It looks like that a lot of russian sci-fi is hard to get english translations of. For example a search for "Kir Bulychov" on amazon.co.uk doesnt return anything of the childrens sci-fi he wrote, which you would expect to still sell well.
The Anglophone trade fiction industry has serious structural issues when it comes to publishing translated works from other languages. Firstly, a lot of readers (and store book buyers) have a "not invented here" problem with foreign authors. Secondly, names that are unfamiliar: difficult. Names that are hard to pronounce: also difficult. (I know one Serbian author who uses a pseudonym specifically because her surname is hard for Americans and Brits to pronounce.) Thirdly: before an editor can decide to acquire and push a title out to marketing they have to read it; this entails at a minimum a bilingual editor in the language in question, or a budget to pay a translator for a three chapter extract and synopsis. Then, if they go with the book, they have the added overhead of commissioning a full translation and, hopefully, getting someone else who's fluent in the source language to sanity-check it. All in all, this costs thousands of dollars -- and there's so much adequate material already available in the vernacular that most editors don't bother. It takes someone with a real sense of mission to put the effort in -- or an author who's willing to pay a translator up-front on spec in hope of selling.
Little-known fact: Finnish SF author Hannu Rajaniemi writes in English. Indeed, his novel "The Quantum Thief" was translated into Finnish by someone else (and made it to #2 in the "foreign translated fiction" bestseller charts in Helsinki).
That is really unfortunate. Especially considering english is second language of choice of so much of the world. It would be helpful for more great works to be translated.
