My tinfoil hat is off in admiration for anyone who translates speculative fiction for fun or profit. Lord Xenu knows, the genre can be difficult enough to understand when reader and author speak the same language; the challenge becomes exponentially greater when an interpreter must take an idea that is by definition alien to native speakers, and somehow make it comprehensible to foreign audiences. (Is there a Japanese word for "flesh-tube monster"? Apparently, there is.) But when this act of alchemy is performed just right, the cumulative effect is like science fiction squared: it can introduce a reader — even one accustomed to being shown worlds he never realized were possible — to new ways of thinking about the unknown.

Sometimes such a work can further illuminate an established author about whom you thought you knew everything there was to know. STRAIGHT TO DARKNESS: Lairs of the Hidden Gods (Kurodahan, paper, $20) is the third anthology in a series of fiction by Japanese writers, set in the Cthulhu mythos of the American pulp master H. P. Lovecraft — that means dark, weird tales about tentacled beasts, ancient artifacts that ooze unidentifiable slime and baby-eating cultists eager to bring about the end of the world. As the Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price argues in an insightful introduction, the original Cthulhu stories resonate uniquely in Japan, a nation that has not only a documented affinity for giant green, scaly monsters, but also a longstanding fear of any organized activity that smacks of cultism — a land where Christianity was alternately banned and bastardized for centuries.

This historical phobia is put to chilling use in the collection's opening story, "The Secret Memoir of the Missionary," by Tanaka Hirofumi, in which a 16th-century Jesuit finds it frighteningly easy to convert the Japanese to a cannibalistic religion that surely isn't Roman Catholicism. Other stories in the book, which has been edited by Asamatsu Ken and translated by various hands, deal with the sexual subtext lurking in Lovecraft's obsessions with appendages and fluids. But by far the best entry is Kobayashi Yasumi's more straightforward "C-City," in which a team of scientists attempting to defeat Cthulhu instead creates an entity even more deadly. (Sometimes a tentacle is just a tentacle.)

Of course, there are plenty of talented international science-fiction authors working in their own milieus, too. BABYLON BABIES (Semiotext(e), paper, $19.95), an underappreciated novel by the French punk rocker turned writer Maurice G. Dantec, deserves a wider audience, and not just because its author is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Michel Houellebecq (and definitely not because the book is being adapted into a movie starring Vin Diesel). Like Houellebecq, Dantec takes his inspiration from both high and low culture; he is the sort of writer who cites Sun Tzu's "Art of War" and the Stooges' "Search and Destroy" with equal facility.