Ironically for a genre that often explores communication with aliens, most American science fiction fans know little of authors writing in languages other than English. Lingua Cosmica is evidence that ignorance of the terrestrial “other” in U.S. SF circles is beginning to diminish. The essay collection investigates the work of 12 authors from 11 nations. Russia is represented by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who did their characteristic work under Soviet censorship. The Russian essay’s author, Yvonne Howell, makes the interesting point that the Soviet Union was essentially “science fictional” for imposing a futuristic utopian project on a premodern society. The Strugatsky writings prefigured James Cameron’s Avatar and are used in Russia to support a variety of political perspectives. Also of interest is Mingwei Song’s essay on China’s Liu Cixin whose winning of the prestigious Hugo Award points to the emergence of non-Anglophone SF in America’s consciousness. Liu’s universe is “a place that remains largely alien to human understanding,” lofty and sublime, where human agency continues to exist in a cosmos whose other entities regard the survival of our species as inconsequential.
