Out of this World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium by Rachel S. Cordasco (review)

Reviewed by: Out of this World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium by Rachel S. Cordasco Regina Kanyu Wang Into a Real World. Rachel S. Cordasco. Out of this World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium. U of Illinois P, 2021. 277 pp. $60 hc, $19.95 ebk. As Rachel S. Cordasco writes in her introduction, “The early twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion of speculative fiction in English translation (SFT).” Out of this World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium comes at the right time to provide a panoramic overview and abundant details of this explosion. This study is well written and precise, and includes many examples and an organized and comprehensive framework, making it user-friendly for both academic and non-academic readers. It is divided into fourteen chapters focusing on SFT in fourteen different languages, with an introduction and a list of resources and an index at the end. Such an arrangement allows readers to navigate through the book easily and directs them to related resources for those who want to explore more. It is suitable for scholars who are interested in SFT as a global cultural phenomenon, researchers who are focusing on speculative fiction from a particular language, and readers who are looking to learn more about books in translation. Cordasco identifies the research objective of her study clearly in its title: speculative fiction in translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium. In her introduction, she sets boundaries on what she includes and excludes. She focuses only on works that have been translated into English from other languages and published in print (either novels, collections, or anthologies). She looks at adult-level speculative fiction, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and more. By clarifying her range, she limits the scale of the book in a practical manner and opens doors to future research with different emphases, such as short stories or young-adult books. She also provides a brief introduction to the larger historical context of SFT, acknowledging both earlier [End Page 484] attempts in the 1970s and recent efforts in the twenty-first century to enhance the communication among speculative fictions written in different languages all over the world and to promote SFT. She also points out two important facts in the genre’s history: its Anglophone domination and its gender imbalance. According to the data she provides, both are improving, or can be expected to improve with the publication of this book. Cardasco’s short yet informative introduction lays the foundation for a thorough analysis of SFT in each selected language in the chapters that follow. The fourteen chapters of the book examine SFT from Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish sf in alphabetical order. Cordasco chooses those languages that have had more than ten books translated into English, with the exception of Korean sf (nine), given its recent boom. Each chapter begins with a short introduction by an expert from that particular language on the general context of speculative fiction in its original language, though Cordasco contributes the Russian one herself. These experts are the scholars, writers, editors, translators, and more who are working at the frontier to bring about more SFT. Their introductions serve as good entry points to speculative fiction in these particular languages before moving to the details of what has been translated. Cordasco further divides each chapter into sections on subgenres: science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, dystopia, and more. Some also include a particular section on anthologies, while others have more detailed subsections based on themes. For languages that are used in multiple countries such as French, German, and Spanish, she divides the sections by countries first before diving into subgenres. In each section, works are listed chronologically according to the years that they were published in English. At the end of each chapter, Cordasco lists all her primary and secondary sources. This makes the book similar to a well-coded electronic map: readers can zoom into a particular language, region, or subgenre to quickly locate the information they...