Speculative Fiction in Translation

by Juhani Karila; translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers

In the utterly original, genre-defying, English-language debut of Finnish author Juhani Karila, a young woman's annual pilgrimage to her home in Lapland to catch an elusive pike in three days is complicated by a host of mythical creatures, a murder detective hot on her trail, and a deadly curse hanging over her head.

Related genres: Magical Realism, Nature Fiction, Folklore.

by Olga Ravn; translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken 

The Employees chronicles the fate of the interstellar Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids. Olga Ravn's prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.

Related genres: Science fiction.

by Amin Maalouf; translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer

Anna is utterly lost. Still in shock after the birth of her son, she moves to snowbound Stockholm with her newborn and boyfriend, where a chasm soon opens between the couple. Lonely and isolated, Anna reads too many internet articles and shops for clothes she cannot afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she must read and write herself back into her proper place in the world. 

Related genres: Science Fiction, Dystopi.

by Maru Ayase; translated from the Japanese by Haydn Trowell 

Portrayed as a pure woman who enjoys sex by her novelist husband, Rui, tired of her privacy and identity being stripped away, consumes a bowl of seeds and buds and roots sprout all over her body, allowing her to break free from her husband by growing into a forest. 

Related genres: Horror, Fantasy, Supernatural, Magical Realism.

by Olga Tokarczuk; translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind...

Related genres: Mystery, Thriller, Horror.

by ed. Margrét Helgadóttir, various translators

Storytelling has been a major force in the Nordic countries for thousands of years, from the epic Icelandic Sagas to best-selling crime with a noir flair. This anthology collects stories by the best names in Nordic speculative fiction, many of which are appearing in English for the first time. Across dark dystopian sci-fi, mythical fantasy, and terrifying horror, from the rational to the eccentric, these stories combine a deep sense of place with social criticism, themes of loneliness and identity, and the concern for humanity’s impact on the wilderness.

Related genres: Science fiction, Fantasy.

by Mariana Enríquez; translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell 

In 1981, a young father and son set out on a road trip across Argentina, devastated by the mysterious death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travels to her family home near Iguazú Falls, where they must confront the horrific legacy she has bequeathed. For the woman they are grieving came from a family like no other—a centuries-old secret society called the Order that pursues eternal life through ghastly rituals. For Gaspar, the son, this cult is his destiny. As Gaspar grows up he must learn to harness his developing supernatural powers, while struggling to understand what kind of man his mother wanted him to be. Meanwhile Gaspar's father tries to protect his son from his wife's violent family while still honoring the woman he loved so desperately.

Related genres: Horror, Supernatural, Fantasy.

by Gunnhild Øyehaug; translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson

In Evil Flowers, a precise but madcap collection of short stories, Gunnhild Øyehaug extracts the bizarre from the mundane and reveals the strange, startling brilliance of everyday life.

Related genres: Fantasy.

by Jon Bilbao; translated form the Spanish by Katie Whittemore

Jon and Katharina spend the winter in Jon's childhood home on the Cantabrian coast, lonely and bored, ambivalent about their precarious freelance jobs and disconnected in their relationship. Yet the couple's routine will soon be disturbed when one rainy night, they witness strange lights in the sky over the village. The next morning, ufologists begin to arrive in the village, anxious to make extraterrestrial contact. The morning brings other unexpected guests: Jon's distant cousin, Markel, and his companion, the silent, alluring Virginia. The visit becomes increasingly uncomfortable as--like the ufologists camped out in view of the house--the strangers stay on and show little sign of planning to leave. Days stretch into weeks, even as the cousins can't remember ever having met, Virginia's behavior becomes subtly threatening, and Jon begins doubt that Markel is who he says.

Related genres: Science fiction, Magical Realism.

by Mónica Ojeda; translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker

Six young artists share an apartment in Barcelona. All of them are connected in different ways to Nefando, a controversial cult video game whose purpose remains a mystery. In the parallel reality of the game, players found relief from the pain of past trauma and present shame, but also a frighteningly elastic sense of self and ethics. Is Nefando a game for horror enthusiasts, a challenge to players' morals, or a poetic exercise? What happens in a virtual world that admits every taboo? Unsparing, addictive, and perverse, Nefando takes us to the darkest corners of the web, revealing the inevitable entanglement of digital and physical worlds, and of technology and horror.

Related genres: Science Fiction.
 

by Djuna; translated from the Korean by Anton Hur

The future of humanity hangs in the balance as a group of rival forces with a far-flung range of grievances race to be the first to retrieve data that is powering a space elevator on the Korean island of Patusan.

Related genres: Science Fiction Fantasy, Dystopia. 

by Izumi Suzuki; translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O'Horan

A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki's stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.

Related genres: Science fiction, Fantasy, Absurdist Fiction.

by Chi Ta-wei; translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich 

It is the late 21st century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she’s too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city’s best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality.

Related genres: Science fiction, Psychological Fiction, Fantasy, Dystopia.

edited by Sarah Coolidge; translated from the Spanish by various translators

In ten chilling stories from an ensemble cast of contemporary Latin American writers, including Mariana Enriquez, Camila Sosa Villlada, Claudia Hernández, and Mónica Ojeda, horror infiltrates the unexpected, taboo regions of the present-day psyche.

Related genres: Horror.

by Bora Chung; translated from the Korean by Anton Hur

Suffused with the author's inimitable wry humor as well as surprisingly tender moments, this brilliantly written new collection is filled with stories of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality.

Related genres: Science Fiction, Horror, Thriller.

by Yoko Tawada; translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani

As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm.

Related genres: Science fiction, Dystopia.

by Stanisław Lem; translated from the Polish by Marc E. Heine

Six explorers—the Captain, Doctor, Engineer, Chemist, Physicist, and Cyberneticist—crash land on a beautiful but strange planet, fourth from another sun. The landscape is bizarre, hosting acrid deserts, hissing trees, and thick spiderlike vegetation. But it is the signs of humanity that are most puzzling. In a labyrinth of plant-shaped buildings are dead ends, passageways, domes, vaulted ceilings, and giant statues. And everywhere there are images of death: mass graves, bodies in ditches and wells, clusters of egglike structures filled with skeletons. Something is wrong with the inhabitants of Eden. But as the crew unlocks the secrets of this twisted society, the most haunting fact they must face is how similar it is to their own.

Related genres: Science Fiction Fantasy.

by Yōko Ogawa; translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

An Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance finds a young novelist hiding her editor from mysterious authorities who would erase all memories of people who once existed.

Related genres: Science fiction, Dystopia.

by Haruki Murakami; translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel

A teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle—yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.

Related genres: Magical Realism, Fantasy.

by Jacqueline Harpman; translated from the French by Ros Schwartz

Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl-the fortieth prisoner-sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman's modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.

Related genres: Science fiction, Dystopian Fiction, Fantasy.

by Hubert Haddad; translated from the French by Alyson Waters 

A contemporary Frankenstein that defies expectations, this is a thrilling novel, couched in luminous, captivating prose, Journalist Câedric Allyn-Weberson who is paralyzed from the neck down by an accident, is the perfect candidate for a full-body transplant, but after the surgery, he experiences physical and existential struggle with his recovery.

Related genres: Science fiction, Thriller.

edited by Sarah Coolidge; translated from the Chinese by various translators

Lightly touching on issues of urbanization, sexuality, and propaganda, this anthology collection builds a world both utterly disorienting and disturbing familiar, prompting the question: Where does reality end and absurdity begin in a world pushed to its very limits?

Related genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy.

by Mikhail Bulgakov; translated from the Russian by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor  

One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him.

Related genres: Magical Realism, Fantasy.

by Haruki Murakami; translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum

The last surviving victim of an experiment that implanted the subjects' heads with electrodes that decipher coded messages is the unnamed narrator. Half the chapters are set in Tokyo, where the narrator negotiates underground worlds populated by INKlings, dodges opponents of both sides of a raging high-tech infowar, and engages in an affair with a beautiful librarian with a gargantuan appetite. In alternating chapters he tries to reunite with his mind and his shadow, from which he has been severed by the grim, dark "replacement" consciousness implanted in him by a dotty neurophysiologist. Both worlds share the unearthly theme of unicorn skulls that moan and glow.

Related Genres: Science fiction, Fantasy.

by Stanisław Lem; translated from the Polish by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox 

When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he finds a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the living physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others examining the planet, Kelvin learns, are plagued with their own repressed and newly corporeal memories. The Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories, though its purpose in doing so is unknown, forcing the scientists to shift the focus of their quest and wonder if they can truly understand the universe without first understanding what lies within their hearts.

Related genres: Science fiction.

by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky; translated from the Russian by Olena Bormashenko

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems.

Related genres: Science fiction, Dystopia.

by Italo Calvino; translated from the Italian by William Weaver

In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo-Tartar emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts the emperor with tales of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. Soon it becomes clear that each of these fantastic places is really the same place.

Related genres: Magical Realism.
 

by Mikhail Bulgakov; translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny

In this absurdly comical story which can also be read as a parable of the Russian Revolution, a world famous Moscow professor transplants a human male's testicles and pituitary gland into a stray dog, creating a worryingly human animal.

Related genres: Science Fiction.