A press release from Host Shaun Duke of The Skiffy and Fanty Show:

For those who hung out with us over the course of this year’s Worldcon, you’ll have heard us talk about our 2014 schedule or seen our magic “We’re All About World SF in 2014″ super special t-shirts (pics coming soon).  But all of you at home missed the big announcement:

The Skiffy and Fanty Show is proud to announced our 2014 World SF Tour.

What does this mean?

One of the things we care a great deal about on this show is diversity in SF/F.  But we’re all based in the U.S., which means it is easy for the show to get stuck on what’s going on here.  Since 2014 is the same year of the World Cup (Brazil!), a huge international competition, we decided to celebrate SF/F from all over the world at the same time.

The World SF Tour will consist of discussions about World SF, the SF/F literary traditions in non-U.S. spaces, and related topics, along with interviews with SF/F authors from as many places as we can fit on a single season of the show.  So far, we know we’re going to talk to South African, Japanese, Irish, Canadian, and Israeli authors, critics, translators, and publishers.  That list of countries will get much longer (we’re working on authors and fans from the Middle East, Central and South America, other parts of the African continent, the Caribbean, and so much more)!

How can you help?

Share this news with the community.  The biggest challenge will be reaching writers, editors, translators, and fans from other parts of the world.  Let’s face it:  the Earth is actually quite a big place, with over two hundred individual countries and more languages than we can count on our figures.  So if you know somebody from Nigeria, South Korea, New Zealand, Qatar, American Samoa, etc. (or someone who knows a lot about the SF/F in X country), let them know about what we’re doing!

Authors, publishers, editors, filmmakers, and translators from all over the world should contact us at skiffyandfanty[at]gmail[dot]com and tell us about yourself.  Do you have a book coming out next year?  A movie?  Do you work with translators to or from a language?  Contact us!  We’re going to try to cover as many topics, peoples, and countries as we can, but we can’t do that without people to talk to!

So that’s the big announcement.  Long live World SF!

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Note:  We’ll still have American guests; when we say “the world,” we mean “the world” and not some essentialized version where there’s the “United States” and “Everyone Else.”  The U.S. isn’t the center of the universe, so a true World SF tour has to acknowledge the contributions of writers from as many places as we can possibly fit in a year.