Update 8 December: Editing of votes is going more slowly than I’d hoped; yes I finished first pass of novel names on Tuesday, but second pass is taking longer, so I’m not done with the novel votes yet, and have yet to even begin looking at the short fiction votes (of which I expect there will be more). Possibly I’ll have novel results in the next few days, but can’t ...Read More

Locus Online will host a set of all-time best polls, covering both novels and short fiction, beginning November 1st, for one month. These will be the first such polls hosted by Locus since 1998; earlier polls were run in 1975 and 1987. This time we’ll do two all-century polls, for 20th century works (1901 – 2000) and 21st century works so far (2001- just to 2010), with five categories in ...Read More

Bogi Takács is a reviewer and linguist in Hungary.

One of the most important works of Hungarian science fiction has never been translated to English; it’s been translated to German, but the German editions are long out of print. The Gregor Man trilogy by Péter Zsoldos changed the way entire Hungarian generations saw science fiction and fantasy. I’ll try to summarize the plot in a nutshell (this means spoilers!) and ...Read More

Chris N. Brown is the co-editor, with Eduardo Jiménez Mayo, of Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, published in January 2012 by Small Beer Press.  He writes fiction and criticism from his home in Austin, Texas.

“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges is the story of an invented encyclopedia entry that takes over the real world. The title requires no translation, ...Read More

Dale Knickerbocker is a professor at Eastern Carolina University’s Department of Foreign Language and Literature.

When Karen Burnham kindly asked me to select and blog about one story translated into English that I considered a “must read,” and one not yet translated that absolutely should be, my immediate reaction was “One?!” I thank her for generously allowing me to sneak in a few honorable mentions. I’d like to thank the ...Read More

Harry Markov is an author and reviewer specializing in weird fiction.

Despite my good intentions, I have never served as a connoisseur of international fiction, given I own a small tomb of books I’ve been building since I first started reading in English. English still possesses my imagination in its entirety and I have yet to oversaturate my yearning for books by English speaking authors. The sole and striking exception ...Read More

Mihai Adascalitei is a reviewer and blogger.

The Berlin Wall raised a physical boundary between West and East, but during the reign of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe censorship built an invisible and even stronger barrier. Romania was no exception and that lead to an isolation felt at every level. Culture, in every form, suffered greatly during that time and the niche of speculative fiction was no exception. In ...Read More

Vandana Singh is an author (Distances) and also a PhD Physicist.

I would like to see an English translation of a story that is among the first science fiction stories from India. It is called Niruddesher Kahini and it was published in Bengali in 1896 by the scientist and polymath Jagadish Chandra Bose. I can only read in Hindi and English, and discovered Bengali science fiction’s rich history ...Read More

Anil Menon is an author (The Beast with Nine Billion Feet) and an editor.

Lokenath Bhattacharya’s novel The Virgin Fish of Babhughat (1972) belongs to the family of dystopic visions that acquired its characteristic and possibly definitive form in the works of Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. As in We (1921), Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) and Brave New World (1931), here too we have an individual struggling ...Read More

Larry Nolen is a reviewer and translator.

It is difficult to select two suitable stories out of the hundreds, if not thousands, of translated and non-translated SF/F stories over the years. It would be a cop-out to choose an extremely well-known writer, such as Jorge Luis Borges or Julio Cortázar, whose fame crosses several genre boundaries, yet there needs to be some cross-subgenre appeal as well. Argentine writer Angélica Gorodischer’s ...Read More

Cheryl Morgan is a critic and editor.

For the 1995 Worldcon in Glasgow a group of local writers got together to do some mutual PR. They produced Shipbuilding, an anthology of speculative fiction by Scottish writers. It was a good idea, and amongst the people to copy it were some fans and writers from Croatia. Despite some optimistic bids, they haven’t yet lured Worldcon to Zagreb. They do, however, ...Read More

Fabio Fernandes is a writer, translator, and editor.

The first time I became aware that science fiction could be something more than just adventure – in fact, that it should be much more than just adventure – was when I read Doris Lessing’s Shikasta. It was 1980, I was fourteen years old, and I begged my mother to buy it for me. She always was (still is) the most ...Read More

Charles Tan is an author, critic, and editor. He is often seen at SFSignal and the World SF Blog.

I’m not just a reader, I’m also a writer. I state this because in some developing countries (at the very least, in the Philippines), the expectations of the two do not necessarily intersect: some readers want thick, lengthy novels while the output of many writers leans toward the short form (or ...Read More

Aliette de Bodard is the author of novels including Harbinger of the Storm and award-winning short fiction in venues such as Interzone and Asimov’s.

I have a particular fondness for Elisabeth Vonarburg’s The Maerland Chronicles, which is a masterful look at a devastated future where women control society–seen through the lens of one woman’s life and personal quest. It probably loses somewhat in translation (I read it in the ...Read More

Nick Mamatas is an author (see Sensation and You Might Sleep) and an editor at Haikasoru.

It may seem mercenary, or perhaps just odd, to suggest that everyone read the exact Japanese SF novel I’ve just finished editing, but I’m going to do it anyway. Project Itoh’s debut novel Genocidal Organ will be published by Haikasoru in August 2012, and I highly recommend it.

Due to the nature of ...Read More