Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction
About this ebook
From the renowned Jiang Bo’s ‘Starship: Library' to Regina Kanyu Wang’s ‘The Tide of Moon City, and Anna Wu’s ‘Meisje met de Parel', this is a collection for all fans of great fiction.
Award winners, bestsellers, screenwriters, playwrights, philosophers, university lecturers and computer programmers, these thirteen writers represent the breadth of Chinese SF, from new to old: Gu Shi, Han Song, Hao Jingfang, Nian Yu, Wang Jinkang, Zhao Haihong, Tang Fei, Ma Boyong, Anna Wu, A Que, Bao Shu, Regina Kanyu Wang and Jiang Bo.
About the author
Xueting (or Christine) Ni is a writer, translator and speaker on Chinese traditional and pop culture. Her translation work has ranged from comics, poetry, essays, film, fantasy and science fiction. Born In Guangzhou, Christine moved to the UK in 1993, and expresses her love for Britain and China equally. Her aim is to show the West that there is more to Chinese culture than kung fu and Monkey (though she thinks both ARE pretty cool). Xueting began giving talks on Chinese culture at Amecon 2008, where she unveiled the western premier of the animated feature “Stormriders: Clash of Evils”. She has written extensively on Chinese culture and China’s place in Western pop media both for other publications and her own website of resources here, for anyone interested in China. Presenting publicly in collaboration with companies, theatres, institutions and festivals, she has spoken on tea culture, Chinese animation, indie music, classical literature, Chinese food, film and science fiction. Her book on Chinese deities will be published in June 2018.
Gu Shi is a speculative fiction writer and senior urban planner. She has been working as a researcher at the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design since2012. Her short fiction works have won two Yinhe Awards and three Xingyun Awards. She published her first story collection Möbius Continuum in 2020. Her stories have been translated into English and published in Clarkesworld and Xprize’s Sci-fi Ocean Anthology.
Han Song, science fiction writer, chairman of the Science Fiction Writers section of the Chinese Science Writers Association. Winner of multiple Yinhe, Xingyun and Tokyo Literature Awards. His signature works include “Subway”, “Hospital”, “The Red Sea”, Red Star Over America, Tombs of the Universe, and “Regenerated Bricks”. He has been translated into English, French, Italian, Japanese and other languages.
Born in 1984, Hao Jingfang leads the new generation of Chinese science fiction writers. A physics graduate, she holds a PhD in macro-economics and works at the China Development Research Foundation. In 2016, she became the first Chinese woman to win a Hugo Award. She has published three collections of short fiction and the novel Vagabonds. She lives in Beijing with her husband and daughter.
A graduate of Shanghai Jiaotong University of Communications, Nian Yu is a contracted Storycom writer, and a self-proclaimed post-95 avant-garde sci-fi author. Ever since her debut Wild Fire, she has been exploring the fantasy imagination, not only creating scifi, but fantasy and fairy tales, publishing many pieces in Science Fiction World and Sci-Fi Gin—Youth Edition. She won the New Author Silver Award at the 7th Xingyun and has published a short fiction collection, Lilian is Everywhere.
Wang Jikang, born in 1948, is a renowned science fiction writer, senior engineer. Winner of multiple Yinhe Awards, he is the only writer to have won the Lifetime Achievement Award simultaneously at the Yinhe as well as the Xingyun. Launching his writing career in the early 1990s, he has composed over a hundred works of science fiction, being named one the Three Leading Lights of Chinese Sci-Fi. His signature works include The Return of Adam, “Sowing on Venus” and The Song of Life.
Zhao Haihong holds an MA in English and American literature from Zhejiang University and a Ph.D in art history from the China Academy of Arts. She teaches at Zhejiang Gongshang University in Hangzhou. She has been publishing SF stories since 1996 and is the winner of the National Award For Outstanding Children’s Literature and a six-time winner of the Galaxy Award. Her translated stories “Exuviation” and “Windhorse” have appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet; and “The Starry Sky over the Southern Isle” has been published on Asimov’s Science Fiction. Her story “1923, A Fantasy” (translated by Nicky Harman and Pang Zhaoxia) was included in the The Reincarnated Giants: An Anthology of 21st-Century Chinese Science Fiction by Linda Rui Feng. She is currently working with publishers around the world on stories for several upcoming anthologies.
Tang Fei, writer, commentator. Member of the Shanghai Writer’s Association and the SFWA. Her signature works include Paradise in the Clouds, The Person who Saw Cetus and The Anonymous Banquet. Since 2013, ten of her stories have been translated and published around the world; her novella The Panda Keeper won Best Microfiction at 2019’s Smokelong Quarterly, Wu Ding’s Journey to the West won the Silver Prize for Most Popular Deduction Fiction at the Speculative Fiction in Translation Awards, and “The Robe” won Best Short Story at the Yinli (China Reader’s Choice) SF Awards. Apart from writing, she also dabbles in other art forms such as literary criticism, poetry, installation art and photography. Her commentary pieces have been published in The Economics Observer (China), Hong Kong and Shenzhen Literary Review.
Ma Boyong, writer. Winner of the People’s Literature Awards and Zhu Ziqing Prose Awards. His signature works include Two Capitals, Fifteen Days, The Great Ming Under the Microscrope, The Longest Day in Chang’An, Antiques and Intrigue, and Secrets of the The Three Kingdoms. Focussing his attention on historical speculative fiction, he is widely recognised to be one of the writers who set the bar for Chinese literature since the May the 4th reforms in the arts.
Anna Wu is a Chinese science fiction, screen writer and playwright. She wrote the script for Of Cloud and Mist, which won Best Film at the 6th Xingyun Awards. Her works have been published on platforms such as Clarkesworld, Galaxy’s Edge and Science Fiction World. Some of Wu’s translated works have appeared as parts of collections, such as The Shape of Thought (translated by Ken Liu). Her science fiction collection, Double Life, was published in June 2017.
Born in 1990, A Que (a pseudonym) graduated from Sichuan University, and currently lives in Chengdu. As one of the representatives of New Science Fiction in China, he published his debut in 2012, and subsequently many works in Science Fiction World, as well as overseas, in English, winning the Xingyun and Yinhe Awards multiple times. His works mainly feature soft sci-fi, but A Que has an eclectic writing style. He loves robots, writes about them and eulogizes them. He hopes they’ll let him live once they’ve taken over the world. His published works include “Walking with Robots” and “The Living World of A.I.”.
Bao Shu is a Chinese SF writer who has won multiple major awards, and published four novels and three collections. His shorter works are published by celebrated magazines like Science Fiction World, Knowledge is Power, People’s Literature, Fiction World, and Flower City. Some of his works have been translated into multiple languages. Several of his stories are now available in English, published in F&SF and Clarkesworld. Redemption of Time (translated by Ken Liu), the officially sanctioned spin-off to Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, was published in 2019.
Regina Kanyu Wang is a bilingual writer from Shanghai who has won multiple Xingyun Awards, the SF Comet International SF Writing Competition, and the Annual Best Works of Shanghai Writers’ Association Awards. Her stories can be found in Shanghai Literature, Galaxy’s Edge, Clarkesworld and more. Her essays can be found in publications such as Mithila Review, Broken Stars, and Korean Literature Now. She has published two science fiction story collections, Of Cloud and Mist 2.2 and The Seafood Restaurant in Chinese and her works have been translated into multiple languages and published around the world. She is also a PhD fellow of the CoFUTURES project at the University of Oslo, researching Chinese science fiction from gender and environmental perspectives.
Renowned science-fiction author, Jiang Bo graduated from Qinghua University with a master’s degree in 2003, the same year as the publication of his debut. He has written over 40 pieces of short to medium-length fiction, totalling over 800,000 words. In 2012, he began creating longer works, of which well-known ones include Heart of the Galaxy trilogy, and Machine Gate. A recent winner of a Best Original Science Fiction award in China, he has also won the Yinhe Awards six times, and the Xingyun Gold Award four times and is considered a representative of China’s generation of “Sci-Fi Regeneration” writers.
