The first book in an ongoing series, Speculative Japan presents a selection of outstanding works of Japanese science fiction and fantasy in English translation… and a glimpse into new worlds of the imagination. It was first released at Nippon 2007, the 65th World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan, and then made available worldwide.
Japanese fiction has assumed a position of significance in many genres of world literature as it continues to chart its own creative course. Whereas science fiction in the English-speaking world developed gradually over a period of evolutionary change in style and content, SF in Japan took off from a very different starting line. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, Japanese SF writers worked to combine their own thousand-year-old literary tradition with a flood of Western SF and other fiction. Contemporary Japanese SF thus began in a jumble of ideas and periods, and ultimately propelled Japanese authors into a quantum leap of development, rather than a steady process of evolution.
The result has been phenomenal. As new authors developed in this exotic environment, they invented new ways to view SF, and used the genre to form new images of themselves and their culture. The time is long overdue to present the work of Japanese science fiction and fantasy writers to the world in English. We hope this shared world of speculative fiction produces a creative feedback relationship, which can only encourage new and more stimulating visions of tomorrow.