Utopiales and my provincialism
Speaking of my own cultural blind spots, I just saw some info about Utopiales, an upcoming speculative fiction "festival" to be held in Nantes, France.
Last year's Utopiales (review/con report) had upwards of 20,000 attendees, and apparently this year they're expecting 25,000. Recall that WorldCon tends to draw about 4000-5000 when it's in the US. DragonCon has more like 20K attendees, but its focus (as far as I can tell) is heavily on media and gaming and comics and such; Utopiales has writer guests like (from last year's guest list) Samuel R. Delany, Brian Aldiss, James Morrow, K.W. Jeter, David Brin, Robert Holdstock, Chris Priest, Terry Bisson, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Liz Williams, and Norman Spinrad. M. John Harrison and Stephen Baxter are going to be there this year, along with Tim Powers, Tom Disch, Jeffrey Ford, Morrow, and Lucius Shepard. It's a much more literary crowd than I'd expect from the size of the convention.
Which brings us back to the cultural blind spots thing. I haven't even heard of most of the non-Anglophone guests at Utopiales, and I don't think I've read anything by any of those I've heard of. I regret my monolingualism, but not enough to actually go learn another language. I feel like there's a whole world of sf out there not written in English, but I don't know how to go about finding out more about it, given my monolingualism and the scarcity of good translations. And we're not in a position to judge or translate stories submitted to us in languages other than English. We do occasionally get submissions that have been translated into English by the author or a friend of the author's, but so far we haven't seen any we've liked enough to publish.
So I'm pleased to see our review of Cosmos Latinos. It looks like exactly the kind of thing I've been looking for: a way to introduce myself to the works of some non-Anglophone sf writers, without actually having to learn another language.
