- Here’s a piece on Indian SF, via, er, I’ve lost the source among my millions of windows. (Sorry!) Apparently, it’s a much bigger market in various regional languages, but some SF authors also see developing an English-language readership as a key to a bigger audience.
- And here’s a recent piece on SF in China. Interestingly, SF entered China in 1902 in the same form it did South Korea (or, well, the Korean language, at least) in 1907 — that is, in the form of a translation of a novel by Verne. (In China, the respected literati Lu Xun translated Verne’s Journey to the Moon; five years later, according to Park Sang Joon (in a piece he published in a recent edition of Beyond, the in-flight magazine of Korean Air — November ’08, if you’re curious — of all things, which I picked up by chance) a group of Koreans studying in Tokyo published a translation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in their scientific journal Taeguk Hakbo.)
Why China now has the biggest SF-reading population on the planet, while the genre is still so marginal here, is of course what I’ve been looking into for a while now. (A search I document in this ongoing series.)
- And on that note, I’ll have a few more things to say about SF in Korea, and hopefully some upcoming writing on the subject and other projects… I’ll say more in a while. So there!