Soil Has No Borders. Why Should Stories?
A Brazilian translation workshop is bringing Tractor Beam to Portuguese readers, planting the seeds for an international translation initiative to make soilpunk truly global
We’re releasing our full Spring 2025 issue, Generation, in Portuguese. The translations are a collaboration with literary translation workshop led by Professor Elton Luiz Aliandro Furlanetto at the Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS) in Campo Grande, Brazil. Contact us to learn about translating into your own language.
Brazil’s storytellers have been at the forefront of environmental and ecological fiction long before mainstream Western literary outlets started using terms like “eco-fiction” or “cli-fi.” In some ways, soilpunk is just another way we refer to a tradition we’re inheriting ourselves.
Our first issue, Generation, features stories that frame the future through the lens of heritage: renewal, possibility, and new beginnings that build on Indigenous knowledge and inherited wisdom. It seeds the thesis that soil and the natural world can be technologies unto themselves — a basis for world-building that already feels deeply woven into the canon of Brazilian speculative fiction.
Beginning June 5, on World Environment Day, we’re rolling out Portuguese translations of that first issue on Substack, alongside the original English versions.
The collaboration began when Professor Elton Furlanetto — a scholar of science fiction and utopian studies, and the Brazilian Portuguese translator of Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time — contacted Tractor Beam on behalf of a literary translation workshop at Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS). The group, which includes students and collaborators from multiple Brazilian universities, had read the first issue and asked whether they could translate it into Portuguese. We were immediately gripped by the premise.
“We want soilpunk to inspire us here in Brazil,” Elton wrote. “The students started a study group that developed into a workshop for translating literature, and people from other universities in different regions in Brazil joined us. They read Tractor Beam, and they loved it — and so did I.”
From its inception, Tractor Beam has been a project about access: bringing visions of the future closer to home (not to Mars) and creating a platform where people across the world can imagine forward from their own vantage points. But how can we have a truly collective future if it isn’t available to everyone? Like rivers, the best stories have no borders.
“Most of our population does not feel comfortable with reading literary texts in English,” Furlanetto explains. “Far from being escapist or naive, visions that are complex and powerful serve as starting points and blueprints from which we develop ideas, dreams, and actions.”
The workshop began in the classroom. A colleague was teaching a translation course focused on theory, not practice, and students started seeking out opportunities to try their hand at the craft. With his background in literary translation, Furlanetto became a natural resource for interested students at his university and beyond.
He suggested an alternative, extracurricular approach: “I would choose one paragraph of a certain novel, or a poem. The students would have some time to translate, then we would put all versions side by side and discuss the results.”
The process is iterative. “We suggest people work in pairs, and each pair is free to choose the way they are going to divide the material and the workload,” Elton explains. “We get together and talk about the tricky parts of the translations, reflect on the reviewers’ comments, and share what we’ve liked and learned in the process.”
What began with poems and paragraphs eventually grew into full-scale translation projects. Their first full magazine was Omenana, a speculative fiction publication that focuses on stories by writers from Africa and the African diaspora. With the success of that first partnership, they set out to translate another magazine, and found Tractor Beam.
They reached out right as we were launching our debut issue, Generation. The issue gathers nine works of original speculative fiction that imagine futures rooted in soil, seed, and inherited knowledge, including Hush Up and Eat Your Dirt, Child by Christopher R. Muscato; The Flowers Where 580 Used to Be by T.K. Rex; Desert Beetle Song by Gunnar de Winter; Rigland by Suyi Davies Okungbowa; Half Life of Memory by L.R. Lam; An Echo’s Timelapse by Tlotlo Tsamaase; What Really Happened in Nightshade by Sarena Ulibarri; Ancestor’s Gift by Chisom Umeh; and Maitake-by-the-Sea by Renan Bernardo, a Brazilian author who publishes primarily in English.
The irony isn’t lost on us: our first story was written by a Brazilian author in English, then translated back into Portuguese as part of this initiative. Speculative fiction has historically flowed toward English-language publishing, but writers like Bernardo have always held multiple traditions, multiple imaginaries. Bringing his story home has underscored that this genre isn’t an export. It’s an inheritance.
And part of the inheritance is community. Furlanetto introduced us to Jana Bianchi, a Brazilian editor and author who he has taken science fiction and fantasy translation classes from. Bringing things full circle, Jana’s work appeared in our latest issue, Underground – furthering the dynamic, ongoing conversation around the future we’re seeding on this planet, together.
We hope the Portuguese edition of Generation will be the first of many. If you’d like to bring Tractor Beam into your language, we’d love to hear from you.
Meet the translators
Maitake à Beira-Mar Leandro Vicente
“The way we have to enter these stories and try to translate their worlds into words of my own language, words capable of describing them and touching people's minds and hearts…the future of Earth relies on de-escalating the human voracity for resources.”
English
Timelapse: O Caminho dos Ecos Luiza Lopes e Sophia Ribeiro Ferreira
“It opened our mind to a different kind of future, one that is green and connected to nature instead of just cold technology. The new specific vocabulary was a bit out of our comfort zone, but it was really fun discovering it.”
English
Fica Quieto e Coma Sua Terra, Filho Mônica Stefani
“The very title called my attention and puzzled me! Why was that sentence there? Was it linked to what kind of context?”
English
Canção dos Besouros Do Deserto Frank Rudiger Lopes e Lúcia Britto
“To learn from others’ translations while also reaching across and trying to suggest and review theirs’ was both a personal and collective learning moment. If translation is often felt as a solitary or strongly individual activity, the project managed to connect its multiple aspects of proofreading and revisions to have us all understand that it is not so.”
“Translating expletives (bad words) was surprisingly difficult as well! Who would’ve thought?”
English
As Flores Onde Costumava Ser a 580 Ayllan Daniel e Matheus Amarilha Sanabria
“I utterly enjoy Tractor Beam’s thematic inclinations, so I learned a large number of interesting scientific facts through the expert commentary… on the other side of the coin, finding the most accurate scientific terms and concepts was a challenge.”
English
O Que Realmente Aconteceu Na Sombra Da Noite Fernanda Vargas Monteiro e Larissa de Araujo Godoy
“For me, the most fun part was translating regional expressions without losing meaning. The most challenging part was translating plant-related expressions and keeping their original meanings.”
English
Plataformalândia João Gabriel de Oliveira Arruda
“Translating is an excellent exercise for understanding both languages, the language of the source text and the language of the new version.”
English
Dádiva dos ancestrais Elton Furlanetto e Lucas Durães Fernandes
“It is always fun to be able to create new opportunities for stories. That’s how I perceive translation: a gateway for stories to be known, read, interpreted, and spread across the world.”
English
About the UFMS Translation Group
The initiative called Mão na Massa: Grupo de Estudos e Oficina de Tradução Literária (Hands-on: Study Group and Literary Translation Workshop) is coordinated by Professor Elton Luiz Aliandro Furlanetto at the Faculdade de Artes, Letras e Comunicação (FAALC), Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS), in Campo Grande, Brazil. The group brings together students and translators across multiple Brazilian universities, working collaboratively on literary translation as both scholarly practice and creative inquiry. Their previous projects include a Brazilian Portuguese edition of Omenana Magazine (Issue 31).
Want Tractor Beam in Your Language?
We’re opening a call to translators, literary collectives, and academic groups around the world to bring soilpunk into their own languages.
Reach us at contact@tractorbeam.earth
Tractor Beam is a soil-based fiction publication that explores speculative ideas around farming, food, earth sciences, and beyond, imagining a positive future on Earth. We call it soilpunk.
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