Rachel S. Cordasco has become, in little more than a decade, one of the most improbable and delightful figures in contemporary literary studies: a scholar who treats global speculative fiction not as an exotic curiosity, nor as a footnote to Anglo-American SF, but as a living, breathing, multilingual ecosystem whose vitality depends on the stubborn, generous labour of translators, bibliographers, critics, and readers willing to look beyond the gravitational pull of English.
Her forthcoming volume, “Speculative Fiction in Translation from Around the World“—scheduled to appear in September 2026 with University of Wales Press—promises to be one of the most ambitious cartographic project yet in this expanding universe. It is, quite simply, a planetary atlas of imagination.
Rachel Cordasco’s earlier book, “Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium” (University of Illinois Press, 2021), already demonstrated her capacity to synthesize vast amounts of literary history with a clarity that feels almost mischievous.
She writes with the calm authority of a seasoned academic, but also with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely loves the strange, the uncanny, the genre-bending, and the linguistically unruly.
The result is a style that is both scholarly and lightly humorous, as if she were guiding readers through a cosmic museum where each exhibit might suddenly sprout tentacles or whisper in Czech.
In “Out of This World”, Cordasco mapped fourteen linguistic traditions—from Chinese to Swedish—each chapter introduced by a specialist who contextualizes the region’s speculative lineage.
The book is a kaleidoscope of Cold War anxieties, postcolonial reinventions, technological nightmares, and mythic reimaginings.
It moves briskly from Soviet-era dystopias to Korean slipstream, from Finnish weird fiction to Italian philosophical SF, always attentive to the peculiarities of subgenre formation and the political climates that shaped them.
What makes the book truly distinctive, however, is its insistence on explaining why certain works were translated into English and how those choices shaped the Anglo-American market.
Translation, in Rachel Cordasco’s telling, is not merely a linguistic operation but a cultural filtration system—one that reveals as much about English-language publishing as it does about the source cultures.
The forthcoming sequel, “Speculative Fiction in Translation from Around the World”, expands this project to a global scale.
If the first book was a detailed map of fourteen linguistic constellations, the new volume is an intercontinental star chart.
Rachel Cordasco divides the world into eight major regions—the Americas, Western Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa —and examines the speculative traditions that have emerged, collided, and transformed across more than forty languages.
The scope is dizzying, but Rachel Cordasco’s prose remains lucid, witty, and delightfully unpretentious.
She writes as if she is inviting readers to a grand literary banquet where the dishes range from Portuguese cosmic horror, from Romanian techno-gothic to Chilean metaphysical SF.
Her tone is academic, yes, but also vibrant, amused, and occasionally conspiratorial, as though she were letting readers in on a secret: the world is far stranger—and far more interesting—than the English-language canon has ever admitted.
One of the book’s most compelling arguments concerns the uneven distribution of subgenres across regions.
Why does horror dominate in certain linguistic traditions while science fiction flourishes in others?
Why do some cultures gravitate toward dystopia while others prefer mythic fantasy or surrealist fabulism?
Rachel Cordasco approaches these questions with intellectual generosity, refusing simplistic explanations. Instead, she traces historical pressures, publishing infrastructures, political upheavals, and aesthetic preferences, showing how translation acts as both a mirror and a magnifying lens. The result is a portrait of global speculative fiction that is not homogenized but gloriously heterogeneous.
Rachel Cordasco’s work is also marked by a deep empathy for non-Anglophone writers and translators.
She understands, perhaps better than anyone, the fragility of translated SF: how easily it can vanish from bookstores, how dependent it is on small presses, how much labour is required to bring a single story across linguistic borders.
Her website, Speculative Fiction in Translation, launched in 2016, has become the central hub for cataloguing and promoting SFT worldwide.
It is a monument to her solidarity with translators and authors who work outside the Anglophone spotlight.
And now, with the launch of Small Planet: The SF in Translation Magazine in May 2026, Rachel Cordasco has created a new platform where global voices can circulate freely, without the constraints of commercial gatekeeping.
Her intellectual generosity is matched by a kind of moral clarity: she believes that speculative fiction is a universal human endeavour, and that translation is the mechanism through which we share our dreams, nightmares, and cosmic anxieties.
She is not merely a scholar but a facilitator, a connector, a curator of worlds.
Her work continues the legacy of Lavie Tidhar’s World SF Blog and the Apex Book of World SF series, but it also pushes beyond them, offering a systematic, historically grounded, academically rigorous framework for understanding global SF as a field rather than a collection of curiosities.
European speculative fiction occupies a particularly fascinating place in Cordasco’s cartography.
Whether written in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or the many languages of Eastern Europe, European SFT often reveals the continent’s layered histories—imperial, industrial, philosophical, and technological. Rachel Cordasco treats these traditions not as monolithic blocs but as dynamic ecosystems where Gothic legacies collide with cyberpunk, where philosophical speculation merges with political satire, where mythic pasts coexist with posthuman futures.
Her attention to Romanian, Polish, Czech, and Russian SF is especially valuable, offering English-language readers a glimpse into traditions that have long been overshadowed by Anglo-American dominance.
Ultimately, Speculative Fiction in Translation from Around the World is more than a reference work.
It is a celebration of linguistic diversity, a manifesto for global reading, and a reminder that the future—imagined or otherwise—belongs to all of us.
Rachel Cordasco writes with the conviction that speculative fiction is a shared human language, one that becomes richer each time a story crosses a border.
Her scholarship is meticulous, her prose lively, her humour subtle, and her commitment to non-Anglophone SF unwavering.
In an era when cultural borders are both dissolving and hardening,
Rachel Cordasco’s work feels not only timely but necessary. She invites readers to step outside the familiar, to embrace the multilingual strangeness of the world, and to recognize that translation is itself a speculative act—a leap into the unknown, a wager that imagination can travel farther than geography.
Her books, her website, her magazine, and her translations form a constellation of generosity and intellectual courage.
They remind us that speculative fiction is not merely entertainment but a global conversation, and that Rachel S. Cordasco is one of its most eloquent, vibrant, and indispensable voices.
Rachel Shawn Cordasco (b. 1982) is an US independent scholar and translator focusing on SF in Translation (SFT).
Rachel Cordasco earned a PhD in Literary Studies in 2010; after working as a lecturer and then editor for several years, she transitioned into independent writing, first reviewing SFT for John DeNardo’s SF Signal.
In May 2016, Rachel Cordasco launched SF inTranslation.com, a site dedicated to cataloguing and promoting Speculative Fiction written in languages other than English and published in English translation.
The site continues the work of author, editor, and translator Lavie Tidhar, whose World SF Blog (2009-2013) led to the publication of five volumes of The Apex Book of World SF, and three subsequent volumes of The Best of World SF (#2 including Rachel Cordasco’s translation of Italian sf author Clelia Farris’s “The Substance of Ideas”).
Rachel Cordasco has written reviews, essays, and academic articles for the ELN Riveter, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Locus, SFRA Review (Science Fiction Research Association), Strange Horizons, Studies in the Fantastic, Tor.com, Words Without Borders and World Literature Today.
She has also contributed chapters to Ian Campbell’s Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation (anthology, 2021) and Glyn Morgan’s Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination (anthology, 2022).
In 2021, Rachel Cordasco published the first book dedicated solely to educating lay readers and scholars about SF in translation, entitled Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium (2021).
This focuses on 14 source languages from which speculative fiction has appeared in English since 1960, with each chapter introduced by a scholar, translator, or author from the relevant country/language tradition.
The forthcoming sequel will focus on underrepresented languages from the rest of the world.
Rachel Cordasco has also translated over a dozen works of Italian speculative fiction, most notably stories by Clelia Farris.
In 2021 she received the Rosetta Award, and in 2022, the Space Cowboy Award for her work in SF in translation.
Her Small Planet: The SF in Translation Magazine was launched in May 2026 as a free download from the SF in Translation website.
