he said.

An even more surprising feature of the Chinese speculative fiction scene was discussed soon after by translator Gwennaël Gaffric during the panel on Chinese online SFF.

He explained that in China, the Party’s strong control on history also extends to the recent past, the present and the future. This meant that even when alternate history and time travel fiction (穿越: chuānyuè) were trending, writers had to tread very carefully. To avoid censorship, they had to set their works within particular time periods, bearing in mind that problematic periods could be as ancient as the Yuan dynasty and as recent as the Cultural Revolution.

But how do writers find interesting things to write about within such limiting conditions? The difficulty of writing amid such censorship is undeniable, but so is the fact that creativity thrives under constraints. Many of these works rarely find an audience outside of their home country despite their literary merit. Still, the ways in which people have stretched storytelling to circumvent censorship are a valuable source of information about the historical context of their production and a testament to the strength of human resourcefulness despite political repression.

It might never occur to a reader living in a country with relative freedom of expression that SFF can be a tool of liberation. This came up during the panel on Iranian SFF with authors Armina Salemi and Zoha Kazemi. In Iran, they explained, sci-fi enabled writers to reclaim the narrative, find their way around the system and challenge censorship. To get published, they had to tiptoe around a plethora of red lines: criticizing the government, criticizing religion, asking political questions, discussing sexuality… To break away from their real-life setting, writers could set their story in an alternate timeline or reality. The new world acted as a defamiliarization device through which writers could ask political or religious questions, speculate about different aspects of history, and criticize different ideologies and fundamentalism. In short, SFF liberates authors working under strong censorship by giving them a space where they can “talk about fundamental topics and themes in the story without getting caught”.

In this way, speculative fiction can be a tool to dissect the defects of the writer’s reality in a way that bypasses censorship, a portal to imagine different possible realities when meaningful political change seems fantastical. It can also make invisible realities visible and completely change the way we view the world. I was struck by a story told some years ago by a well-known author of speculative fiction. After one of the author’s book signings, a middle-aged man came up to him and told him he loved his books. Then he explained that before he read the author’s series (in which homeless people play an important role), he had never really looked at a homeless person before. I found this anecdote equal parts appalling and beautiful: because of the man’s longstanding indifference and callousness vis-à-vis his fellow human beings, and because of what it tells us about the power of speculative fiction. Reading a fantasy novel, even one set in such a generic location as London, had made the invisible visible to him and enhanced his experience of reality. I would go as far as to say that by reminding him of the humanity of others, it increased his own humanity. People find it easiest and most convenient to dismiss the existence and humanity of others when you have never bothered to listen to their story. Not only does reading diversely open our eyes to possible futures that lie beyond the boundaries of what has been imagined in our local and imported cultures, it also expands our understanding of the world around us and the people inhabiting it, whether they live on our street or on another continent.

I asked them why they thought stories of hope and imagination mattered in the current context, when the political reality leaves little room for anything beyond dystopia. The combat of Hikaya, Davide Knecht explained, is using science fiction, fantasy, and the future to help humanize people who are far too often dehumanized. The MENA region is often portrayed negatively, through the lens of war or narratives of eternal, inevitable, suffering. Fantasy and “Wondrous Journeys” are about hope, about fairytales, about escapism - and escapist literature gives the reader a different image of the culture they’re reading about. Crucially, reading Arabic science fiction and fantasy also dispels the idea that the future is only being created by the West.

Monica Carrion highlighted how important it is that people understand this richness and diversity, as well as the dangers of stereotypical representation. “We need people talking about Palestine”, she explained: “to present a different image of Palestine and the Palestinian people—that this region is full of nuances, with a rich history and traditions.” Hope, they both agreed, is the most important theme of the novel.

And in retrospect, hope was the common thread that linked the entire cycle of conferences. The guests all shared a similar attitude: a kind of optimism that barely needed to be voiced to be understood. An unwavering belief in the importance of the stories they labored to get out to the world, generosity in giving and openness to receiving knowledge and expertise.

I found this optimism refreshing in light of a recent discovery: my favorite café/bookstore removed their secondhand book section. They used to have a “bring three used books, get a free coffee” deal. In the first year after the café opened, I found quite a few gems in the secondhand section. But an unfortunate change began to take place. Slowly, the secondhand shelves were invaded by nondescript, thrillers and romances, commissioned by the same four or five Anglo-Saxon authors and whipped up by armadas of ghostwriters. The titles and covers were so similar that if you squinted, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart, as were their contents. Suffice it to say, those books — which French might describe as “littérature de gare”, train-station literature cheap, short, and punchy enough to spend a train ride with before tossing aside—sold less and less. I believe their stubborn, fruitless occupation of the shelves is why the owners decided the space could find a better use.

For argumentative purposes, I will assume my hypothesis is a reality (a little speculation never hurt anybody). Regardless, the problem afflicts almost every secondhand book sale I’ve been in. There are good books, but most gems are hidden and require thorough searching to find. In the middle of the book sale space, however, there’s always a massive table. It holds what I like to call the Great Publishing Garbage Patch, after the huge island-like patch of non-bio-degradable garbage that floats in the Pacific Ocean. There have been significant attempts to clean it, but sea currents continuously bring in new trash. People buy these mass-produced fast-fashion single-use books, try to resell them, and reenter the cycle of prose pollution. Since these books rarely appeal to people who read beyond the occasional train ride, they are condemned to gather dust on the shelf.

In the end, these books are a vocal minority, and I have given them too much space. The world is brimming with brilliant books, tales of dreams and hopes and futures flavored by cultures and languages we may never have the opportunity to encounter directly but have the privilege to access through translation. I’ll leave you with a few words from the first panelist of this year’s edition of Confluences, Francesco Verso. He co-founded Future Fiction, a cultural organization which publishes speculative fiction translated from 14 different languages, to promote a diverse and interdisciplinary approach to the future. As he talked about the importance of reading in translation, he said, “If you really want to go out and find something new, you need to change your ears. You need to change your eyes.” To add to that, I’ll circle back to the horse I mentioned earlier. The horse’s main relevance to all this is that it lacks a very useful tool you probably have: hands, which are very good at removing blinders. Enjoy your walk.

 by Asmae Ghailan

 [1] Oldenziel, R. (2007). Is globalization a code word for Americanization? Contemplating McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and military bases. TSEG-The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, 4(3), 84-106.

[2] Le Guin, U. K. (2004). The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Shambhala Publications