Meeting the Alien Face to Face—in Italy

Abstract

120 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) Premendra Mitra’s Fiction” by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, analyzes the famous 1955 Bandung conference’s rarely documented racism, as examined through the lens of Premendra Mitra’s seemingly prescient work, a short story cycle about Ghana-da, “the irascible Bengali teller of tall tales” (193-95). By using these short stories as a case study, Mukherjee explores the seeming lack of historicization of science, notting Suvin’s neglect of the intersectional and race-based facets of sf that depend on such historicization—partially rectified, as he notes, by the work done by various scholars in SFS (196-97). “The Afterlife of the Post-Apocalypse: Dmitry Glukhovsky in China” by Jinyi Chu discusses the cross-cultural exchange with Glukhovsky. He has become quite well-known in fandom, pop culture, and literary circles in China (216-17). Primarily focusing on historicizing and comparative translations, Chu’s contextualization of the Soviet-Chinese “friendship” is enthralling, offering background to just why Metro 2033, Glukhovsky’s 2005 novel, was not only such a big hit, but also how transformative fandom and archival fandom mixed to create their own interpretations and translations where the official translations lagged behind, or even censored content. This piece was my personal favorite, as I am a fandom studies scholar. Chu describes in a nuanced manner the many translations of Chinese to Russian, Russian to Chinese, English to Chinese, and Chinese to English works. Most intriguing to me was the process of fans attempting to translate Metro 2033 after the video game adaptation’s release, with one netizen (now an official government employee) publishing a translation on a fandom website that became so wellknown that she was tapped to do the official translation of the novel’s sequel, Metro 2034 (2009). She even consulted the gamers to discuss names that were not localized in the original novel or on which she was a bit hesitant (228-29). Combined with Chu’s translation of a fan-made parody of a famous Cold War ballad that had been translated from Russian into Mandarin, this chapter is a fine examination of translations, localization, and fandom discourse and engagement with sf. Each chapter offers a new analysis of global sf. The first section, “An Other Transatlantic,” takes a historical lens to Russian, Mexican, and Cuban sf to contextualize cross-cultural exchange between world cultures and how these literatures were able to work around the constraints of government censorship. The second section applies these ideas to Eastern Europe, especially regarding translation studies. The final section takes readers into Bengali myth and history to examine a subtle undercurrent of racism, and then to early-2000s China, where fandom practices keep Russian literature in translation alive and well online and in gaming. These articles continuously engage with the work of Suvin, Jameson, Žižek, and many other notable scholars, placing each into conversation relevant to contemporary literature. If one has any interest in global sf, Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East is a valuable book.—Katherine Randazzo, University of Iowa Meeting the Alien Face to Face—in Italy. Simone Brioni and Daniele Comberiati. Italian Science Fiction: The Other in Literature and Film. STUDIES 121 BOOKS IN REVIEW IN GLOBAL SCIENCE FICTION. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 289 pp. €62.03 hc; €43.42 ebk. When I co-wrote with Arielle Saiber the introduction to SFS’s special issue on sf in Italy (42.2), we decided to end the text—which complained about the scarce interest in sf in Italian academia, the rarity of studies devoted to Italian sf abroad, and the prejudice against sf in Italian culture in general—by optimistically declaring that the cat was out of the bag. This book by two relatively young Italian scholars based in the US and France (Simone Brioni teaches at Stony Brook University in New York and Daniele Comberiati at the University Paul-Valery Montpellier 3 in France) seems to prove that Saiber and I were not over-optimistic. It also confirms that scholarly work on Italian sf seems to be at home only on the border between Italy and the rest of the world. This book is the work of two...