The domination of the magazines published in the United States, the United Kingdom and, from the 1980s, Australia and Canada, has overshadowed the sf magazines published elsewhere in the world. The primary reason for this was that until the 1980s many of the non-English-language magazines consisted predominantly of stories translated from English, and although much of their artwork was home-grown, it seemed, at least superficially, that they had little else to offer.

That's not to say that there wasn't an awareness of international sf novels in translation, some, such as Pierre Boulle's The Planet of the Apes (originally La planète des singes, 1963), Komatsu Sakyo's Japan Sinks (originally Nippon Chinbotsu, 1973) and Stanisław Lem's Solaris (1961), attaining a significant reputation. There was also an increasing, if passing, interest in science fiction from the Soviet Union, notably the works of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Ivan Yefremov and Kir Bulychev. But these still seemed the exception rather than the rule, and the translation of shorter fiction was much more rare. There were occasional anthologies devoted to international sf. Donald A. Wollheim had always shown an interest in the wider world of sf and his annual selection of each year's best science fiction was called The World's Best SF for good reason as he included two or three stories from other countries. He also published two volumes of European sf compiled by Richard D. Nolane, Terra SF (1981 and 1983).

Magazines were another matter, however. The US and British sf magazines are dominated, not surprisingly, by anglophone writers, and it was unusual to see any writers for whom English was not a first language. The reasons are fairly obvious: it costs more to have a story translated, and the translation may not necessarily capture the mood or essence of the original.

The occasional translated story did appear in the 1980s, though these were usually courtesy of a translator rather than as direct submissions. John Brunner, for example, who had been a close friend of the late French writer Christine Renard, translated her ‘Transistoires’ (1971) as ‘Transistors’ for the August 1982 Asimov's. Asimov's also published ‘The Land of Osiris’ (March 1985) by Wolfgang Jeschke, translated by Sally Schiller from the German anthology Arcane (1982).