Global Science Fiction: Essays on the International Imagination

The genre of science fiction now represents a diverse, international community of writers and readers that spans the entire world. This collection provides a tour of global science fiction, with essays about Latin American, European, African, Arabic, Indian, Japanese, and Chinese science fiction, offering a necessary supplement to critical works that focus exclusively on the literature of one region with contrasting insights about how writers around the world have explored and reinvigorated the genre. Essays by prominent critics from five continents convey information about the particular traditions of certain cultures as well as illuminating analyses of representative texts by authors such as Tobias S. Buckell, Lourenco Mutarelli, Stanislaw Lem, Masande Ntshanga, Tawfiq Al-Hakim, Anil Menon, and Cixin Liu.

The scholars in the essays herein pay special attention to the ways in which national experiences have shaped these narratives, which often differ strikingly from the Anglo-American works that long dominated perceptions of science fiction. There is also an introductory survey of how foreign-language science fiction has been published and received in the United States which endeavors to explain why so many of these texts have remained unknown to Anglophone readers. An extensive bibliography lists numerous resources for further study of science fiction from various parts of the world.