Fantastic Fiction: French SF in Translation in F&SF (1961) (original) (raw)

The February 1961 issue of F&SF, with glowing humanoid figures wrapped in blue ribbons and floating in an abstract space of black and gold lines. Cover authors are Brian W. Aldiss, Marcel Ayme, Robert F. Young, Theodore L. Thomas, Ron Goulart, and Rosel George Brown. The early years of the 1960s brought a number of French science fiction stories into English, thanks in a big way to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This kicked off decades of French science fiction in English, including several Pierre Boulle novels (like Planet of the Apes), that in turn inspired major films, introducing American readers to a more expansive view of SF. According to the introduction of The World Treasury of SF (which includes three stories by two French authors), the French magazine Fiction began in the 1950s as a translation of F&SF, but slowly began including stories by French writers, Eventually, these stories, in turn, began appearing in the English F&SF, many translated by author and editor Damon Knight.

The August 1961 issue of F&SF, with a skinny humanoid robot in an art gallery cringing in front of a large abstract metal sculpture titled The Robot. Cover authors are Murray Leinster, Gordon R. Dickson, Isaac Asimov, Harry Harrison, and Kit Reed. In 1961 alone, four French stories in English appeared in F&SF: by Marcel Aymé, Claude F. Cheinisse, Claude Veillot, and Gérard Klein. The latter was a French anthologist, editor, and author whose novels came into English in the 1970s and 80s via DAW and Doubleday. Editor of the prestigious SF imprint Ailleurs et Demain for four decades, Klein’s early influence was Golden Age American science fiction and wrote several space operas that focus on humans in the far-future, including four that were translated into English. His short story “The Monster in the Park” is a work of quiet SF-horror, in which aliens have landed in the middle of a Parisian park, near where a woman knows her husband walks on his way home from work. When he’s late, and she hears reports about the aliens on the radio, she begins to worry about her husband’s safety. When an alien finally speaks, its voice sounds… like her husband’s.

The September 1961 issue of F&SF, with a blonde white woman looking at a blobby, coral-like creature, with shadowy soldiers in the distance. Cover authors are Floyd Wallace, Brian W. Aldiss, Herbert Gold, and Isaac Asimov. Aliens inhabit another of the French stories in F&SF published in 1961—this time it’s Claude Veillot’s “The First Days of May.” Here a story about alien domination eerily echoes the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two.

In Cheinisse’s story, “Juliette,” a woman becomes emotionally attached to her sentient car, à la Knight Rider. The last 1961 French story in F&SF, Aymé’s “The Ubiquitous Wife,” imagines a woman whose special power is the ability to split herself into multiple versions of herself, and thus live multiple lives. She keeps this a secret from her husband (for obvious reasons), but eventually he starts to notice that something is off, especially when a version of her starts seeing another man.

The December 1961 issue of F&SF, with a dejected looking white man with short dark hair at the front of a long line of human figures walking through a ruined cityscape and being menaced by insectoid aliens. Cover authors are Brian W. Aldiss, Herbert Gold, Isaac Asimov, and Will Stanton. It’s unfortunate that French science fiction (and science fiction as a subgenre, in particular) has been translated into English less and less since the heyday of the 1960s-80s. Hopefully, though, more French SFT will come to us in the future.