Best Non-English Science Fiction Books

Three Body Problem (chinese)

by Liu, Cixin

If you are looking for an introduction to the best Chinese science fiction, look no further than Lui Cixin's stunning and much celebrated award-winning trilogy which has sold nearly half a million copies so far. Not ba...

The Sfwa European Hall Of Fame

by Morrow, James

Short stories are often a great way for readers to discover new writers, so they are often a key route by which non-Anglophone writers can reach an English readership. Even so, anthologies traditionally sell less well th...

R.u.r.

by Karel Capek

Czech is hardly a widely spoken language, and in the years immediately after the First World War Czechoslovakia had barely gained its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire which had largely swamped Czech culture...

Roadside Picnic

by Arkady Strugatsky

During the Cold War, little of the science fiction being written in the Soviet Union managed to reach the West. The one exception was the work of the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who wrote getting on for 20 nove...

From The Earth To The Moon

by Verne, Jules

Of all the works of translated science fiction, there can be few rivals for the mass and continuing popularity of Jules Verne's extraordinary voyages. Between 1863 and his death in 1905, he produced well over 50 novels (...

Labyrinths

by Jorge Luis Borges

Labyrinths, a collection of ficciones and other short pieces from several of Borges's earlier books, was the first opportunity the mass of English speakers had to encounter the work of this extraordinary Argentinian writ...

Troll: A Love Story

by Johanna Sinisalo

One of the things that should make fiction in translation so appealing to science fiction readers is that the stories are often built around very different cultures, traditions, and assumptions so that we are immediately...

Nest Of Worlds

by Marek S. Huberath

To illustrate the problems associated with translation, this novel was a major success in its native Poland, but even though there was a very fine translation already in existence by Michael Kandel, it took a ridiculousl...

We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

We was written in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and though Zamyatin was himself a Bolshevik, the novel expressed his disquiet at the structuring of society that the Soviet Union was planning; it was,...

Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory To The End Of Mankind

Rosny was the pseudonym of the Belgian writer, Joseph-Henri Boëx, who rivals his near contemporary, H.G. Wells, as one of the founding figures of European science fiction. Or at least, his reputation would have rivalled...

The Cusanus Game

by Wolfgang Jeschke

By the middle of this century, Northern Europe is a nuclear wasteland, with economic and political consequences that threaten the whole of human civilisation. In Italy, a young woman is recruited by an institute trying t...

Harmony

by Project Itoh

Like China, Japan has one of the liveliest science fiction scenes in the world, and one of the least known in the West. Very few Japanese science fiction writers have seen their work translated into English (though the r...

Solaris

by Lem, Stanislaw

Psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at a research station hovering over the ocean-covered planet Solaris and finds it nearly deserted: his mentor is dead, and the two surviving scientists seem to be hiding something. Then K...

The Angel Maker

by Stefan Brijs

In a small village at the point where the Dutch, Belgian and German borders meet, a strange doctor arrives with three even stranger children. Slowly, as we come to understand what is going on, we realise that the beautif...

The End Of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

Over the last few years a distinct strand of alternate history writing has appeared in which a woman lives and relives her life multiple times during the twentieth century. Leading examples of this type of story include...

The Time Ship

by Enrique Gaspar

Before the end of the 19th century, everyone who travelled in time did so by falling asleep or being transported by magic, devices which gave the traveller no control over their journey. It is popularly assumed t...

Niels Klim's Underground Travels

by Ludvig Holberg

Ludvig Holberg was a Norwegian philosopher and playwright whose only novel this was. A utopian satire that poked fun at a lot of contemporary issues, it would have created an uproar in Norway at the time, so Holberg publ...

The Invention Of Morel

by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Adolfo Bioy Casares was the lifelong friend and occasional collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges, but he was also a considerable writer of fantastic literature in his own right, and nothing quite matches the strange, hauntin...

The Year 2440

by Louis Sébastien Mercier

Mercier was a dramatist and essayist, who was also a member of the Convention at the time of the French Revolution, and on the eve of the Revolution he poured his views on what was wrong with French society into his one...

Two Planets

by Kurd Lasswitz

One of the problems with having to rely on translation to the whole other world of science fiction out there, is that it can be terribly hit and miss. For instance, Kurd Lasswitz is one of the seminal figures in German s...

The Fourth Circle

by Zoran Živkovic

Zoran Zivkovic is both writer and translator (he has translated several works of science fiction into Serbian, as well as translating his own fiction into English) so he is far better placed than many non-Anglophone writ...