Expanding Horizons – (y)our favorite non-Western fiction
(post in English for the international visitors of Erasmuscon / Eurocon 2024)
On Sunday I moderated a panel about non-Western fiction, to expand our reading horizons. Description of the panel: Diversify your to-read pile with Non-Western fantastic fiction! The fantastic genre is everywhere and bookstores offer science fiction, fantasy and horror stories from all over the world. Expand your horizon and try a book by non-Western authors from Africa, China, India and other parts of the world. To get you started, our panellists will discuss their favourite non-Western books. You’ll be sure to come out of this panel with more than enough reading tips to start a whole new to-read pile!
Panellists: Valentin Ivanov, Joost Uitdehaag, Kat Clay
We talked about what non-Western fiction consist of, and our opinions varied a bit. From every book that isn’t written in English, to books from cultures that aren’t Western in basis. So there were some very different kinds of books that were promoted during the panel.
Kat Clay (Australian author of noir, horror and the weird) first talked about the short fiction of Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Japan), like Rashomon, and later about speculative South American literature and the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges.
Joost Uitdehaag (writer from the Netherlands) called attention to Tashan Mehta’s The Liars Weave (India), a book about the only person in a magical world that doesn’t have a horoscope to rule their life. And because of that he is the only one who is able to lie, and his lies are reality to the ones who hear them.
Valentin Ivanov (writer, promotor and astronomer from Bulgaria talked about two Bulgarian and a German book:
* Assen and the Travellers in 101 Bulgarias, by Elena Pavlova, a Childrens book about travelling to different parallel Bulgarias;
* Nano, by Nikolay Tellalov, about the consequences of nanotechnology (the Bulgarian title is 10-9);
* NSA – Nationales Sicherheits-Amt, by Andreas Eschbach, about what would have happened if the Nazi’s had modern computer and surveillance technology, during the 1940’s?
Martijn Lindeboom (Dutch writer, promotor and editor) promoted these three books:
*Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi (Nigeria), about a nightmare god from the Yoruba pantheon, who is seduced by succubus Nneoma to leave his godly masters and go freelance with her. But they are pulled back in, for one last job: steal the Brass Head of Obalufon from the British museum. Of course this goes horribly wrong… A dark and thrilling heist-story, god punk, urban fantasy.
* The Tensorate-series, by Neon Yang (Singapore), about an unstable and very strange pseudo East Asian world with magic, genderless children, velociraptors and a sun that rises and sets a lot of times each day.
*The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka (Sri Lanka), a story about a recently murdered war photographer, who wants to find out what happened to him, travelling on the whims of the living through war torn Sri Lanka of the 1990’s. Winner of the 2022 Booker Award, utterly brilliant, funny, and disturbing.
Of course there are many, many more non-Western speculative books worth reading, I’d love to hear your own tips!
I’ll be posting about this and other subjects (in Dutch) on my website: www.martijnlindeboom.nl