A thought surfaced in my mind: Tabula Rasa. If I want to survive this I’ll have to hurry. If it reaches my brain or my heart, it’s over. In my head I prepared a schedule to use the fluxer every three hours or as often as I needed it.
Op dat moment kwam er een gedachte in me op: Tabula Rasa. Als ik dit wil overleven dan moet ik haast maken. Als het mijn hersenen bereikt of mijn hart aantast, dan is het over. In mijn hoofd maakte ik een schema om elke drie uur of zo vaak als nodig mijn fluxer te gebruiken.
Mr. Andrés Batista did not believe in ghosts. Nor in premonitions, curses or witchcraft. He was interested only in bare facts. For six decades he had served as regional magistrate with fierce devotion to truth, justice and demonstration through tangible evidence. He considered it an insult to human intelligence to believe in tawdry superstitions. He was a self-declared enemy of lies.
Don Andrés Batista no creía en fantasmas. Ni en predicciones, ni en maldiciones ni en brujas. Para él lo único real eran los hechos desnudos. Durante seis décadas había ejercido la magistratura con fiero criterio aferrado a la verdad, la justicia y la demostración mediante la prueba confiable. Consideraba por debajo de la inteligencia humana dar fe a supersticiones “baratas”, amén de ser un enemigo declarado de la mentira.
In this special feature, Emad El-Din Aysha - an academic, journalist, and translator, and member of the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction, which was formed in 2012 after the the Arab Spring - interviews Farzin Souri, editor-in-chief of the Iranian SF magazine 3Feed.
For the latest in our author/ translator interview series, we're delighted to welcome Mike Jansen, writer and translator of the story 'Fluxless'/ 'Fluxloos', which appears in our December 3rd, 2018 issue. Mike was kind enough to provide bilingual answers to our questions, so we hope you enjoy reading more about his work, and about the Dutch SF scene.
Kun je ons iets over jezelf en je schrijven vertellen – hoe ben je ooit begonnen met fantastische literatuur?
Can you tell us more about yourself and your writing – what first got you into speculative fiction?
Ik heb altijd alles gelezen dat los en vast zat, sciencefiction, fantasy en horror.…
Read in Italian here
People who know me know that for some years I have been involved in an almost impossible mission: to promote and spread not much the concept of SF “diversity” (a positive idea that hides, in my opinion, a fundamental error, that is diversity from a common standard; from a normality that has become a benchmark for evaluating any phenomenon, yet which doesn’t exist in reality) but instead a fairer distribution of “the future” and therefore of opportunities between dominant cultures and languages and those ones considered minor for the only reason of being “other”.
Fortunately, as a small publisher and SF writer, in five years of translations from at least six languages, and with a catalogue of over seventy stories published from around the world I can affirm:
Quality has no colour,
Quality has no nation,
Quality has no language,
Quality belongs to everyone.…
Read in English here
Le persone che mi conoscono sanno che da alcuni anni sono impegnato in una missione quasi impossibile: promuovere e diffondere non tanto il concetto di “diversità” – un’idea positiva ma che nasconde, a mio giudizio, un errore di fondo, la diversità cioè da uno standard comune, da una normalità diventata metro di valutazione di qualsiasi fenomeno, il quale tuttavia nelle realtà delle cose non esiste – bensì una più equa ripartizione di futuro e quindi di opportunità tra la cultura e la lingua dominanti e quelle ritenute minori per il solo fatto di essere “altro”.
Per fortuna, da piccolo editore e divulgatore di fantascienza, in 5 anni di traduzioni da almeno 6 lingue e con un catalogo di oltre 70 storie pubblicate da ogni angolo del mondo posso affermare quella che, pur sembrando una banalità, è tuttavia il presupposto di quanto sta avvenendo nel genere dalla SF nonostante non se ne tenga conto:
La qualità non ha colore,
La qualità non ha nazione,
La qualità non ha lingua,
La qualità appartiene a tutti.…
I knew that the way in which the language itself evoked a particular time and place was what made the novel special, and that these subtle flavors could easily be lost in translation.
Thank you to Small Beer Press for giving us permission to publish this excerpt from Su Wei's novel The Invisible Valley, translated by Austin Woerner and released on April 3rd 2018.
