Seth Hi there, and welcome back to Hugos There 2.0. And this is going to be another Zoomed Out episode. In this case, it's a sub genre spotlight. Though in this case, it's kind of a synthetic sub genre, more of a subset of science fiction, because we're going to be talking about science fiction in translation. And my guest for this episode is Rachel Cordasco. Hi, Rachel. Thanks for joining me. Rachel Cordasco Hi, thank you. Seth Thanks for joining me. and um yeah it's We started talking about this ah um months and months ago, and and you sent me a bunch of suggestions and I've just finally gotten to them. Rachel Cordasco Yeah. Seth But why don't you tell my listeners about yourself? Rachel Cordasco So I started um reviewing ah science fiction in 2013 for John DiNardo's SF signal. And ah so in 2014, he sent me um the Three-Body Problem. And I thought, huh, well, that's interesting. You know, I've never read any ah any science fiction translated um into English before that I knew of. And ah I, of course, fell in love with it because it's one of the greatest um trilogies, I think, of all science fiction. Seth Mmm. Yeah. Rachel Cordasco And, um you know, so I wrote a glowing review. And then ah then he sent me um a Polish novel ah by Marek Huberath and said, you want you want to do a Polish novel? And I was like, oh, because I just I've I've always I have a degree in literary studies, but um I've always loved translation and languages. So I said, sure. And then I just started getting interested, wondering, you know, what else is out there? Rachel Cordasco um And then I broadened my, I started writing a list, I kind of broadened it out from just science fiction to what I started calling, what I started, I started using the term speculative fiction as a broad umbrella of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and magical realism. And this was around, yeah, like 2015. And um before I knew it, I realized it was just going to be overwhelming. Seth Sure. Rachel Cordasco There was so much and I couldn't believe it. So I started the website SFN Translation just to, because I'm also a list and spreadsheet maker, so. Seth Excellent. Rachel Cordasco ah I thought, this is perfect. And then once I saw how much was out there, I inevitably was, you know, transported back to my academic academia days. And I couldn't help, ah you know, but analyze and start writing about it and um you know, and so now, uh, this May was the, I guess, eighth year of my website, um, written a book, multiple articles, almost 200 reviews and ah many, ah you know, different um kind of conferences. And ah this has just become my baby. I just I love it. I can't get enough of them writing a second book. I don't have the time. Like, what am I doing? But I'm doing it anyway. So, yeah. Seth Nice. and And your book is but what's the title? Rachel Cordasco So ah my, ah the first book is, it's called Out of This World, Speculative Fiction and Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium. Seth Nice. Rachel Cordasco um The editor came up with that. That was, I was just like, uh, stuff in translation? I don't know. But um you gotta start, you gotta start, like you can't, you can't just go back forever. Seth Yeah, yeah. Rachel Cordasco Cause then you'll never, you know, there's a lot of proto-SF that I'm like, no, so I started at 1960. Seth Okay. Rachel Cordasco And that book is like over 300 pages and I could have done much more. I had to cut like 10,000 words. Seth Oh, I'm sure Rachel Cordasco It was, it's a long. um And then this next one is going to be, I just I picked the top kind of 14 source languages for that other book. so got the most you know kind of what was the you know we've gotten the most from Japanese from French from Spanish from Hebrew and Arabic and Korean and um so I wanted to do kind of the next 10 to 14 languages but now I'm at a new publisher and they wanted something kind of even broader so now I'm like the rest of the world so but my word count is smaller Seth ah okay Rachel Cordasco Um, I don't know what happened to my, there we go. My word count is smaller, but my, uh, what I'm, what I'm talking about is much broader. Seth Okay. Rachel Cordasco Cause I'm also talking about short fiction. Seth okay Okay. Rachel Cordasco So it's, it's going to be a challenge, but, um, I just can't, I can't help myself. There's just, there's so much I can't even explain and people must be like, that's insane. How much can there be? But I'm telling you. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco You could spend your life like I'm doing just reading SF in translation. Seth yeah Yeah, I had a previous guest on the show talking about his his mission to read from as many countries in the world as possible, and so it kind of is effectively the same kind of thing, right, where it's where I'm reading translated things. Rachel Cordasco Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Seth so um like It's funny because looking through um you know the the the first project that I did on the podcast, of course, was reading through all the Hugo winners, and there's only one work in translation on the list. Rachel Cordasco Yeah. Seth um Oh, sorry, for the novels anyway. Rachel Cordasco Yeah. Seth um And there's a whole bunch of authors like Paolo Bacalupi, right? You're like, oh, well, he's got to be from, no, you know, I think he's American. Maybe he's British. I can't remember. There's, there's so many where, where I just keep thinking, oh, all of they must be, you know, Verner Vinge, must be German. Seth Nope, American. Rachel Cordasco Nope. I know. I keep I I keep there's another name that keeps coming up. I'm like, oh, no. Seth so um So I mean, you kind of talked about how you got into science fiction and translation. Rachel Cordasco Right. Seth what what do you think you know What's the the why of why why do you want to read science fiction and translation? What's what's the lore? Rachel Cordasco Um, you know, I've always, uh, I like to, I mean, I, you know, I guess some, there's like a personality trait that I've realized that I have, um, that I share with, uh, my oldest brother, which is if everybody's doing that, then I'm going to do *that*. Meaning if everybody's doing one thing I'm gonna do the other and um I've always loved science fiction uh but I saw I mean there's just like you just look at the American and British science fiction it is just unbelievable how much there is I mean it is just an avalanche and so you need to kind of find a niche you know and and I when I was when I found that there was a like a that there were ah it was a like a number of works of SF in translation that you could kind of sink your teeth into it wasn't just like a few here or there because then there's nothing you can do with that. When I saw that there was like an actual like amount you know a good number Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco um I realized, you know, I think this is my niche and I really want to kind of like look into it because no one else is. um No one else seems to be. Then I found out, of course, Lavie Tidhar and um Francesco Verso and other people were. And um Cheryl Morgan, of course, um they were doing a lot of that. ah Those efforts kind of just before I kind of started becoming aware. So they were doing this around 2009. 2010. And um it was very ah ah it was it was kind of in a bubble, you know, there's apex world, you know, Book of World SF that's that came out and everything, but it was still kind of small. And, ah you know, I Rachel Cordasco I realized like this is kind of a place where I can make a difference and I can kind of, you know, show people kind of what else is out there. You know, like I said, I'm also very interested in um other languages. I used to constantly complain to my parents like why was I born in America? it's so boring I want to be European why couldn't I have been bored somewhere cool you know and so I I've always used books as a way and I didn't we didn't travel much at all so I used books as a way to travel the world and um I've kind of continued to do that since you know uh with young kids and and just the fact that we're also not just our family we're not huge travelers Seth Mmm Rachel Cordasco like I always wanted to travel the world but you know that's kind of like It's not a thing that I can do, you know, I won't be able to do till I'm retired. Maybe I don't know. Seth right right Rachel Cordasco But so I continue to use books as a way to travel the world. But also, um I'm, you know, if someone gets me started on this topic, I start to rant because it's just, you know, I know it's like I'm interested in it. And so I care about it. Other people don't necessarily care about it. But I'm like, just because we're, you know, on our own, continent and you know it's not like we're like Europe where there are a million languages and you know they're all kind of near each other it's like that doesn't mean we have to be ignorant of other languages doesn't mean we have to it's like everything I feel like everything in the US is so insular which is so weird because it's 2024 but we get we get very little news of the ah of the outside world Seth right. Rachel Cordasco we read very little in translation and a lot of that is a feedback loop of like publishers say well no one wants to read translations and then you know no one buys them because they're not available and then the publishers are like see no one reads translations and so I feel like we need to kind of break that that loop but then um then like you you mentioned about the Hugo Awards I see you know the Hugo Awards talking about how it's a world award and everything Seth Right. Rachel Cordasco And I'm like, no, you're not doing it the way you you said you were doing. you know you You're supposed to be a world award. I'm not seeing I'm seeing more interest in international communication it from the 1970s. That's when they were having like massive international SF conferences reaching across the lines. I mean, they were taught there were there were anthologies from Russian translated in like the height of the Cold War. And you'd think we would want, not you know, the U.S., Russia, we'd have nothing to do with each other in the 70s or whatever. But it's like, no, that's when we had the most, like, Theodore Sturgeon writing intros for Russian science fiction and all kinds of amazing things. And it seemed like it kind of became in like it kind of SF in translation had its day again kind of around like 2018 and then it just sort of seemed to kind of decline again and you know I I I just don't I don't know I feel like don't you get bored reading the same thing like don't you know like don't you want to read something different you know Seth Yeah, yeah yeah I mean, it' kind of there's almost an analog to like, why don't Americans speak other languages? and like Because we can travel to so many diverse places just in our own country and just and still speak English. Rachel Cordasco Yeah, exactly. Seth It's kind of the same thing with there's so much anglophone science fiction that you know you could someone could say, well, I don't need to go outside of my receptor language, have my language, because there's enough there's too much for me to read already just in English. Rachel Cordasco Right. I, I just feel like I'd get, uh, I don't know, it would get, I would feel like, why am I, I'd feel like I'm reading the same thing over and over, but I honestly, I can't, I can't really make these judgments about Anglophone speculative fiction because I just haven't read like I don't read much of it and so I can't really say definitively this is the better way you know you need to read but I can tell you that reading horror fiction by a Swedish author and then reading supernatural fiction by an Italian author and then like alternate reality or alternate history by a Japanese author you're definitely going to be getting something that you're not going to get if you're just reading the same people from the same language who have been living in America like it's different there are a lot of people in Singapore uh in you know Nigeria uh in India they all write in English that's different like Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco I'd say you're definitely still reading more internationally when you're reading that but it's still English and it's like I find it fascinating when people talk about translations and how the translation process itself does something to change like you're um how you're approaching a story. So you are approaching it through kind of a you know one step removed, which I think I think kind of scares some people because they think, well, is it, am I reading the actual book or am I reading someone's, you know, and and translations Seth Hmm. Yeah. Rachel Cordasco I think used to be a lot more uneven, but people need to understand that in the United States, you know, weirdly, while people seem to not be interested in reading translations, translation pre like preparation for becoming a translator has become so much more rigorous. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco I mean, there are translation programs all around the country. And the translations are absolutely excellent. I mean, the awards there are awards that are constantly recognizing some of the best translators. They're winning international awards that aren't even, you know, and like genre is winning international awards. So it's it's like, you don't I can tell people for sure, you don't have to worry that you're going to waste your time reading a bad translation because It's so, ah you know, what makes it into English already is usually the stuff that's won a million awards in its own language. Seth Right. Rachel Cordasco So you're already getting it vetted. ah Francesco Verso often often talks about it's already vetted, like you know it's already good, and the translation more than likely is going to be top-notch. So you're getting just greatness on top of greatness. You're not gonna waste your time, you know. Seth Yeah, yeah, the the stuff that isn't getting translation in in translation doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. But if it is, if it does make it over here, that means that it has yeah passed through some some filtering, right? Rachel Cordasco Right. Yeah. I'm very cautious about when someone sends me a link and they're like, look, it's SF in translation. And I look and it's like, it's been independently. it's It hasn't been vetted. It hasn't really been recognized in its own country. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco it's just kind of a person who's writing in another country trying to get their stuff into English maybe so that it'll gain recognition in their own country which happens but it's not it's not going through that I mean I used to work as an editor Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco And so I'm always like, you need an editor. You really do. Seth Yeah, yeah. Rachel Cordasco I've been on both sides. I've written book and had an editor. I've been an editor. I know that you just, it's not possible to write a book. um Put it out there and it and it be in the form that it could be. An editor is really like a midwife. Very necessary. Seth It's funny because these days, you know with with chat GPT and other things, you can find AI translations of works Rachel Cordasco Mm hmm. Seth And they're sometimes just dreadful because they they miss all the sense of the the source language and trying to get it into the receptor language. Rachel Cordasco Yes, it has to be a human, it has to be human translation. Seth And it can be be really awkward. Yeah. Rachel Cordasco I, I, I mean, we're talking science fiction, so I'd say maybe five centuries from now you can have machine translation that'll work, but not now. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco And I don't think ever, honestly, but I think it'll get pretty close, like, after century I mean maybe I don't know but yeah you and you can immediately tell like you can and you know it's kind of it's kind of like you know not great to to acknowledge either but like sometimes when you read a translation it makes me so like oh sometimes you'll read a translation that was done by a person whose original whose first language is the source language not the target language Seth Yeah, yeah. Rachel Cordasco you can tell the difference. As I've seen, it it I mean it it really you can't say one is better than the other. like Lots of people translate from a source language into a target language and their source language was their first language, um but you will find sometimes that it's just the translation will be a little more rough they'll have words where you're like that doesn't that's not what an American would how an American would say but then again who are you translating it for an American speaks differently than than a British person than than a person in India so you know it English is also itself kind of strange so mm Seth Mm-hmm I've noticed that even just watching television programs from from the UK where they have an American character and they're doing a dreadful American accent and I'm like even if I couldn't tell from the accent they said "different to" and We don't say that in America we say "different from" and and like they just they might phrase something differently that they evidently didn't have somebody consult on that script to to catch it Rachel Cordasco Exactly. Exactly. Rachel Cordasco And it doesn't take a lot like I don't understand like if if you know that somebody is maybe Not a professional like I'm not I'm not a professional translator um but when I've translated stuff, you know, I I want other people to read it and be like you know, cuz I I just want to make but I feel like well you're doing your your you know, you're doing this weird kind of rewriting and Seth Mhm. Yeah. Rachel Cordasco where you're, you're getting the meaning, but then you have to make it sound right. Rachel Cordasco And, you know, um some people, ah most translators do an excellent job. but um And even the ones that are a little shaky, it's still, you can still understand the story, you know, so. Seth Yeah. yeah well So let's move into kind of making getting some recommendations for people. And I do want to to point people to your website because as you mentioned to me and over email, ah you have ways of filtering and searching on the website. Rachel Cordasco Sure. Seth So if people want to read books about cloning or zombies, or you know you can filter on that kind of stuff and find zombie stories from all around the world. Rachel Cordasco Yes, lots of zombies. Seth um Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so so I do want to make sure that that folks go there and look, but I also want to give just a few recommendations for like, where would you start? Rachel Cordasco Sure. Seth If if somebody said, I've never read a book that wasn't originally written in English, where would you point them? Rachel Cordasco Yeah. um I would start off with the um the absolute classics. um So first I would say ah the Strugatsky brothers from Russia, so Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. um extremely prolific you could spend a very long time only reading their stuff I've I've read a lot of their stuff and I haven't even really I haven't even read a third of it um it's uh it was written in I guess from the 1960s through the through the I guess the late 80s early 90s. Um they're very much uh very psychological science fiction very science fiction um that is I do have a favorite sub-genre and that would be hard science fiction and so I love them uh they do a lot of about aliens a lot but not like you know creepy like, you know alien invasion. It's like a lot more subtle um Seth So Roadside Picnic. Yeah. Rachel Cordasco Yeah Roadside Picnic you never meet the aliens, but apparently they've been here and so they've they've created weird zones ah Where you know they've left, potentially they've left their trash what you know ah and people pick it up and all kinds of weird things happen and And so that's like classic like Rachel You know like I love that stuff Rachel Cordasco Um. But it's also that, I mean, you got you just have to, that's where you have to start. um so So that's them. But they read a lot of, there was something that was published about maybe like five years ago that was also very subtle. Seth Okay. Rachel Cordasco You didn't really know there was an alien involved, but it it read like a murder mystery, like a hotel murder mystery. And I was like, that was my first ah entry into their work. Seth Hmm. Rachel Cordasco And someone was like, that is not representative of them. um But yeah, they do a lot of like other, um ah you know, humans landing on alien worlds, um but ah it's always, there's always like, they lived under the worst kind of, you know, World War II, the rise of communism, ah the worst kind of oppression, like a lot of their work cannot, you know, they use science fiction as a way to kind of channel all their thoughts about authoritarianism and about um mind control, propaganda, um you know, and so you can read, a you can see that once you know the context of when they were living and where and everything, Rachel Cordasco um You can kind of understand what they're writing about. um You know, I could have started with Stanislaw Lem, too. Seth Mmm. Rachel Cordasco He is he's just a mighty figure in a science fiction period from Poland. um Had a weird frenemy thing going on with Philip K. Dick. I don't know. um It's, it's quite complicated, but you can, if you just looked up Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, you can find some interesting stuff. um But Lem also wrote about very subtle psychological science fiction uh about what it would be like if we were contacted by aliens uh you know what would happen I mean he wrote Solaris so if you've seen the um the original Solaris or the uh the root more recent Solaris whatever there's also uh the original translation was was very um heavy-handed from what I've heard yeah Seth Yeah. Seth Yeah, let's let's talk about that just a little bit because I on your recommendation, I picked up Solaris and it was an interesting read. Rachel Cordasco Mm-hmm. Seth um I have a couple of questions about it, but I did see that the the version that I got was from Audible and it was a new translation that was approved by the family of Lem, where there was a previous one that went from ah from Polish to French and then French to English, right? Rachel Cordasco Right, yeah. Seth And that's weird. Rachel Cordasco very weird because that's gonna make it like all jumbled I mean I'm sorry but like those double translations are like ah yeah ah yeah it's totally weird but also apparently there was a lot that was changed um sometimes what happened a lot of this happened with ah early translations of Jules Verne in the early 20th century where Seth Mm hmm. It's a game of telephone, right? Yeah, yeah. Hmm. Rachel Cordasco um Apparently the translator working with along with the editor um would say, you know, Americans wouldn't care about this paragraph, let's cut it, you know, or or they would just change it completely and just rewrite it, you know, and ah that doesn't, that's just not a thing that happens now, but it definitely happened. Seth Hmm. Rachel Cordasco um I'm not I didn't read the word for word like I didn't I didn't sit down with the original English from the French and then the Bill Johnson or Johnston translation from 2011 you know I didn't sit down and like read and compare um But from what I've read about the two translations, the original, the first one was was heavily altered. um And Lem was kind of like, what? What is happening here? um So I'm really glad that ah that the 2011 one was was done directly from um Polish. Solaris is a landmark. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco I think Solaris has become what Planet of the Apes has become, which is um I love shocking people by saying so. You know, you like Planet of the Apes and they're like, yeah, it's cool. And I'm like, did you know it was translated from French? And they're like, no, get out. Seth Right. Rachel Cordasco No way. Seth Yeah. Like stealth translations. Rachel Cordasco Yeah, I'm like, no. 00:27:36.00 Seth You only know it from the movies. Yeah. Rachel Cordasco And I'm like, no, I swear it was. So Solaris has become like that. But Lem, I don't think Lem ever even came to the United States. I think he he's always wrote in Polish. Seth Hmm. Rachel Cordasco um And he wrote a he wrote a bunch of books about um ah robot folk tales or like folk stories, you know, the tale of the computer that slew the dragon, like just, he's just, he just puts a smile on your face. Rachel Cordasco I just love that guy. um So that's a very, that's another super classic. Seth Hmm. Rachel Cordasco So the Strugatskys and Lem. Seth So one question that I have about Solaris in particular, as a translator, would you want a translator to fix anything? Seth Because that in Solaris, there's a line that that mentions the Grand Canyon and it says, Colorado's Grand Canyon, Rachel Cordasco Good question. Seth which people in the US, were actually, I wouldn't be surprised if people thought that it was in Colorado. Rachel Cordasco Right. Yeah. Seth knowing, knowing American geography knowledge the way I do. Rachel Cordasco Exactly. Seth But you know, a translator might look that up and go, Oh, it's Arizona. Should I fix that? Rachel Cordasco I so if I was a translator I would um I would add a little star and at the bottom of that page I'd say we all know that it's not Colorado but um I try to I would try to have a lighter hand I think that's a great question because Ken Liu talks a lot about translating. He's just a wealth of knowledge, just one of the greatest translators alive, and he ah he talks about what to do with footnotes and endnotes, and he says, you know, you gotta be light on the footnotes, but you need them sometimes. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco I mean, you simply cannot ah You know, in Chinese, there's maybe like one word, it means a world of things. Seth yeah Rachel Cordasco You can't, you can't say it all in that sentence, because then that sentence is going to sound real weird. So you're going to need to like give some context. So I'm always for that. um Yeah. Seth Well, yeah, and I enjoy even this year in the in the Hugo voters packet, um they're well they on the shortlist, there are a couple of works that came out of China, um because WorldCon was in China last year, and so it's not it's not terribly surprising, and there's translations of them. Rachel Cordasco Yeah. Right. Seth And for one of them, there's a translator's note at the beginning that says, you know here's what we'll use for this word in Chinese, but it has layers of meaning that we don't get in English. Rachel Cordasco It's very important. Rachel Cordasco I feel like because people people will get let's say someone is trying to read S7 translation for the first time and they read a story like from Indonesian and they're like at what's a I can't even print out what is the you know you need to give a little bit like I love I love some places like um Asymptote journal Seth yeah Rachel Cordasco um and Words Without Borders, World Lit Today, sometimes they include translator's notes, like one paragraph. It's all you need. Rachel Cordasco And you just give a, you know, like in Swahili, this word means blah. And I translated it in this way because I wanted people to kind of understand that this is kind of where the story is coming from. Like I didn't use the word vampire, but that's what it really means. Rachel Cordasco So I use something else and I need a bubble blah, blah, blah. Seth Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah. And it's funny, because like, you would think of all people who would be prepared to consume something like that, who would be nerds who read books with a glossary of characters and, and you know, like, world building and that kind of stuff, you know, so many, especially fantasy books, you know, have a a dictionary at the end that defines all the novel words. Rachel Cordasco Yeah, right. That's true. Seth And even like something like, um Oh, what is it? The Fifth Season, that series, the Broken Earth trilogy. It's it's written in English, of course, but you know she she defines a bunch of words that are used in there differently than we currently use English. Rachel Cordasco Right. And I think that's that's a great way to kind of help people get yeah, get more kind of ready. I don't know. But I, you know, ultimately, the the ultimate problem is, is just reading books, you know, at the at base, that's the problem. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco It's like, you you know, if you're if you're going to read um then you got to find the genre you like and then you can find science fiction but you know you go to you know I mean there's independent bookstores are almost gone I mean they're they're there they're around like you know they're they're around but if someone says I need a book they go let's say to Barnes and Noble hopefully you know unless they decide to go to Amazon but let's say they go to Barnes and Noble and they look around Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco I do this all the time. I'll go to Barnes and Noble and I'll look and see how much SFT they have. And out of, you know, in the sci-fi section, out of like, you know, 500 books, I'll find 10. You know, um it's just not there. Seth Yeah, yeah. Rachel Cordasco It's just not available for people anyway. And so um people, yeah, people kind of need to be made aware of it more, but, you know, I start talking about it and people's eyes glaze over. So when you contacted me and said, you, I could, we could talk about this for like an hour and a half. I was so excited. Seth Yeah. And so before we started recording, what we were talking about ah Planet of the Apes, because I I said, well, that's one of my recommendations, just because it's one of those stealth translated books where you surprise people, you blow their minds, and you're like, yeah, it was really originally written in French. Rachel Cordasco Yeah. Yes. Seth And so when I covered that one for the podcast, I had my friend Emmanuel from Montreal on to talk about it. Rachel Cordasco Yeah. Seth And um you mentioned that you'd read a whole bunch of Pierre Boulle. Rachel Cordasco Oh yes, I did, it was 2002, I believe. Um, I decided I was going to read all the peer bull in English. Um, pretty sure I did. I'm trying to think he's got, he's one of those people who wrote mainstream, you know, uh, realism, whatever, and then science fiction. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco Um, And he's, so yes, if you have not read Planet of the Apes, you must. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco I'm commanding you to read it. ah You know, it was written in the 60s. Pierre Boulle was huge in the United States because when Planet of the Apes became, was turned into a movie, um next thing you know, every other year for the next like 15 years was another Pierre Boulle in English. DAW published a lot of his stuff. um I think it was mostly DAW. And ah you had just boom, boom, boom just one after another. And so I read them, ah got them all out of the library. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco They're all out of print. you wouldn't even know they exist so you have to go looking for them and oh my god I mean he is not I haven't read his non is non genre but fiction but he is a I'm going to I have ideas I have thoughts I have um uh I have plots and I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you about that and the only way I can do it is with characters so I'm gonna throw in some characters that kind of thing it's he's he's not you know he's not going to write like ah like the Strugatskys or Lem. He's just not that kind of writer. um You're not going to say he's a literary genius, but that's okay. Planet of the Apes is incredibly entertaining. ah Then you get into one of my but of my favorite wild, crazy shark jumping books that I mentioned. It's called Desperate Games. I tell everyone about it. It's crazy. I don't remember I don't remember if it was late 60s or early 70s that he wrote it. Rachel Cordasco But um I think he also liked to make people mad. Seth Sure, sure. Rachel Cordasco Like he wrote a book about um a nuclear submarine um healing people. So nuclear radiation healing people. Sure. He wrote about he wrote a ah book completely demolishing like uh solar energy he he basically took a lot of these like ideas that were kind of getting a lot of traction in the 70s and wrote like the opposite you know just I think to kind of just get to people but desperate games is um Basically, a bunch of scientists decide, you know what, the world sucks, we're gonna make it better, because we're scientists, you know we know we know better. And they take over the Seth And that always goes well. Rachel Cordasco And they take over the world, and they make everything better. And this is just within the the next the first 20 pages. They make it all better, they solve all the things. So what happens? Everybody starts committing suicide, because everyone is bored. because there's nothing more to do with your life and so it gets really bad and so then of course the science is like well now we have to figure out how to entertain people because otherwise they're just they're just gonna either sit around or they're gonna commit suicide and and it's just it's a mess and so because they didn't they didn't foresee this and so they bring back gladiator battles Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco But that's not even the craziest thing. And everybody's like, yeah, you know, and so they have actual gladiator battles and everybody watches them and everybody's happy. Then everybody gets bored. So then they start doing underwater battles with like all kinds of crazy things and people like it. Then they get bored. Then they're like, I've got it. And they ramp it up and ramp it up and ramp it up. And someone finally says, let's do a reenactment of World War II battles. But let's add some nuclear weapons. Seth Hmm, sounds fun. Rachel Cordasco It goes, it, they basically destroy, I mean, I'm not going to spoil it for you, but but it gets out of control and it is just hilarious, but it's, it's just like, yes, you know, I can, I could totally see people being so bored that they, he was, you know, he was talking about like, you know, that people. you know people have access to all the education they could want they could have access to all the you know the best things in life and what would they do they complain you know and so he kind of destroys that whole idea of uh scientists fixing up the world um and it's It's really funny, but Liu Cixin, author of the Three Body trilogy, came out with a book a few years ago. um Well, now I'm forgetting what it was called. Oh, Supernova Era, where basically the same thing happens where all the all the adults are killed off and all the kids are like, now what do we do? Seth Okay. Rachel Cordasco And they start like, hey, let's have wars, you know, and and it's like it builds up and builds up. you know And so there's there's that kind of craziness. But um Boulle wrote, yeah, he wrote about ah solar energy, he wrote about nuclear radiation, he wrote about, um ah he wrote ah basically a book about um the, about Wernher von Braun, but he just gave him a different name. Seth Okay. Rachel Cordasco and and imagined what would happen if the Japanese had joined the space race. So it would be Japan, ah Russia, and the US. Seth Hmm. Rachel Cordasco Fascinating alternate history. ah He wrote short stories about robots. he I mean, this man just never stopped. He wasn't, I don't think he but got married, he didn't have any children. He devoted his whole life to writing and um He's just, he's something. I feel like just for some of the entertainment value his book should be back in print. Seth Nice. Yeah, I just did a quick search on my my library and yeah, they have Planet of the Apes and Bridge on the River Kwai. And that's it. Rachel Cordasco That's it. Yeah. Rachel Cordasco I mean, I live, you know, half an hour away from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. So that's where I had to get these books. I mean, I was getting them. Seth Mm. Rachel Cordasco I was getting them in a library loan like from all over the country. That's what you have to do. Otherwise, you can buy them on these books sites. I mean, they're available, but who knows what condition? Seth Yeah, yeah. Okay, so, um you know, we've kind of given recommendations for Planet of the Apes, for Roadside Picnic, Solaris. um Anything, I mean, do you want to go any more kind of niche? The Three-Body Problem is a huge recommendation, obviously, um because because I actually have not read the whole trilogy. Rachel Cordasco Oh yeah, absolutely. Seth I've only read the first one just because I had to read it for the podcast. And I would like to get back to to reading the rest of it. um So I'll do that at some point. Rachel Cordasco You must. Seth so So, yeah, other recommendations. Rachel Cordasco Um, so, uh... you know, I know that this is seeming like a very, ah very heavily male writers discussion. And, ah you know, a lot of the issue is that um kind of getting through that gauntlet, especially pre 1990, was, you know, first of all, you had to get published, and then you had to get translated. Rachel Cordasco So there was a lot of like, ah It was just, it was not, you were not going to find as many ah women writers, but there, there are plenty. um There's so many. I'd have to say my favorite. um One of my absolute favorites is, ah she's from, I believe she's from France, but moved to Quebec, Elisabeth Vonarburg. Rachel Cordasco people somehow that I didn't expect would know about her books do know about her because she is one of she's a lot like up there along with Joanna Russ and uh um there's so many others feminist wave in in the 70s um and Vonarburg was able to kind of get through that gauntlet into English um thanks to her translators uh who You know We're very you know really good about but Advocating you know because her stuff is amazing. It's it's it's it's just it's like a I feel like her her two Novels in English to Silent City and In the Mother's Land. Those are the two You have to understand that and I always get this confused, but I think In The Mother's Land was written first Silent City was written second the Silent City takes place before In The Mother's Land, if that makes sense. Rachel Cordasco um But it's very like undefined economic ah environmental catastrophe. Everybody goes, so if you've seen the the show Silo, which I love, um everybody goes down into a silo, but then it gets all crazy. Seth Mm hmm. Rachel Cordasco Then there's lots of bioengineering and Android and computer, you know, consciousness, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Rachel Cordasco And then In the Mother's Land, you're getting this whole like, basically, it brings together religion, archaeology, science fiction, history, like it just hits all of my favorite things. And um they start to try to figure out where these humans are like, wait a minute, our history is not what we thought it was. And you realize that this is far in the future, even though it's very much sounds like it's written in the past like, you know, very like kind of uh gender rigid women must wear certain outfits men have a certain but the funny thing is in the mother's land it's the women who control everything and the men are very passive and one woman uncovers the history Seth Hmm. Hmm. Rachel Cordasco of why this happened and then we find out all of this has happened like centuries in the future from our time and brilliant she's just she's amazing she's you know um she's got some short stories in English uh she like I said she was pretty big in the in the 70s and 80s um I you know I recommend her to everyone there's um Seth Hmm. Rachel Cordasco kind of, there's also, I think a lot of people who read science fiction will have heard of ah Angelica Gorodischer from Argentina. So she wrote um Trafalgar is her major work. um She's, you know, she very, you know, science fiction, um very, ah ah it's it's hard to explain, but she's got like, it's It's got such ah vitality to it. I haven't read it in a long time, but she's very ah it's a lot like um stories of Leena Krohn, who's from Finland. Seth Hmm. Rachel Cordasco um It's just this like this buoyant imagination about aliens, about plants, about the natural world, about humans ah in you know undefined time. ah interacting and you know it's it's just uh they're they're also um they need to be read more um I think they're you know I could go on and on but um kind of those are those are some of the um female writers that that I really love Seth Nice, nice. One of the other um recommendations that you gave me was The Legend of the Galactic Heroes by Yoshiki Tanaka. And it's funny because ah I I mentioned in the ah but kind of when we were going back and forth an email, I've read that All You Need Is Kill by Sakurazaka is the last name, I don't remember first name. Rachel Cordasco Mm-hmm. Seth But the but like that one's very much kind of set with Japanese characters and that kind of stuff where where a Legend of the Galactic Heroes is this far future, future history kind of thing. Rachel Cordasco Mm-hmm. Seth And you have all these names like Reinhardt von something, you know and and and and all these Germanic names and everything. Rachel Cordasco Yeah. Right. Seth And it's I you know it doesn't seem Japanese in any way to me um And so that that was that was kind of kind of fascinating because I just expected I guess to to see more culture included in the translation, but there's nothing saying that You know and Japanese author can't write about a far future time when everything's all homogenized Rachel Cordasco Right. Absolutely. I mean, he's in if you read deep into it, like it's there are 10 volumes. They're short. They're kind of short. But like if you read deep into it, there are characters with Japanese names, characters, a lot of characters with German names. It's basically he was writing it in the believe that the maybe he was modeling it on the European wars of the 19th century, I believe, maybe like the Napoleonic wars. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco um Yeah, very not kind of. we wouldn't know let me just put it this way if you don't know if you don't know Japanese culture you're not familiar with it you'll probably be I mean I'm sure I missed a million things there's only so much yet the translator can do uh if you are Japanese if you're very familiar with that culture I'm sure you will find parts of the book or kind of like the style uh telling like screaming Seth Right. Rachel Cordasco Japanese like I you know, I'm sure I'm sure that just like this just I don't think you can write outside of your your background like you Yeah, right Exactly, right Yeah, Seth Mm hmm. Seth Right. Well, and and even in this book, right it's it's talking about this galactic empire and you can definitely, you could you could see that as kind of looking back on the Imperial old Japan times and and having some some criticisms of that. Rachel Cordasco exactly Seth And I did love that you know it basically shows the rise of dictators and and there was this quote in it that I that I that I wrote down that said, "it's the ones who empower a dictator who deserve most of the blame, but the ones who don't support him actively, who watch it happening without saying anything, they're just as much to blame." Rachel Cordasco Yeah, yeah. Seth And and I thought, wow, that's certainly not topical. um Rachel Cordasco Yeah, it's it's a it's a quote that is. ah Yeah, I mean, it apply, it will always apply. ah He. You know, I think ah what fascinated me the most about it is that it's so layered, it seems at first so kind of basic like space battles, you know and and court intrigue, Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco but then you read it and you're like Constantly being reminded the narrator is always talking about how the history is written It's a his it's a historiography is what this whole 10 series 10 novel series is it's talking about how the history was written of this battle what the historian said about that battle it's really a set of novels about how the history of these battles was written that's really what these books are and I just love that but you can't see that until you've read the whole bunch and then you see and then you kind of step back because you're like there's something ah about this that's not quite It's almost like it's out of focus for a little while and you're trying to understand what it is about and and then you realize what it's really about. Seth Yeah. I See, I've only read the one book and I was I was commenting to a friend of mine that that it it feels like and more or less almost like a history novel that just kind of it it narrates it exposits, you know, here's here's how this historical trend happened. Rachel Cordasco Yes. Seth And then there were some battles and it describes the battles and those are fun. And then it's back to, um you know, talking about this this lineage of this other Emperor. Rachel Cordasco Yeah. Seth And it just it felt a little detached to me. Rachel Cordasco It's a meta-historical analysis is what it is. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco like you You read about, you say like there's a meta-analysis of 10 scientific papers about these different um experiments. And this is this is a series about a meta-analysis of history. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco It's just fascinating, but I think that the um the Japanese ah kind of an interest in things German, um makes sense when you when you think about World War II and their uneasy alliance, but um you know, it makes me think of ah ah Ken Asamatsu's Kthulhu Reich, which was crazy! Seth Sure. Eldritch horror and World War II? Rachel Cordasco Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's crazy. I mean, it's so, you know, of course we know the Nazis were fascinated with the occult. And so what Ken Asamatsu does is he just takes like, well, what if the Nazis traveled to, I forgot if it was the South pole or North pole or whatever, and they uncovered like a Cthulhu like creature. And what would happen? You know, because they would revive it, of course, because they want to use it. Rachel Cordasco And what would happen? Bad things would happen. But this is written by a Japanese guy about Nazi officers in, like, the North Pole. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco And you're like, what? And then there's ah there's another kasulu Japanese horror book that's sitting on my shelf that I haven't read yet. And I'm like, why? I don't understand. But like the Japanese, I have to say, I have to say that um I've read, you know, I've read a lot across different, la you know, source languages. And I have to say, there's something about the Japanese science fiction. they mostly science fiction or horror, which is an interesting combination. Rachel Cordasco This is not often found in ah in other other um countries, but ah the combination of science fiction and horror that they have produced just since World War II is astonishing. Seth Mhm. Seth Hmm. Rachel Cordasco The sophistication, the the the amount that they that they have produced, the variety of authors. the the it's just It's just fantastic and the the tragedy of it is that almost all of the publishers of Japanese SF in translation have folded Seth Duh. Rachel Cordasco I don't know why, but Haikasoro was my, Haikasoro was like the main kind of place that I got my Japanese SFT from. Kurodahan also, it's it's extremely sad. um Now I guess it's it's like vertical, which publishes mostly manga, but you know, there's some ah University of Minnesota press is bringing kind of classics. um but very slowly and haikasura was just they they I mean they were the ones that give you that gave us legend of the galactic heroes all 10 volumes they gave us uh just I mean hundreds it it was it was really amazing and and it was very sad they just shifted to so basically just to what was more profitable. um Manga, graphic novels, um video games, I guess, TV, whatever Viz Media does, but um it's ah it's very sad, but I'd have to say, I got I mean... Rachel Cordasco they're they're They're doing something right in Japan. It's just amazing how how much output, how amazing, they got that, they got the Ring Cycle. Rachel Cordasco Like didn't didn't that, wasn't that turned into like a movie or something? Koji Suzuki. It's like a Seth Ringu. Yeah. Rachel Cordasco Yeah, it's I haven't even I think I read part of it, part of one of the books. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco I'm not exactly a. um I don't read nearly as much horror um as I do. ah Science fiction and fantasy and kind of fantasy ish, but. um You know, like what, like that's a whole thing going on there. It's huge. It's international. It's you know, everybody knows about it. Seth yeah Rachel Cordasco That's Japanese horror is is. Again, you could live your whole life just reading Japanese horror and you'd have a ton to read. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco um But it's scary. It's super scary. So if you're like me and you don't want to always be super scared, you know, maybe you kind of like space it out a little bit. But um there are lots of recommendations on ah and Japanese SFT. Seth Yeah, yeah. So the the Ring series is by Koji Suzuki. Rachel Cordasco Mm hmm. Seth And, uh, yeah, that, uh, I think I'm going to steer clear that just cause, yeah Rachel Cordasco It's super scary, agreed. Seth Yeah. No, I don't, I don't do super well with, with horror. So especially in print, I can watch horror movies, but in, in print, it really gets into my brain. Rachel Cordasco Yeah. Seth Yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm probably a good time to start, you know, winding down and maybe just throw out a few more recommendations and, and you know, just lightning round kind of kind of style. Rachel Cordasco Sure. Seth So other other stuff. Rachel Cordasco Okay. I have a list. Oh, my God. Okay Rachel Cordasco I guess, um you know, I'm currently writing, ah like I said, writing a book about um the source languages that are not as well known, um not as much read in the US. Seth Mm hmm. Rachel Cordasco And I'm currently working on a chapter on Southeast Asian speculative fiction. ah A ton. Rachel Cordasco The chapter is is now like it's going to be like 30 pages, at least ah one of my longest chapters. um ah If you're interested in kind of like ah some classic ah ah Indian, non-English, Indian ah SFT, there's an anthology from 1993 called It Happened Tomorrow. It's got, it's excellent. It's It's got Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, um ah Hindi, um all these stories translated from those languages, ah fascinating. Seth There's so many languages. Yeah. Rachel Cordasco Oh, there there are many, yes. Rachel Cordasco um there's ah There's some Indonesian ah works that are um kind of people with, people who know anything about Indonesian um kind of books in English recently, they'll think of ah Eka Kurniawan and Intan Parameditha. They're very magical realists. There's lots of just magical realism, but I have to say literally like two days ago, I read these two stories by this this guy named Rio Johan, also from Indonesia. Rachel Cordasco ah one story is on Asymtote. One story is on um Samovar. And they're both taken from his collection that hasn't been translated into English about a a bioengineering company that has engineers creating new forms of fruit. And um in one story, this guy creates the this fruit to kind of give inspiration to people. um He eats the fruit and the the fruit starts to colonize his mind and starts to enslave him and make him do things that he doesn't want to do. Rachel Cordasco And then the fruit ultimately wants to take over the world and enslave humanity. It's just absolutely insane. It's crazy. Seth Bonkers, yeah. Rachel Cordasco I love it. and And it made me think of um I I translate, I've translated a lot of stories by Clelia Farris, who is from Sardinia, and she, um so it's translated from, so she writes in Italian, but she's got a a lot of Sardinian phrases, words. Seth Hmm. Italian, yeah. Rachel Cordasco Um, which is, which is, you know, has, has been like, it's really made me do research, you know, cause I don't know Sardinian. Seth Mm-hmm. Rachel Cordasco Um, so, uh, she writes very similar kind of fascinating stories where, you know, you just, you have no idea where it's going. And she also wrote a story. Um, you can actually find it on, um, uh, future science fiction digest website, uh, called the substance of ideas, except in, in, instead of cherries or Visio cherries as Rio Johan calls it, she's got sea urchins and people eat sea urchins and it yeah it makes them like brilliant and crazy and um so there's this whole kind of like theme going through SFT in Indonesia and Italy and in all these other places where like people ingest some sort of food or some sort of creature and it changes their consciousness. Seth Hmm. Hmm. Rachel Cordasco ah So it's another way of thinking about consciousness alteration. um Love that. Seth It reminds me of the ah the idea of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Rachel Cordasco yes that's exactly it's perfect it's it's it's uh I love that like I love but it's it's the way that they write about it that's just so excellent and um so Clelia Farris definitely Rio Johan my new uh you know guy I just found out about a couple couple days ago um uh Seth Yeah. Yeah. Rachel Cordasco You know, a lot of people like Johanna Sinisalo from Finland. She's um excellent. I haven't read much of her, but she does a lot of um kind of like the human and the natural world, you know, ah a lot of kind of, um ah you know, like she has a book, Bird Brain, What Would Happen if Birds Decided to Turn on and People. um Yeah, Eco-Horror. Basically, Eco-Horror is a definite thing in Finnish, SFT. Oh, and then, um like I said, I don't really read like a ah ton of horror, but um The ah Swedish author, ah John Lindqvist, people actually probably know him because of Let the Right One In, which was a very big movie in the US. Seth Yeah, yeah yeah. Well, there was a US remake as well. I think I think they're both well regarded actually, which is kind of rare. Rachel Cordasco Yes, he's excellent. he's he's People call him, you know, the Swedish Stephen King, whatever. He's him, he's himself. um But that his horror is, yeah, very ah sophisticated, well done, not too gory. Rachel Cordasco For the um World Literature Today special feature that I guest edited um that just came out ah you know, they asked me, find some, you know, find some good horror. And I immediately said, we have to have Linqvist, like they have to. So we've got we've got a Linqvist story and we've got one from Japan, one from Argentina, ah one from Egypt, um and then one from one from Sweden. I haven't, you know, I haven't talked much about, there's there's a ton of um Arabic, Hebrew, Czech, um Danish? I could go on. Seth Yeah, I did want to mention that one one of the Arabic ones that you that you recommended was a Iraq + 100. Rachel Cordasco Yes. Seth I started listening to the audiobook from my library today. Seth Fascinating, because yeah, I mean, it's it's it's sort of kind of, you know, grappling with the history of colonization and and military takeovers and regimes and and going forward 100 years and you can, you know, grappling with the Islamic State and and, and all kinds of stuff. Rachel Cordasco Iraq + 100 is great, yeah. um Really interesting variety in that. Yeah, I just got Egypt + 100. So I'm very excited to read that. Seth Oh, nice. Rachel Cordasco But um if you like Iraq + 100, a lot of people had very different views. I just thought it was I thought was great. ah Frankenstein in Baghdad. Seth It's a pretty rare anthology where where every story hits, you know, perfectly. Rachel Cordasco Yeah. Rachel Cordasco Yeah, but um I yeah and I recommend Frankenstein in Baghdad. I recommend um ah there are two anthologies called Zion's Fiction about um ah science fiction from Israel. um Some of the writers are from Russia, I think, but it's all written, it's all translated from Hebrew. Those have a a wide variety um you know lots of different but ah you know a lot of them focus a lot of them kind of focus on like what it means to um to have parents you know or grandparents who were in the holocaust lots of uh kind of issues with history with identity um there's yeah there's lots of that I also have to say I have to mention one of my favorites of all time it's so random because it's just Seth Mm-hmm. Rachel Cordasco It's just there. um But I happened to I happened to read several years ago a book called Wicked Weeds by a guy from the Dominican Republic called Pedro Cabilla. It is, it is about a aboutda guy who, who says, you know, I'm a zombie. It sucks. When you're a zombie and you're trying to like live your life, you know, you're always decaying and you have to fix yourself up and you got worms coming out of your ears and you have to like wipe them away. Seth Mm hmm. Rachel Cordasco And, you know, it's like, what do you got to do when you're a zombie, but you still need to work and you still need to live. And, and it's. It's like way more than that and the end just totally blew my mind and it deals with like pharmaceutical companies, colonialism, history, botany. Seth Hmm. Hmm. Rachel Cordasco It is outrageous and said just like I just happen to read it. and It's one of my favorites of all time um It is wicked Seth Oh, it's a short one too. I just looked it up. Yeah. Rachel Cordasco Yes, you just you can blow through it in a day. It's so crazy I mean as you could see the crazier the better for me I just I love books that really make me say like I did not see that happening like That was that was out of the blue Yeah Seth Yeah. Nice. I think you know I wanted to talk also briefly about like some of the benefits, at least for me, for for somebody or I don't know, right when we go through our education system, right endless unless we're focused in college or something on doing international studies or or or really trying to broaden our experiences, we can get pretty insular. And it's interesting reading in translated works that there's things that they'll reference that are really important to the person writing this novel. Rachel Cordasco Yes. Seth um that made a big difference in in their lives. and That puts me down a click hole on Wikipedia or or wherever to be like, what is the Velvet Revolution? Rachel Cordasco Mmhmm. Mmhmm. Seth you know and I'm looking up because I'm reading a book the Czech Republic. Rachel Cordasco Right. Seth right and um it's and That's so great to to be able to do that and kind of when When I read The Three Body Problem, right I started looking at the Cultural Revolution. Rachel Cordasco Yes. Yep. Seth and um and yeah it's and then That makes it worth it. Rachel Cordasco Well, it's like it's like with it's like with Linqvist, you know, his one or two of the of his novels in this trilogy center around. You don't really know it until it kind of like weaves itself in and then you realize it's actually very, very important. um It was the assassination of a prime minister in like, I don't know, the early eighties, I think, or the late seventies. And then you look it up and you find out that the assassination was Sweden's JFK assassination. Seth Yeah, yeah. Rachel Cordasco It was incredibly important. It like, it changed kind of like, it like every Swedish person knows about it. They know where they were when it happened, like that kind of thing. And I have had never heard about it. I mean, I've never learned any Swedish history. And I'm a history person. like I read I read my history textbooks for fun. Seth Mm-hmm. Rachel Cordasco And there was never anything about Sweden except like, oh, there's this king in Sweden. And he like did stuff. Next! you know And so, yeah, I love learning. But then you know you're like, oh, there's so much more to learn. you know but Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco you know, but you can only do what you can. But even having like a surface understanding of like the Cultural Revolution, I mean, it was the Three Body Problem that led me to get a 18 hour long audio book series on China, on the history of China. Seth Mm hmm. Rachel Cordasco And then learning about the Cultural Revolution from that perspective, and then thinking back to how it was presented in the three body problem was huge. I never learned anything about that. in school which is I don't know I'm sure they could have fit it in you know it could have been like two days like we could have learned about it but you know instead we spent like three months on Colonial America it's like I think we can like figure out how to get more and I mean I know there's always more history happening but like these are really important things that we need to know about like the world that things that change the world Seth Right, right. Rachel Cordasco And I think, you know, yeah, other countries, yeah, they they're talking about something that happened. You know, Indonesia, like they're like, oh, yeah. And then, you know, all the colonial, all the violence during the colonial days. And you're like, wait, who was, wait, what? And then you learn about the Dutch and the Japanese and the history of Indonesia in the 20th century. And it's just like. Wow, I I don't know how anyone can learn all that except you have to find your way through while you read, you know, so you're learning as you go. Seth Mmhmm. Mmhmm. Yeah. Rachel Cordasco You're always learning. Seth Mmhmm. Yep. Well, I I mean, I was already convinced, but I i hope we've convinced folks listening to pickups in science fiction in translation. Rachel Cordasco ah yeah people need to I think people I think people just aren't reading enough of it, honestly, because I think it really will it really will make you think differently. Seth Mm hmm. Rachel Cordasco Honestly, I used to be terrified of of alien invasions. um That was my thing when I was younger. I was like, we're going to have alien invasions. And then I watched a ton of Star Trek. a ton of Star Trek and then I read a ton of science fiction honestly it could be that you know now in my 40s I'm just I'm less scared of things like I'm less scared of insects I'm less scared of aliens but I think it's also I read so much about aliens and I thought so much about what form they could take what they could do I've been so like there's so much of it that now I'm like ah you know what are you gonna do like it could take the form of an alien that you can't see that could inhabit your body or it could be a three-headed, you know, whatever or it's like who knows but like Seth Yeah, or gelatinous ocean on a distant planet. Rachel Cordasco Exactly, it could be literally anything like my one of my sons was like, well, what do we do if we were invaded by aliens? And I'm like, honestly, like, read these books, like, this is what these people did. And, you know, I, I think that it's it's really important to think about some of these issues in lots of different ways and from lots of different perspectives. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco And then you kind of feel less worried about it. You're like, all these other people are thinking about it. I'm thinking about it. And maybe you just kind of get immune to it. You're you're just not as like, oh my god, this thing just occurred to me. you know Whatever. Rachel Cordasco And yeah, you can be prepared. You can think, well, if there is an environmental catastrophe of one kind or another, how would humans come back from it? What would we have to do? Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco you know What do we have to be prepared for? I understand people who you know, have all kinds of stuff in a bunker because, like, they're preparing, you know, but thinking it ahead. Seth Mm-hmm. Yeah. Rachel Cordasco Yes, science science fiction makes you think ahead. And I ah just I think it's just better for you to to read books that invite you to think about the future, you know. Seth Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Well, so before we sign off, where can people find you? Rachel Cordasco So um I'd say the the best place is to just go to sfintranslation.com, um where I try to, I do um a ah monthly, um out this month, and I give you a list of kind of the novels and the stories. um I'm one person, I'm the only person running this site, but I'm always a list, like inviting people, please send me titles. like I can't find all the things you know that's just it's everywhere it's like I'm trying to aggregate and at this point it's me and one other website that I know of that aggregate SF in translation now you can go to ISFDB but you can't search by translation so that's a little bit difficult but I lean heavily on them to to find a lot of things um Rachel Cordasco So my website, I'm also on, I'm on Twitter, I don't really, I don't post a ton, um but it's always hashtag SF in translation, so I'm at @RCORDAS, so our C-O-R-D-A-S. ah There's a Goodreads group that I started that um ah ah Another ah person named Kalin has taken over and they do on good reasons. It's speculative fiction in translation. They do a lot of like monthly. um I think reading kind of groups ah where they pick a pick a title. Seth Yeah. Rachel Cordasco I only have so much bandwidth. Seth yeah yeah. Rachel Cordasco um So ah they do that. I basically do the site and and Twitter um on Twitter or on on the site, you can find, um you know, how to contact me. I I maintain a a massive spreadsheet that you can also drop notes in to be like, you know, no, this is translated 1967, not 1966, or, you know, what about this title? Seth Perfect. Nice. Rachel Cordasco so I'll do what I can. But anyway, any, um, anybody wants to send me stuff, you know, I'm happy to listen. Seth Right. And if you take nothing away from this discussion, realize that the bit that we've talked about here is the tiny little tip of the iceberg of of science fiction in translation. Rachel Cordasco It's it's so outrageous. There's so much and people do not believe me. So you just have to go look, you know. Seth Okay. All right. Well, Rachel, thank you so much for doing this. was This was an absolute pleasure. Rachel Cordasco Thank you so much for inviting me on. I could have talked for three more hours. Seth All right. All right. Well, take care. Rachel Cordasco Thank you.