World SF

Last updated

World SF is a loose term for international, or global, speculative fiction, predominantly from the non-Anglophone world. An early use of the term came with the establishment of World SF, an association of SF professionals in 1976. [1] According to the third edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the term was partly revived by the author Lavie Tidhar, leading to the establishment of the World SF Blog, [2] which ran 2009-2013. Early on, the Filipino blogger Charles A. Tan became involved with the blog, contributing much of the original material - including interviews with authors, reviews and the occasional editorial, including the important World SF: Our Possible Future in 2012. [3] Tan was himself twice nominated for the World Fantasy Award, for his own blog, Bibliophile Stalker, [4] and has edited several anthologies of Filipino speculative fiction.

Contents

For his work on the promotion of global speculative fiction, Tidhar was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2011, [5] and won a 2012 BSFA Award for Non-Fiction in 2012. [6] The Polish SF scholar Konrad Walewski argued that "Tidhar deliberately utilized the term World SF as a specific act of disagreement and dissatisfaction with what he considered to be the gradual ossification of the original organization". [7]

In parallel, Tidhar edited three anthologies of World SF, The Apex Book of World SF series, between 2009-2014. Significant authors featured in the series included Lauren Beukes (South Africa), Zoran Živković (Serbia), Aliette de Bodard (France), Hannu Rajaniemi (Finland), Xia Jia (China), Karin Tidbeck (Sweden), Guy Hasson (Israel), Tunku Halim (Malaysia), Samit Basu (India), Ekaterina Sedia (Russia) and many others. The series was continued in 2015 with a fourth volume edited by Mahvesh Murad, with Tidhar remaining as series editor. [8]

World SF should not be confused with WorldCon which, despite its name, is a predominantly (though not exclusively) American institution.

Further reading

Anthologies

Novels

Short story collections

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken MacLeod</span> Scottish science fiction writer

Kenneth Macrae MacLeod is a Scottish science fiction writer. His novels The Sky Road and The Night Sessions won the BSFA Award. MacLeod's novels have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Campbell Memorial awards for best novel on multiple occasions. A techno-utopianist, MacLeod's work makes frequent use of libertarian socialist themes; he is a three-time winner of the libertarian Prometheus Award. Prior to becoming a novelist, MacLeod studied biology and worked as a computer programmer. He sits on the advisory board of the Edinburgh Science Festival.

Neil George Ayres is an English short fiction writer, born in east London in 1979. He grew up in Tower Hamlets, Essex and Spain.

Nir Yaniv is an Israeli multidisciplinary artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lavie Tidhar</span> Israeli writer

Lavie Tidhar is an Israeli-born writer, working across multiple genres. He has lived in the United Kingdom and South Africa for long periods of time, as well as Laos and Vanuatu. As of 2013, Tidhar lives in London. His novel Osama won the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, beating Stephen King's 11/22/63 and George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons. His novel A Man Lies Dreaming won the £5000 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, for Best British Fiction, in 2015. He won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 2017, for Central Station.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sean Wallace</span> American publisher

Sean Wallace is an American science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologist, editor, and publisher best known for founding the publishing house Prime Books and for co-editing three magazines, Clarkesworld Magazine, The Dark Magazine, and Fantasy Magazine. He has been nominated a number of times by both the Hugo Awards and the World Fantasy Awards, won three Hugo Awards and two World Fantasy Awards, and has served as a World Fantasy Award judge.

<i>The Future Fire</i> Science fiction magazine

The Future Fire is a small press, online science fiction magazine, run by a joint British-US team of editors. The magazine was launched in January 2005 and releases issues four times a year, with stories, articles, and reviews in both HTML and PDF formats. At times issues appeared more sporadically than this.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lauren Beukes</span> South African writer

Lauren Beukes is a South African novelist, short story writer, journalist and television scriptwriter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aliette de Bodard</span> French-American speculative fiction writer

Aliette de Bodard is a French-American speculative fiction writer.

Anil Menon is an Indian writer of speculative fiction, as well as a computer scientist with a Ph.D. from Syracuse University, who has authored research papers and edited books on Evolutionary Algorithms. His research addressed the mathematical foundations of replicator systems, majorization, and reconstruction of probabilistic databases, in collaboration with professors Kishan Mehrotra, Chilukuri Mohan, and Sanjay Ranka. After working for several years as a computer scientist, he started to write fiction. His short stories and reviews have appeared in the anthology series Exotic Gothic, Strange Horizons, Interzone, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Chiaroscuro, Sybil's Garage, Apex Digest, and others.

The BSFA Awards are given every year by the British Science Fiction Association. The BSFA Award for Best Artwork is open to any artwork with speculative themes that first appeared in the previous year. Provided the artwork hasn't been published before it doesn't matter where it appears. The ceremonies are named after the year that the eligible works were published, despite the awards being given out in the next year.

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards was a literary award for science fiction and fantasy works translated into English. The first award was presented in 2011 for works published in 2010. Two awards were given, one for long form and one for short form. Both the author and translator receive a trophy and a cash prize of $350. The award was supported a number of ways including direct donations from the public, the Speculative Literature Foundation, prominent academics in particular staff at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), home of the Eaton Collection, one of the world’s largest collections of science fiction and fantasy literature. The last award was for 2013, and the award officially closed in October 2014.

<i>Salon Fantastique</i>

Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy is a fantasy short story anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

Pornokitsch is a British "geek culture" blog that published reviews and news concerning speculative fiction and other genre fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Han Song (writer)</span>

Han Song is a Chinese science fiction writer and a journalist at the Xinhua News Agency.

Benjanun Sriduangkaew is a Thai writer of science fiction and fantasy who is also known for controversial online criticism. She was a finalist for the 2014 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the 2014 BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction, for Scale-Bright.

Abyss & Apex Magazine (A&A) is a long-running, semi-pro online speculative fiction magazine. The title of the zine comes from a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), "And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." The stories and poetry therefore follow the pattern of "how would humans react?" if a new technology or a type of magic or supernatural power affected them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Usman T. Malik</span> Pakistani speculative fiction

Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani speculative fiction. His short fiction has been published in magazines and books such as The Apex Book of World SF, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Black Static, and in a number of "year's best" anthologies. He is the first Pakistani to win the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction (2014) and has won the British Fantasy Award (2016). He has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award (2016), nominated again for the Stoker Award (2018), has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award, and has been nominated for multiple Locus Awards.

Fiona Moore is a Canadian academic, writer and critic based in London (UK). She is best known for writing works of TV criticism, short fiction, stage and audio plays, and academic texts on the anthropology of business and organisations. Her research work has been described by Professor Roger Goodman at the University of Oxford's Nissan Institute as "engaging head-on with the growing and increasingly complex literature on transnationalism and globalisation and relating it constructively to key ideas in symbolic anthropology" A graduate of the University of Toronto and the University of Oxford, she is Chair of Business Anthropology at Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2020, she was shortlisted for the BSFA Award for Shorter Fiction.

Sarah Anne Langton is a British artist and graphic designer specialising in science fiction and fantasy illustration. She won the 2016 BSFA Award for Best Artwork for her cover of Central Station by Lavie Tidhar, and is a three-times British Fantasy Award nominee for Best Artist.

<i>Osama</i> (novel) 2011 alternate history novel by Lavie Tidhar

Osama is a 2011 alternate history metafictional novel by Lavie Tidhar. It was first published by PS Publishing.

References

  1. ↑ The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Third Edition, "World SF" http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/world_sf
  2. ↑ "The World SF Blog". The World SF Blog.
  3. ↑ "World SF: Our Possible Future". The World SF Blog.
  4. ↑ Charles. "Bibliophile Stalker".
  5. ↑ 2011 World Fantasy Award Winners & Nominees
  6. ↑ "BSFA". BSFA - The official website of the British Science Fiction Association.
  7. ↑ "Culture : World SF : SFE : Science Fiction Encyclopedia".
  8. ↑ "Cover Art and Table of Contents for The Apex Book of World SF 4!". Tor.com.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.