The Best of World SF Lavie Tidhar (me reader .TXT) 📖

ten editions in translation, at last count. And I had to face up to the fact that maybe the world really was changing.

Mahvesh Murad came on board to edit The Apex Book of World SF 4. I think she is the first editor from Pakistan to edit a genre anthology, and she went on to do more, and get nominated for a World Fantasy Award, though not for that book, because still no one cared.

Cristina Jurado came on board to edit The Apex Book of World SF 5, and it was great, and there we stopped. And I tried to sell a bigger version of those books to publishers large and small, and kept hearing that familiar ‘no’ – or, more commonly, not hearing anything at all. I watched those writers I published early on become established, and I watched talented new writers pouring in to the new magazines and the electronic publications, and they were terrific. Some of them are in this volume. And some of the old gang are here too.

Science fiction has to change to stay relevant. It deals in futures, after all. And the Internet was a great liberating force for those of us who lived elsewhere, who spoke English in a strange accent, who wrote in it as a second language or not at all. There are more translators now, enthusiasts mostly, but there are more places open to those stories now. They weren’t there before. The editors weren’t there and the publications weren’t there and we had to create them somehow. The future couldn’t stay uniform or it would die.

And we weren’t there. There was a time where every year Aliette de Bodard and me would be placed on the same panel at the same SF convention to talk about the same thing in front of the same people, and one year a guy accused me of taking publication spots from native speakers and why can’t we publish in our own countries? And the next year he repeated the question because he said he didn’t think I understood him the first time he’d asked.

But I did understand. And I never did that panel again after that. In fact I try not to do panels at all and let other people speak instead, and I refuse to talk about translation. I have my own body of novels now and my own awards, but for some reason I never get asked to talk about that – that privilege is still reserved for ‘proper’ writers. Things change, but slowly…

2.

It’s hard to put my finger on the exact moment the idea for a World SF anthology first crystallized, but the seeds for it were sown long before. I grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, and even as a child I was drawn to fantastical works, many translated from Europe: not just Tove Jansson’s Moomins, but Janusz Korczak, Michael Ende, Astrid Lindgren, Erich Kästner and many others, alongside the numerous translations from the English.

Even then, I was drawn to seek out homegrown Hebrew fantasy too: my favourite being Eli Sagi’s mid-1960s trilogy of science fiction novels, the Adventures of Captain Yuno, in which a pair of children, Yuno and Vena, travel throughout a solar system teeming with mysterious alien life (charmingly illustrated by the prolific artist M. Aryeh). When I wanted to write a high school dissertation on Israeli science fiction, I contacted the foremost translator of the genre, who dissuaded me rather bluntly with the words: ‘There isn’t any.’

It always stuck with me, that line. Even then, I didn’t think it was true. Perhaps he had meant that what there was, was not much good. Or perhaps he meant that it simply was not American enough. I changed the topic I was going to write on, but my interest remained.

The first time I went backpacking, at seventeen, through eastern and then western Europe, I sought out obscure works of local SF: I still own the two Nemira anthologies, for instance, published on thin rice paper in 1994 and 1995 in Romania, or strange works of fantasy published by a still-Soviet imprint in Moscow.

But I think one defining moment was a visit to China back in the turn of the millennium: I had been so warmly welcomed by the science fiction community there that I felt almost duty bound to repay the favour in some way, and I could best do that, I thought, by helping Chinese SF be published abroad. This did not happen immediately, of course… and for a long time seemed likely never to happen at all.

In 2005, a single issue of a magazine called Internova came out in Germany. It was edited by three German fans, and I became involved relatively early on, also helping bring in several other contributors. It was the first time that a magazine dedicated to international speculative fiction was launched in decades (there had been a short-lived attempt by Fred Pohl in the 1960s) – but more importantly, it was the first time such an endeavour was undertaken by people from outside of the dominant anglophone sphere.

Internova was not without problems. It was a slick paperback production, but it was hard to get hold of. E-books were still not a very common option and distribution made it difficult for anyone to find. In addition, the committee style structure didn’t allow for quick decision-making. Internova was an inspiration, an eye-opening experience that such things were even possible, but it did not last beyond its first issue (it did re-emerge as a website later on, though).

What Internova couldn’t do, I thought (with a mixture of naïve optimism and not a little hubris!) a single person might achieve. The idea for a sort of ‘Best Of’ anthology, selecting stories for reprint from a wide variety of venues, seemed possible – if only anyone could be convinced to do such a strange thing.

Back in 2008, print-only submissions were still a barrier to many international writers. Electronic magazines were still considered lowlier than