Exposição Prolongada à Ficção Científica  

   um blog de Luís Filipe Silva


Encontra-se em modo de artigo. Para ver as outras entradas vá para a Página Inicial ou Arquivo, no menu da direita.

23 Junho 2007

«HOW TICKLED YOU ARE BY ALL OF IT». A descrição do século do que é ser-se fã de FC - fã deste mundo e de todos os mundos a que este abre as portas, fã de todas as possibilidades do ser, fã de todos os futuros e respectivos passados. Jon Stewart nailed it muito bem, na conclusão da entrevista a Greg Bear, no Daily Show de quinta-feira. Uma entrevista com conteúdo e evidente respeito pela condição de autor de FC (e nem se tentou sequer esconder atrás da designação de tecno-thriller). Pensamentos enquanto assistia? De como é reconfortante que exista este tipo de pessoas no mundo: lógicas, claras e desligadas da imaturidade emocional de ter de recorrer a bengalas religiosas para aguentar a incerteza da vida. De quanto está a FC afastada da Fantasia, e ainda bem que. De como ambas foram um sub-produto de uma fase de comercialização no mercado norte-americano, logo expandido para a Europa, mas que nunca estiveram verdadeiramente muito relacionadas. De como a FC poderá, talvez num futuro breve, perder esta designação e assumir a postura de especulação sobre cenários alternativos para prevenção de realidades catastróficas, algo muito mais prático e imediato. Mas enquanto houver autores como o Greg Bear, a FC continuará alive & kicking. Editores portugueses, então? Então, meus senhores?

[Link Permanentedel.icio.us  technorati  digg  facebook  reddit  google

23 Junho 2007

DE PASSAGEM POR PORTUGAL, no ano passado, por ocasião do lançamento do livro A Transformação de Martin Lake, da Livros de Areia, Jeff VanderMeer inaugura o seu novo site de autor (com um layout belíssimo e invejável) e aproveita a ocasião para publicar o artigo sobre o fandom europeu que surgiu na revista Locus no início do ano. Eis, como destaque, o que tem a dizer sobre nós:

Take, for example, the Portuguese market for genre fiction, which is tiny-a print run of 1,500 would be average. We were, half jokingly, half seriously, introduced to Portugal’s “SF writers” (João Barreiros and Luís Filipe Silva) and “only Horror writer” (the incomparable David Soares, who also creates graphic novels). Half-jokingly in that these writers represented perhaps the majority of successfully published homegrown Portuguese SF and horror writers (many more are struggling to achieve publication).

In Portugal, the terms “Science Fiction” and “Fantasy” are often seen as a detriment to sales, and the most common result is the attempt to disguise SF/F as something else-and then compare it to Borges, who is wildly popular in Portugal. This is certainly the tact taken with my own collection from Livros de Areia, one of the smaller presses (despite having published Eduardo Galeano, Jerzy Kosinski, and other well-known writers).

Problems of publishing genre in Portugal also include the sudden collapse of the SF/F infrastructure in Portugal about a decade ago and, at least according to some writers I talked to, that only three decades have passed since the overthrow of an authoritarian dictatorship in a military coup (not to mention, an educational system that is still in severe disarray).

This sense of history still impinging on the literature of the present became a recurring theme, especially in places like the Czech Republic, Romania, and Germany. Events like the fall of Communism might seem as if they happened long ago, but it has only been a generation or so, and that’s not long enough for the wounds to have healed or some societies to have completely recovered from the harm done to them.

However, there’s a difference between a lack of institutional support and the full-on passion and effort of individuals, and there are many committed people in the current SF/F scene. In addition to the efforts of Joao Seixas and Pedro Marques from Livros, Luís Corte Real’s commitment to his publishing house Saída de Emergência has resulted in several exciting projects, like the translation of Alan Moore’s novel into Portuguese. Another activist in the scene is the translator and editor Luis Rodrigues, the man largely responsible for the dialogue between Portuguese SF/F and the English-speaking world through his Fantastic Metropolis website and corresponding anthology, Breaking Windows.

Rodrigues bemoans what he calls a vicious cycle: “Everything is done on the cheap, due to the flimsiness of the market and also because most publishers don’t take SF/F seriously enough themselves. So they take the cheapest books and translators they can find (usually translation students or people with no training at all), which only keeps readers from investing in Portuguese genre editions. Things are either done for the love and with some sacrifice, or done poorly, and you can’t reach critical mass with bad books or butchered classics….We have a long, long road ahead of us.”

This may be true, but my perception of the Portuguese SF/F scene was rather less jaded: I saw many pragmatic people working very hard for the fiction they love to read and write.

[Link Permanentedel.icio.us  technorati  digg  facebook  reddit  google

Site integrante do
Ficção Científica e Fantasia em Português
Texto
Diminuir Tamanho
Aumentar Tamanho

Folhear
Página Inicial

Arquivo

Subscrever
Leitor universal