Aliette de Bodard

Gordon Van Gelder

Q-1.

What country/ethnicity/culture do you identify yourself with?

A-1.

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Er, it's a bit complicated... I'm French by nationality and have always lived in France (albeit with a brief 2-year stint in the UK), but I grew up with a strong English presence in the house. Ethnically, I'm half-French, half-Vietnamese, and both cultures have played a large part in my upbringing.

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Q-2.
 

SF/F/Horror/Slipstream genre has always been dominated by Anglo-American language. Is Anglo-American genre fiction is your major influence?
 

A-2.

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I think my influences are taken a bit all over the place: I actually read quite a bit of crime fiction and general fiction in addition to SF. Neither of these feels to me quite as overwhelmed by Anglo-American literature as SF, though of course they both include a significant Anglo-American segment. My major influences in genre fiction are certainly either British or American, or not very modern (I am influenced a lot by traditional fairytale Chinese or Vietnamese narratives, which I read or was told as a child).

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Q-3.
 

Give us the ratio of your reading of Anglo-American fiction against your own or non-English literature. Currently.
 

A-3.

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It depends on what you count as Anglo-American. I read a lot of Anglophone fiction, but a lot of it is from the UK. I'd say about 70-30 for Western Anglophone (US/UK/Aus/Can/etc.) vs non-Anglophone, but about 30-70 American vs non-American.

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Q-4.
 

To our dismay, a lot of so called World things are actually American ones. From Baseball's World series to our genre's Worldcon (almost) or World Fantasy Awards. How can we correct it to its real structure, into the real chaotic world?
 

A-4.

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I wish I had an answer to this――it's hard to escape the American domination of literature, especially if you don't overthink things and consume what is handy without trying to diversify your sources. I used to be convinced that the Hugo Awards and Worldcon were genuinely international fiction awards, and was rather dismayed to find out it wasn't the case.

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I think the only way that imbalance can ever be redressed is through promoting the works of SF written by people outside the Western Anglophone hegemony (I regroup under "Western Anglophone" America and additional countries of Western culture like the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand..., who might not have quite as much weight on genre but still benefit quite a bit from the American hegemony). There has been much progress: the World SF blog, imprints like Haikasoru, increased (though still minuscule!) translations from foreign languages.

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Sometimes, though, when I'm in a pessimistic mood, I do worry that Lavie Tidhar is right, and that all the stuff like the World SF blog mostly enables people from outside the Anglosphere to find each other and talk to each other, but by and large mainstream genre remains impervious to other voices outside the dominant tradition.

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Q-5.

Yet, it's true that we're culturally much influenced by American pop culture. Haruki Murakami cannot write like he does now without his American literature and Jazz influence. Is it the same for your case? Can you imagine you write without that influence at all?
 

A-5.

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I'm very bad at rewriting the past :) More seriously, it's hard for me to imagine writing without that influence at all――even if you didn't count all the American books I read, there is also the overwhelming presence of America in the movies shown on TV, the songs played on the radio, ... It's a really pervasive hegemony, and I think we'd all be very different persons without it!

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Q-6.
 

But these days a lot of young writers and editors work in English language and for American market. Do you hold any grudge against working like this? Or is it a natural reaction to that influence?
 

A-6.

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It's certainly a natural reaction to that influence; and, as someone who works in English for a mainly Western Anglophone market, I'm certainly not going to grudge this! I continue to think that it's a shame, not only that things work that way, but that members of the hegemony, by and large, continue blithely oblivious of its existence and the privilege that it grants them: for instance, many Western Anglophone writers take translation rights for granted (and will complain if they don't sell them!), whereas French writers know that they're extremely unlikely to be translated into multiple languages and read all over the world. There is a persistent disconnect between the Western Anglophone writers and everyone else outside the hegemony, which is a bit saddening.

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Q-7.
 

If and when you have to write in English, do you do that to English-American readers, or to the global readers?
 

A-7.
 

I write in English, but I've never specifically targeted my work to English-American readers――I count on enough passion and cultural similarities to get my work across, and so far it seems to have worked (though I have a big leg up by having grown up in France and partly in a Western culture).

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Q-8.

Is there any works or writers from your local scene you can sincerely recommend to the world readers? And why do you recommend them? Is it because they have no equivalent works or writers in Anglo-American scene? Or is it because they perfectly fit there and have many things in common that we should share? Which do you think is important, originality, or affinity?
 

A-8.
 

If I may――I find several aspects of that question slightly problematic, so I'll start with those before actually recommending French writers (of which I know plenty!)... The first is "originality", i.e. the idea that only works that have no equivalent in the Anglo-American scene are worth recommending. This is problematic to me because, by essence, it's taking the Anglo-American scene as reference――if there's already an Anglo-American writer doing similar things to a French writer, I'm quite unsure why the Anglo-American writer should be given precedence? (For all I know, maybe the French writer is doing a way better job than the American writer, or wrote his book twenty years before the Anglo-American one!) Also, to my mind, it's a very dangerous thing to recommend people because they are "original" and not doing things done elsewhere, because this can very easily degenerate into "only the most original writers should be translated", and then into "if so-and-so are not translated, it is because they're mediocre, uninspired hacks" (a sentiment I have seen expressed, time and time again, over the Internet, and which remains equally false no matter how often I read it!).

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The second is the idea of "affinity", and this also poses me problems. The idea that only things somehow "fit" for sharing on the world stage should be translated is also intensely problematic for me. I've seen that argument over the Internet, generally going something like, "but the reason Hollywood movies are exported everywhere in the world is because they are universal stories, and any 'local' productions are clearly too parochial for export". It fails to amuse or convince me, because the main reason Hollywood movies are so popular outside the US is because of cultural hegemonism backed by a serious exporting and lobbying machine that kills local productions in many countries.

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There are of course works that are not translatable or very difficult to translate (by and large, anything relying on humour is going to be hard to get across); there are also works that are uniquely, say, French, in the sense that they require a lot of knowledge of French culture and history to be fully understood (same for Vietnam; same for China...). However, for me, what this means is simply that a French person reading them will get quite different things from an American reader or a world reader. They might possibly not grasp all the nuances of the work. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't read it, or that they won't get anything from that reading. What I, as someone who grew up in France, get of reading Victor Hugo's Les Misérables in the original language, is very different from what an American would get out of reading that book; but both of us can enjoy the story on different levels with different readings――and this is just the way literature should work. I think it's more a question of how open-minded and curious readers are, rather than of "fitness" of books to be presented on the world stage.

Er, sorry. Now that I've completely deconstructed the question... I would recommend the following French/French-Canadian writers, simply because they write good SF which deserves to be more widely known:

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-Elisabeth Vonarburg: she writes thoughtful SF with a sharp eye for detail and a great imagination. I particularly loved her Queen of Memory, which is an alternate history reimagining of French history and a sharp look at colonialism in Southeast Asia.

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-Alain Damasio: his Horde Against the Wind, which follows the quest of a diverse band of adventurers to find the source of all winds in a world ravaged by storms, was a very original and groundbreaking book both in theme and in style.

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- Jeanne A-Debats: a very strong voice who writes radical and ecologist SF.

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- Pierre Bordage: one of our bestselling SF writers, he writes space opera tinged with mysticism. I loved his Warriors of Silence series, and my husband recommends his latest, the Panca Brotherhood.

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Q-9.
 

Have you ever read and liked any Japanese works, in and out of our genre? What aspect of it attracted you?
 

A-9.
 

I have read some works, though many of them are not genre (I read a lot of Japanese poetry, as well as The Tale of Genji and The Tale of the Heike, and quite a few manga as well, though I'd imagine that was hardly the point of the question!). In genre, the last Japanese work I read was Harmony by Project Itoh, which was a brilliant satire of the health system and a frightening imagining of where it could go.

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What I like from reading those is having a glimpse into Japanese culture, and a genuinely different way of seeing things: for all its insistence on mindblowing difference, much of SF can be quite parochial, and it's disturbing to see how it repeats not only the same tropes, but also the same point of view on those tropes, over and over again. I was recently reading Le Guin's Four Ways to Forgiveness, which focuses on decolonisation, and I was struck by how much the decolonisation depicted was inseparable from American-style slavery. I'm not saying it's not a brilliant work of fiction (it is!), but I was still left a bit disappointed by the inability of genre to look beyond Western Anglophone history and its tropes when inventing new starfaring societies.

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Q-10.
 

Could you please explain what you do to promote foreign literature to your readers or your own works to foreign readers?
 

A-10.

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I've made a conscious effort in previous years to diversify my reading sources――though at the same time I've become increasingly aware of how few works are translated into English. I run an irregular feature at my blog which summarises the books I've read and liked, and I try to include genre books from other sources beyond the US. I'm also an irregular contributor at Lavie Tidhar's World SF blog, and finally I'm doing my best to promote other writers who write in English outside the Western Anglophone hegemony――people like Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Zen Cho, and newish writer Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

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Regarding the promotion of my own works, I'm not aware of many efforts beyond the obvious ones of keeping a blog, a regular twitterfeed and trying to have interesting content!