Back in 2009, I had also begun the World SF Blog, initially a promotional outlet that very quickly outgrew its original purpose. In its four years it published hundreds of articles, links, interviews and discussions on every aspect of international SF, and itself began to publish fiction. By the time it had ended, in 2013, it had won a British Science Fiction Association Award for non-fiction. People prominently involved with the blog included Charles Tan, a massive supporter of the entire project, who took on the task of producing much of the original non-fiction content of the site, and fiction editors Debbie Moorhouse and then Sarah Newton. To them, I can only offer my sincere thanks.
Alongside the blog and the anthologies, we also began the World SF Travel Fund, to allow international writers to travel to the World Fantasy Convention on part of full funding. We were able to run this for three years and send several people to the convention.
I watched the number of writers virtually explode; the rise of online publications such as Clarkesworld, which made a conscious effort to publish global works, as well as translations; the death, finally, of the dreaded print-only submissions as even the last of the print magazines at last adopted electronic submissions, removing one great big barrier to publication; and the rise of new, specialized anthologies such as the excellent Afro SF series.
The world was, slowly, changing.
When I look back on it all, I wonder how it ever happened. But the truth is, we were there all along. The future of science fiction is dependent on its global nature, on its international authors, who each bring their own unique visions and experience, their own background and culture, and their shared love of the fantastic to their work. From Ghana to India, from Mexico to France, from Israel to Cuba, science fiction is alive and kicking, a vibrant new generation of writers changing the face of the genre one story at a time.
I think that’s something worth celebrating.
3.
My use of the term ‘World SF’ is, of course, a joke.
‘World SF’ came about initially as a rubber-stamp association of writers back in the halcyon disco days of the 1970s as a way for writers from the West (i.e. America and Britain) to meet up with their counterparts in the East (i.e. the Soviet Union). The Soviet writers required an official document of invitation, which the World SF Association gladly provided. Their meetings were, by all accounts, great fun, but in truth did little more than prove an opportunity for socializing over drinks. Which was, of course, the point! There were a couple of associated awards, one for translation, but they didn’t last long, and a couple of anthologies like the Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction back in 1986.
That’s over thirty years since an international SF anthology was published, if you’re counting.
The first ‘World Science Fiction Convention’ took place in New York in 1939. It was named not for being a collaborative, international project, but because the ‘World’s Fair’ took place in New York that year, and it seemed fun to give a grand title to a tiny event. The Worldcon immediately split in two between rival factions of fans, one of which banned the other from attending. It has ever been so.
What people tend to forget is that science fiction as we know it was created by a Jewish immigrant from, of all places, Luxembourg. Hugo Gernsbacher (later, Gernsback) arrived in America aged twenty. English wasn’t his first language, likely not even his second. He not only gave science fiction its name, founding Amazing Stories in 1926, but also created modern fandom, recognizing the power this new kind of literature could have over its readers. The prominent authors of the time called him ‘Hugo the Rat’. The anti-Semitism and racism of many of those early practitioners no longer goes unremarked, thankfully. And poor Hugo is still celebrated, at least, in the Hugo Awards.
At some point, I decided to claim back the ‘World SF’ term for myself. It was my idea of a joke, but it had a serious purpose. The term was only used by and for anglophone writers and editors before. And they were not going to help me. So I took it back, and stamped it on a bunch of books, because the only way international SF was going to flourish was if we did it by ourselves. I watched editors return story after story; I watched publishers make mealy mouthed excuses about not publishing international works. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if it were set in New York?’ I was told once, plaintively. ‘Or at least London?’ Many of the contributors in this volume have heard the same.
So I called this book The Best of World SF. It is for everyone who’s never been to London or New York, or doesn’t much care for those fine cities’ peculiarities, or who only knows America from the television screen. The future doesn’t belong to London or New York, after all. It belongs to everyone.
4.
I feel obliged to offer a very brief snapshot of the genre rockface as it is at the time of writing, if only for the benefit of any hopeful writers reading this. Perhaps it will remain as merely a historical footnote.
The three main print magazines remain. Analog, Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF) continue, though editorial changes have made them more accessible in recent years, and the last magazine to hold out for print submissions, F&SF, finally succumbed with the appointment of a new editor. They publish good works (including my own) but as attention shifted online they have suffered somewhat in the notice of the field when it comes to
