Foreign language genre and Tis the season for awards... nearly.

I've just noticed that the World Fantasy Awards were announced last week and this year's winner of best novel is Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Beach.    Originally published in 2002 in Japanese, the book isn't really about Kafka at all, it's about UFO's and ghosts.

I don't normally follow the WFA's, in fact looking back over the past winners I realise that I've only read a handful of them and most of them I've never even heard of.  Admittedly this is because I don't read much fantasy (though I've just finished Tamara Siler Jones' latest book Valley of the Soul for review) and also because I've only really started taking my Sci-fi all that seriously over the last couple of years.  So that's an excuse... not that it's a particularly good one.

However, I was intrigued to see this award go to a book that was translated from the Japanese and I realised that, by and large, I really don't know much about what goes on in genre outside of english.  In film this is easy enough to solve as all you need to do is rent a load of Italian exploitation films, Japanese ghost stories or french polars and you're away... but with books we're far more dependent upon the whims of translation, leaving us to wonder how much good stuff we're missing and how a bad book can give a bad impression of a whole scene.

I'm actually bilingual so I can and do frequently read books in French but, weirdly, the french Sci-fi scene is entirely dominated by english translations (as well as having a Fantasy to Sci-fi sales ratio that makes the english market look balanced).  However, what is interesting about the French genre scene is how much more creative their graphic novel/comics are.  Rather than being dominated by super heroes as the english comics scene is, the french comics scene is dominated largely by comedy stuff but also really off the wall fantasy and sci-fi.  As I've mentioned before, French genre is heavily influenced by Jodorowsky's Incal and as a result is more visual and artistic than the bulk of english language fantasy and Sci-fi. 

Speaking of awards, it's nearly the end of 2006 (Xmas decorations being up and all) so soon we shall start the 2007 awards cycle again, particularly the Arthur C. Clarke awards and the British Science Fiction Association (or BSFA) awards.  I tend to pay more attention to these than I do the more prestigious Hugos because in recent years they've tended to be spot-on, particularly the BSFAs as they've never suffered from the Hugo's tendency to go to anything except sci-fi.  I'm doubly excited about the BSFAs this year as it's the first year I get to vote seeing as I finally joined up a couple of months ago.

So who do I fancy will be appearing on next year's shortlists?

Well, so far I've got three books that I think will probably appear:

Charlie Stross' Glasshouse
Jon Courtenay Grimwood's End of the World Blues
Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End

We shall see what other great books this year has for us, but I actually think that Grimwood's latest will take some beating.

Comments

[Niall Harrison]

Minor problem: novels have to have been published in the UK to be eligible.

http://www.bsfa.co.uk/index.cfm/section.categories2006

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Oh dear... well I guess that's Stross and Vinge out of the picture.

[Niall Harrison]

There's a vaguely complete list of 2006 UK science fiction novels here:

http://urchin.earth.li/cgi-bin/twic/wiki/view.pl?page=UKSFBooks2006

(Though, of course, fantasy novels are also eligible for the BSFA award.)

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Excellent... that's a good resource, thanks. It should be an interesting competition this year seeing as most of the usual suspects don't have books out, it'll be a good opportunity to give some publicity to less known authors.

Of course, if fantasy novels are allowed in then I have a horrible feeling that The Last Witchfinder might make an appearance, seeing as I was apparently the only person in the world not to like than novel.