By Ersatz Culture:

(1) Glasgow con reports – 8 Light Minutes and Arthur Liu (part 1)

Publisher 8 Light Minutes Culture has put out a fairly long Chinese-language con report on WeChat/Weixin.  (There’s also a version on Weibo, but the content is truncated part-way through due to a login prompt.)  A lot of the content had previously been posted as individual posts on their Weibo account, but I think this report has some previously unseen material.  It focusses on the dealer area and the stand they had there.

The report also notes that the English translation of Hai Ya’s “The Space-Time Painter”, last year’s Hugo Best Novelette, will be appearing in an upcoming Galaxy’s Edge anthology, which I don’t recall seeing previously reported.

Hugo finalist Arthur Liu previously wrote a 5-part report on the Chengdu Worldcon, and has just started documenting his attendance at Glasgow.  The first part (Chinese language) covers what he did prior to setting off for the UK, in particular his contributions as a volunteer on the Hugo team, to the In Memoriam list, and the Xanadu project to promote Chinese SF.  Disclaimer: I am briefly namechecked.

(2) Photos of the play staged at the Chengdu SF Museum on Tuesday

Further to the Chinese SF coverage posted last week, the “China Orbit (Spring)” play was staged at the Chengdu SF Museum on Tuesday 27th.  A selection of photos are below, but more can be seen in the following Weibo posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

(3) Tianwen opens up memberships to in-person attendees of the Chengdu Worldcon

Also following up earlier coverage the Tianwen Literature Contest published a Chinese-language announcement on Sunday 25th that memberships are available.  Via Google Translate (with minor manual edits):

1. The Secretariat of the Competition Jury invites in-person attendees of the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon (including single-day ticket members) to become “Tianwen” members.  You can become a member by providing attendance credentials, which include but are not limited to: member purchase receipts, member attendance nameplates, or attendance check-in photos.

2. Newly registered members who were not in-person attendees of the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon need to complete a questionnaire.  Fans who pass this can become “Tianwen” members.

I don’t know what the questionnaire entails – registration seems to involve providing a phone number to get a validation code via an SMS message, and my experience with other Chinese registration systems is that these often refuse to send a code to my UK phone number.

That Tianwen appears to have access to Chengdu Worldcon membership details isn’t perhaps quite the data privacy fail that it might appear at first glance.  The copyright message in the footer of the tianwensf.com website (which seems to have just been launched) indicates that the Chengdu Science Fiction Society is the entity behind the award – corroborated by the authorship of this latest announcement – and that organization was also the one responsible for the Chengdu Worldcon, so the membership details probably haven’t been passed onto a third party.

Right now, all that membership seems to give is the ability to nominate for a single award category, the best work translated into Chinese in the past decade.  (As far as I can tell, all the other award categories are determined by judging panels.)  Nominations close on September 19th.