Today I have a different kind of spotlight. Jana Bianchi is BSFA-winner author of science fiction and fantasy and a long time Brazilian friend. She's published at Clarkesworld, Uncanny, F&SF, Fireside, and elsewhere. Like me, she writes both in English and Portuguese and is trailing her path in both markets. Her novel “A Long Orbit” (title in free translation), was not (yet!) published in English, so it's the first time I have a spotlight for a work not yet available in English. The reason for this and for the questions I asked her is to show my English-speaking readers how there is an entire world of global voices unpublished in English and, perhaps, bridge a little of the gap and spark more interest for translated works and global SFF voices in anglophone spaces.

My Nebula finalist novella, Disgraced Return of the Kap's Needle, will be published in Portuguese in 2027 by the same publishing house (Aleph) as Jana’s book. Along with Jana and a handful of other authors, we're going to be the first Brazilian authors published by Aleph, who is the Brazilian house of Martha Wells, Isaac Asimov, John Scalzi, Arkady Martine, and other big-name SFF authors. This shows how US/anglophone SFF inundates even the markets where English is not a first language. While the anglophone spaces (mainly US/Canada/UK) see very little of translated pieces from other areas of the world, Brazil tended to favor (for years) fiction translated from other languages (mainly English) in detriment of local authors. Happily, those vices seem to be slowly dwindling in both ways!

Tell me more about "Uma Longa Órbita" (A Long Orbit) and what made you write it.

“Uma Longa Órbita” is my first novel, to be released/released in early-September by Editora Aleph, one of my favorite Brazilian publishing houses; they’re responsible for bringing to Brazil big classics I read in my teens, such as “Jurassic Park” and most Asimov’s books, as well as contemporary science fiction writers like John Scalzi, Martha Wells, and the huge, amazingly kind future best-seller Renan Bernardo ¹ (which I’m lucky to call my friend)—so I’m SO, SO flattered and excited. I’m truly living the dream.

The book is about Tarsila, a scientist from a space station of Brazilian ancestry hired to help solve a technical issue in a research settlement in Tau Ceti f: native organisms are clogging their water collection system, which is strange because they never behaved like this during the last twenty years. The problem is that Tarsila isn’t trained nor went through the long, expensive process of genetic modifications that allow selected people to be physically present in the planet, a superearth with a crushing gravity for a regular human. So the only way to work on the planet is staying in an orbital station close to the planet, from where she syncs her mind to a gaiato, a highly-technological mechanical avatar that can walk and interact with Tau Ceti f surface. The problem is that she falls in love with another scientist that lives in person on the planet. Thus, “Uma Longa Órbita” is about racing against the clock to understand the mysterious behaviour of these alien microorganisms, but it’s also a story about relationships and how close to someone you can be even if you’re physically away from them. (Yes, the book has hot scenes, so I like to call it a “science friction” story.)

I wrote it in 2021, because we were in the middle of the pandemic and… Well, I fell in love with my partner, another writer and editor who lived a state away from me. Due to all the travel restrictions (we didn’t even have vaccines yet), Diogo and I lived a whole year having a complete relationship—with love, arguments, sex, dreams, drama, and everything—before we could even touch each other. It was so, so crazy and intense I wanted to write about it, and the idea came to me with this science fiction twist to it, probably because I was completely obsessed with “The Expanse” books at the time. I wrote the first draft in English, as Uncanny was open for novellas, but I was rejected and decided to translate it into Portuguese, “just in case”. Then, years later, Aleph contacted me asking for a story; I sold it to them, and almost rewrote the whole book—now living in Rio de Janeiro, with my partner and our dog, which made it a particularly sweet full-circle story. 

Like me, you have two literary careers in two different spaces. What do you think are the main differences about writing and publishing SFF in Brazil and in the anglophone/English-speaking world?

I think there are many differences, but they all come from the same root, so to speak: scale. I don’t like to endorse the stereotype of Brazil being a country where people don’t read at all, but we do have much less readers than we could have considering our population, and certainly much less readers than the USA or Europe—and I’m not even talking about the SFF niche. So, as we unfortunately live in a capitalist society, the Brazilian literary market has much less money than USA and Europe’s—as a consequence, it may be “easier” to sell a story to a big publishing house here in Brazil, but you need to be an EXTREMELY successful author (in terms of numbers, let’s make it clear) to live from royalties; I know it’s true around the world, too, but the amount of successful authors there are much higher. It’s mathematics. We also have less literary events, less literary awards, etc., the whole environment has less funding, which somehow limits what you can achieve.

On the other hand, I think our market is much more open to stories written from different perspectives, with actual innovative takes. I don’t have any formal data to prove it, but I have enough experience writing, editing, and reading, both in English and Portuguese, to see we aren’t that attached to models, structures, and formulas—maybe because Brazil is so huge and has so many diverse communities and forms of doing art, maybe because we are in Latin America, caramba. I mean, your brain is shaped differently when you’re raised INTO magical realism, in a place where everybody has some kind of supernatural story to tell, where the news themselves blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. Also, we’re raised watching telenovelas—I’ll just say it. In summary, I do think we have a particularly creative and innovative literature (which, please, doesn’t mean it’s better or worse than any other literature); I mean, back in 1881, Machado de Assis published a book written in the POV of a deceased man, addressed, in its dedication, to the first worm that gnawed on his flesh—yes, go read “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”, you can thank me later!

It's the first time I feature a book that was not published in English (yet!). One of the reasons I'm doing this is to show my English-speaking audience one of the many amazing stories that are not available in English. How do you envision this could change in the future?

Oh my, how to answer this question without writing a whole book about it? I’ll try to be brief: while I see the anglophone market blaming technical barriers (how expensive is to translate a piece, basically) on the meager amount of translated stories that make it to their readers, I personally believe it’s a matter of mentality and education. You wouldn’t have any problem with paying translators if you had people actually willing to read and buy translated books—this is what happens in Brazil, for instance, where publishing houses not only pay for the translation but also pay huge amounts of advancements, in dollar, because there are already readers here waiting for anglophone books. You need to teach people the world is much bigger than their own country, that it doesn’t revolve around them. It’s not a problem exclusive to literature—which makes things harder, I admit. But I’m ultimately an optimist. Even though we’re in a historical moment in which nations seem to be closing more than opening, probably because there’s so much shit happening everyone is just trying to protect themselves, I believe in globalization. I believe history has its ups and downs, and hopefully we’ll soon come back to a world that is interested in building bridges instead of walls.

You have pieces in Clarkesworld, Uncanny, F&SF, and more. Tell us about the challenges of publishing in English as (like myself) a Brazilian living in a country that doesn't have it as a native language, but that values translations from English more than it values stories in its own language (Portuguese).

Oh, I could write another book about this question too haha… But ok, let’s focus on the language barrier. For me, writing in English is excruciating—not because it’s English, specifically, but because it’s not my mother tongue. Writing in your first language is already very hard, actually; when you add to the equation having to produce art in a language in which I began to properly express myself only when I was already almost in my twenties… Oh, it’s so hard. And it shows!

The other challenge of trying to publish in an English-centered market is exactly the fact that it will always show how I’m not a native speaker. Thus, I’ll always be an outsider—and everybody knows the challenges an outsider faces anywhere, no matter how open or kind a group tries to be. People tend to think only about ugly, direct xenophobia and racist situations, but the small things also hurt us. Patronizing also hurts us. Not having the same opportunities because we aren’t able to go to in-person events and know people face to face also hurts us. Having our stories rejected because “they don’t make sense” (aka doesn’t fit some standards/models/structures) also hurts us.

Talk a little bit about some books that you DESPERATELY want to see reaching new audiences with a translation to English.

Omg, they’re so many! In order to reduce the list a bit, I’ll try to focus on very Brazilian books by authors published by big publishing houses (and who all happen to be great people and amazing friends):