Forum: scifi.stackexchange.com
Tags: <short-stories><novel><languages><influences>
Title: Which originally non-English novel or story has had the widest reception in English-language SF as measured in number of citations?
Question: I'm trying to understand how big the influence of translated SF is in the English speaking world. Part of the question is which is the single most influential work from outside.  So, which story or novel that was not originally published in English has been most often cited in other works, as measured by number of citations in Google Scholar?

Answers:
sents: text: I'm pretty sure Jules Verne is going to be a frontrunner of this.
text: He wrote originally in French, and is the second most translated author in the world (after Shakespeare and just before Agatha Christie).
text: He has had a major influence on Science Fiction for more than a hundred years, with multiple screen adaptations.
text: EDIT:
text: The question asked for a work.
text: It's hard to choose between his most popular science fiction works (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; Journey to the Centre of the Earth; From the Earth to the Moon) and I can't find sales figures for each, but if I had to guess it has to be 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/456/DJClayworth
score: 72
sents: text: I would guess it is the works of Stanislaw Lem.
text: "Cyberiad" has been translated into English, widely published, and widely cited.
text: "Solaris" was made into a Hollywood movie.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/638/Dima
score: 26
sents: text: Consider Jules Verne .
text: Considered by many to be one of the 'Fathers of Science Fiction', his works started being translated into English in 1852.
text: According to the Wikipedia article, he's the second most translated author in the world since 1979, and was probably the most translated during the 1960's & 70's.
text: Unfortunately, the article doesn't provide numbers on the translations by story/novel (and I don't know where that information could be obtained) but think about how many folks have read classics like '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea', 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' or 'From the Earth to the Moon'.
text: He is the most translated novelist in the world (148 languages according to UNESCO) see NAJVS
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/2933/Stan
score: 21
sents: text: Not sure if Pierre Boulle would count.
text: Although the book La Planète des singes wasn't particularly popular outside of France, the various Planet of the Apes films which were (loosely) based on it have been extremely influential.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/969/Daniel Roseman
score: 12
sents: text: If think Karel Čapek with his play R.U.R influenced SF quite heavily with his univrsally recognized word robot .
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/19274/jnovacho
score: 11
sents: text: Even though the question is tagged as "written", a 1927 film "Metropolis" by Fritz Lang definitely deserves a mention, being an exceptionally influential work of Sci-Fi and seen by a considerable number of people.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/16653/oakad
score: 9
sents: text: With Jules Verne and Stanislav Lem the best known non-english SF writers of the 19th and 20th century respectively, some earlier notable SF writers who were eventually widely circulated in English include: 18th century: Ludvig Holberg Danish/Norwegian author publishing Niels Klim's underground travels in 1741.
text: Describes a solar system inside the earth with several inhabited planets.
text: Widely published in several european languages Voltaire French writer and philosopher who wrote the 1792 short-story Micromégas where Earth is visted by two aliens from Saturn and Sirius.
text: 17th century: Johannes Kepler German astronomer writing Somnium between 1620 and 1630.
text: Contains detailed descriptions of how the earth would look like from the moon.
text: Cyrano de Bergerac French dramatist who wrote Comical history of the states and empires of the moon , published posthumously in 1657.
text: Arthur C. Clarke credited this novel with the first description of rocket-powered space flight and the ramjet.
text: 2nd century:
text: Lucian of Samosata (AD 125 - AD 180)
text: a Syrian satirist writing in Greek, who wrote True History a satire of contemporary works which manages to include space travel, aliens and interplanetary warfare.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/13961/Abulafia
score: 7
sents: text: We by Yevgeney Zamyatin (Russian, 1921), influenced e.g. George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut.
text: That's quite a long reach.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/863/JohnWinkelman
score: 5
sents: text: Some sort of "honorable mention" for Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic which turned into, among other things, the Tarkovsky film "Stalker", and their book Monday [Begins|Starts] on Saturday (which is more soviet-science-fantasy)?
text: Heavily influential on me, at any rate.
text: Pretty small sample size.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/8842/Michael Paulukonis
score: 4

Summary of the answers:
A number of originally non-English SF authors and works are considered to be influential. These include Jules Verne, Stanislaw Lem, Pierre Boulle, Karel Čapek,  Ludvig Holberg, Lucian of Samosata and  Yevgeney Zamyatin. Voltaire wrote 1792 short-story  Micromégas; Johannes Kepler  wrote  Somnium  between 1620 and 1630; Stanislaw Lem wrote Cyberiad and Solaris; and Cyrano de Bergerac wrote  Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657).
Though there are many possibilities, Jules Verne is the most likely English novel or story with the widest reception in the English speaking world.