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So far, I've only seen questions on English-specific books. Is this a language restriction?

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The language of the site is English, so the audience are people who speak English. This strongly biases the site towards books written in English (or at least for which translations are available).

Furthermore, I think that there is a larger proportion of SF published in English than with other genres. This is an informal impression from comparing the amount of SF not translated from English relative to the total amount of SF, to the relative amount for other genres and non-genre modern literature, in France at least.

So it's natural that the bulk of the SF we discuss was written in English or at least translated into English. However, this is no obligation, and I do recall a couple of story identification questions where the asker had read a book in another language and wasn't sure there was an English translation. I think we've also had a couple of questions about non-English writers, not all of whose books had been translated into English.

You can ask questions about non-English books. You're less likely to reach someone who can answer, but there's no prohibition against such questions.

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    To augment what Gilles said, we DO have some non-English-SFF expertise on the site, but it's more by luck than by rule (I can cover USSR/Russian, and I'm making an unfounded assumption that Gilles can cover French-speaking ones. I think I saw active users who speak German and Italian as well. But you should NOT count on getting a decent answer as the chances are pretty slim that the critical mass of experts in your language's SciFi would be hanging out here.
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Sep 9, 2012 at 19:13
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    @DVK It's called a conclusion.
    – user56
    Sep 9, 2012 at 19:18
  • in my professional life it's called an "executive summary" :) - the important piece that (presumably important) people read if they don't want to bother with the rest of a sizable communication. TL;DR is simply a less pretentious version. Your call though - you have more experience with editing for clarity than I do so I'll defer to your judgement.
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Sep 9, 2012 at 21:15
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    Thanks for the answer!
    – Chetter Hummin
    Sep 10, 2012 at 1:07

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