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In 2016, SF and fantasy went global. It wasn’t a question of success – both genres have been globally successful for many years – but of provenance. This was the year in which western audiences began to wake up to the excellence and diversity of genre voices from around the world.
Take, for instance, the Hugo, the genre’s most prestigious award. Over the last couple of years this prize was more or less hijacked by the “Sad” and “Rabid Puppies” – groups opposed to the more progressive and liberal iterations of SF. In 2016 these angry activists proved much less destructive. This year’s Hugo winners were not only great books, they were pointers for the direction in which the genre as a whole is moving. Best novel went to NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (Orbit), a tale of an earthquake-afflicted and wasted world that functions as a powerful fable of ecological collapse while also reconfiguring fantasy in more ethnically and sexually diverse directions. Best novella was Nnedi Okorafor’s African-flavoured space opera Binti (Tor), while best novelette was Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu.
The power of translation is a unifying theme in an unusually varied year for SF
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