An Analysis of the Brazilian experience in English-Speaking SFF Spaces

After some years of following authors attempting to break into international speculative markets, I decided to catalog every story I could find written by a Brazilian author and published in English. What started as a handwritten list of eleven people I knew became the Index of Brazilian SFFH Fiction in English, listing the work of forty-four authors from the late 1980s through 2021. It’s the opposite of the meme #cometobrazil, but in the form of archival work, and it can also be easily used as a reading list, in case any gringo reader wants to immerse themselves in our writing.

It’s a growing list—there are works out there that I might have missed, and some stories were lost in the vortex of time—but I knew from the start that this would be no easy feat. At first I included translations because it felt natural; Portuguese is our mother tongue, after all. But translated work proved to be difficult to catalog because of my main point with this research: I was trying to find intention. I wanted to see, in numbers, how many of us were actively trying to publish in international markets, but if I included translations, I would have to add the work of the nineteenth century classics like Machado de Assis, or a bestselling juggernaut like Paulo Coelho, none of them directly related to the speculative fiction community. Therefore I was forced to remove translation from the index, even though many of the authors cited there have translations of their work (similarly, I also decided against listing self-published work, because I wanted to see how many Brazilian writers were being accepted).

In short, I wanted to have a better understanding of our international presence, to see how many of us are out there, and if my original impression that we are underrepresented was baseless or not.

My conclusion? It depends. There are more of us than I thought, and some have been active longer than I predicted, but we are scarce. In fact, the number of Brazilian authors in international markets has only started to grow in the past few years.

In solo books, we’re currently represented by Laura Pohl, who has two YA duologies under her belt, Illimani Ferreira, with an indie adult novel, Fabio Fernandes and H. Pueyo, with a short collection each, and Woody Dismukes, with a poetry chapbook. In short fiction, we have around 110 pieces scattered from the early 2000s to now, but twenty of those authors only published once, and several published a couple of pieces, then never again.

Why does this happen? I asked three of the authors listed in the Index about their experiences. The first is H. Pueyo, who has an impressive bibliography—out of the 110 short fiction pieces I listed, thirty were hers. She explains some of the difficulties she encountered:

“There’s an unspoken cultural dissonance. I get constant rejections saying they love the writing and concept… But no, sorry, our readers wouldn’t connect with it. This happens to many narratives, perspectives and realities that are unfamiliar to editors, and it goes against the very search for diversity: the ‘other’ might have different storytelling, sensibility and even form (‘show, don’t tell’, for example, is the contrary of what many Latin Americans do), but the international market has not yet fully embraced that.”

Laura Pohl speaks of similar struggles:

“When we talk about gate-keeping in publishing, we think of basic aspects of editorial—cultural insensitivity, failure to connect to a story from another point of view, racism—but this is only one of the many difficulties international authors face in publishing. It’s an uphill battle that starts with fighting for your story and trying to mold yourself to the US market without losing your identity, and even getting paid. It’s a system that benefits only US-based authors in every step of the way, which can obviously take a toll on our own writing. How can we focus on doing our work if the system itself is trying to push us away from it?”

Laura’s response made me wonder if part of the problem is our lack of physical presence. Should we be more present in workshops and international cons? I asked Rodrigo Assis Mesquita, a Clarion West and Viable Paradise alumnus, about his experience:

“It was game-changing: being immersed in writing environments surrounded by talented and generous people made me a better writer and helped me get into a bigger community. We help each other with critiques, emotional support, et cetera. I think the workshops improve the chances of publication because you end up writing better stories, but sales depend on a number of factors.”

Jana Bianchi, translator and Clarion West graduate, also says:

“In Brazil, most books we publish are translated from other languages—chiefly English. It’s the opposite in the Anglophone world—and maybe it would remain so if the readers, and consequently editors, weren’t eager to read “different” things (this is a relative concept, I know, but that’s the point). And “different” is exactly what the market will find if it opens up to stories written by non-native English speakers and, why not, to translations.”

Jana’s point took me back to the translations I’d omitted from the Index. Intention is still an important factor, but not for the reason I originally thought. Many authors are professional translators, and I had to leave out many of their stories in the abridged bibliography I made for them (Fábio Fernandes, H. Pueyo and Anna Martino are among the authors who had some of their stories first appear in Brazilian magazines and, eventually, published a translation of their work in English).

Those cases, however, are mostly self-translated, and they’re meager compared to the others. The preference for English exists for many reasons, like our lack of professionally paid magazines (and a national indifference toward SFF). But the preference also means intention, which means authors have to grind even harder, immerse themselves in a foreign language, pay for expensive workshops if they can, and try again, again, and again to submit to a market that scorns many aspects of Latin American writing. Examples include writing rules that discard some of our cultural narratives: our sentences tend to run longer, we often “tell” instead of “showing” for a stylistic purpose, and we’re far more accepting of the use of the passive voice (passive voice, in fact, is often considered to be more poetic).

And, on the opposite end of this determination, shared by Brazilian authors who submit to international venues, is our lack of exportation. We translate ourselves. We come here to show our work. And,     yet, our work does not come out of Brazil. Some of our speculative classics, like Érico Veríssimo’s “Incidente em Antares,” remain untranslated, which is intriguing, considering Flora Thomson-DeVeaux’s new translation of “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas” by Machado de Assis had a great reception last year.

Why? I still don’t have an answer to that question. Forty-four authors in nearly four decades is relatively few, but it’s an expressive number for our international presence. When I started the Index in 2020, there were thirty of us. In a single year, ten new authors published their stories and, eventually, I believe the Index will be too large for me to maintain. But, again, intention. Those forty-four authors are trying on their own. What about the millions of other artists who produce content here? When will they be exported and translated?

As a meme, #cometobrazil showcases Brazilian enthusiasm over international artists. We translate and consume so much from other cultures that it’s a well-known fact that our fannish intensity can help shape the popularity of any artist. It’s past the time for this sentiment to become a little less one-sided.