Written By Ersatz Culture.
(1) CSFDB recommendations for the first half of 2024. The Chinese Science Fiction Database (CSFDB) has released a list of recommended works published in China in the first half of 2024. (The announcement on Weibo includes comments from fans, authors, translators and publishers.)
In summary:
- Seven pieces of short fiction were recommended; at first glance the only authors I recognize are 2024 Hugo finalists Han Song and Baoshu.
- No Chinese novels were recommended.
- Three translated novels were recommended: Greg Egan’s Permutation City; Alastair Reynolds’ Chasm City, and Empire V, a 2006 Russian novel by Viktor Pelevin. The latter I must confess I’d never heard of, but it turns out to have received an English translation in 2016, but which hasn’t been published in North America.
- Six translated short stories were recommended: three from Japan, and one from each of South Korea, Russia and the USA, the latter being Fredric Brown’s Pi in the Sky from 1945.
- Miscellaneous recommendations included biographies of Tolkien and Terry Pratchett, essays by Margaret Atwood, and artbooks by John Harris and Sparth.
(Disclaimer: I correspond with at least two members of the team that put this list together.)
(2) Editorial changes at Science Fiction World. On Monday August 19, the Weibo account of Science Fiction World announced three changes in its senior management. The announcement (especially after being put through machine translation) seems fairly PR-speakish, but as I understand it, the main change is that double Hugo finalist Yao Haijun is now ultimately responsible for all SFW editorial output. (I think previously he was in responsible for just the book publishing side, not the magazines.) La Zi/Raz/Latssep has now moved over to take charge of the marketing department.
(3) Chengdu SF Museum updates. A 15-minute video touring the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum, with narration being a mix of English and Hindi, was uploaded to YouTube a couple of weeks ago. It gives a good idea of the current content on display in the museum.
More recently, it was announced that this coming Tuesday, the museum will see the staging of a play based on the China Orbit (Spring) juvenile SF/alternate history story by academic and author Wu Yan. WeChat/Weixin posts by the museum here and here. Per the second link (via Google Translate with minor manual edits):
Looking back at the history of China’s manned space flight, the grand blueprint of the dream of manned space travel was drawn up as early as 1966. At that time, China ambitiously planned to launch the “Dawn” spacecraft between 1973 and 1975, but due to various reasons, the relevant project stagnated after 1971, and the focus of national scientific research shifted to the development of satellites.
The science fiction stage play “China Orbit” is based on the assumption that “China successfully prepared its own space program in 1972” and tells an alternative history story that is detailed, vivid and interesting. What would it be like if the “Shuguang-1” manned spacecraft project (code-named Project 714) that carried countless expectations at the time had been successfully realized, and China’s manned space program had succeeded thirty years ahead of schedule?
The piece implies that this is the first of four parts (named after the seasons) adapting the original work.
(4) New Hugo-X/Discover-X video released. 2024 Hugo Best Related Work finalist Hugo-X/Discover-X released a new video on the Chinese Bilibili service on Wednesday, their first for several months. At time of writing, the video has not yet been uploaded to their YouTube channel.
The video was shot in and around the Glasgow Worldcon, including some footage from the Tianwen promotional event previously covered on File 770 (although Tianwen itself is never actually mentioned). The video is in Chinese – which may be the reason it hasn’t yet been uploaded to YouTube – but there’s nothing especially noteworthy in the narration, unless you want to hear Chinese observations on the Scottish summer climate or British cuisine.
A reply to a user comment indicates that a second season of Hugo-X/Discover-X is about to start; presumably interviews were filmed at Glasgow, similar to how their previous videos were from the Chengdu Worldcon.
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The museum in Chengdu just does not make it for me. It is great that they are showing the play about a possible Chinese space program. That would be worth seeing but the museum is too sparse. I have been to the museum in Seattle which is now the Museum of Popular Culture back when it was the SF museum and they had artifacts, that is models and props, costumes etc. You engaged with the exhibits, that is you looked at them a read the labels. I noticed that people were just walking through the Chengdu museum. There was some interactive and the models of a variety of Mars and Moon rovers were great. But on the whole it looked empty. Not a great museum.
I was surprised that I had never heard of Viktor Pelevin, but after looking him up, I realized I had after all, but had written him off as sort of a post-modernist author playing word-games and writing novels with plots only remotely related to sf. Empire V, per the Wikipedia article, stars vampires and seems to be a fantasy satire, although possibly with a tissue-thin sfnal rationalization for the vamps. (The Wikipedia article on the novel explains that the title is a literal translation of a complicated pun and anagram that doesn’t work in English.)
Pelevin is a post-modernist, even if some of his novels more SF than others. It amused me more that in the short stories they have Platonov, who died in 1951. The story (actually novella-size) is supposedly 1932 ?????????? ????, which while have SF elements is mostly about a guy, who visits a healthy collective farm (note the year of the story!), where one woman committed suicide – the protagonist find out why (a propaganda about bad kulaks, who stole farm’s cows)
Ersatz Culture (et al.): Thank you, once again, for bringing these news to us.
Patriclk McGuire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Pelevin is a very remarkable author, certainly one of the (top, say, five) best living post-Soviet ones. He started in the 1990s on the borderlands of genre SF and kept moving towards post-modernism, I think now he could be compared to the late-era William Gibson. I certainly recommend trying him, although I lost pace with him in the later phase; but I like the comparatively short early novelllas “Omon Ra” and “Prince of Gosplan”, both brilliant metaphors of the Communist regime.
Oleksandr Zholud: Thank you to you, too; I would not not have found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Platonov in the first webpage and hardly would have researched further. Yes, it is a bit unusual to see him there… yet, it is nice to see him appreciated, no matter if a kind outside the genre-sf ghetto.
After all, it is always interesting to see what got translated, and then awarded. (Over here, “Pi in the Sky” in the late 1980s – and it is a brilliant story, almost not dated at all; I wonder what else I missed in Brown? – and PermutationCity around 2000.)
Pi in the Sky is a fun story – some of Brown’s stories rely on cultural references that are old enough that I (born in the 60s) don’t recognize them, but this story still works.
Echoing Jan Vanek jr, a lot of Victor Pelevin’s early work is genre or borderline genre, and brilliant: in English translation, his short fiction collections A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, The Blue Lantern, his novella The Yellow Arrow, his novels Omon Ra, The Life of Insects, and Homo Zapiens.
Re: Andrey Platonov: the NYRB has been issuing English translations of his work for several years now.
I am not sure whether this novella was among the NYRB English translations. Wiki gives its English title as The Sea of Youth (but it gives the year wrong). I was curious why Chinese have chosen it – the novella has several layers, on surface it is a socialist realism, but below it a satire on the genre, with some almost kafkaesque twists, like peasants sleeping in giant pumpkin – they were grown for have ‘the largest ever’ but they cannot be used as food 🙂
@Oleksandr ZHOLUD: “The Sea of Youth” is not among the English-language translations issued so far by NYRB.
the novella has several layers, on surface it is a socialist realism, but below it a satire on the genre, with some almost kafkaesque twists,
That describes most of what I’ve read by Platonov.
I’m dying, “British food punishes every curious person.”
re: Chengdu museum. It really is huge. I hope they will evolve it to be a proper SF, or even just a science museum.
Empire V, a 2006 Russian novel by Viktor Pelevin
This novel has been adapted to film of the same name. The film itself was refused a Moscow region licence so effectively banning it. Given its theme – an elite, ruling class, preying on average citizens – it is not surprising that Russian leaders banned it. Any SF/F film that Putin hates I’d like to see…
If anyone was wondering why the Independent Film Hugo poll Glasgow ran was so close is because there is a wealth of SF film out there that does not get a general release let alone a general release in Anglophone countries. With the demise of the Worldcon film programme in the 1990s (and even before then not all Worldcons had an imaginative film programme) the Worldcon community has lost a chance to see some of these.
If anyone wants to know how to put on a cinematically literate, international film programme then look at the 2010 Worldcon film programme. Brilliant!
Jonathan C.: In that case, you need to see this year’s film of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (Wikipedia; reportedly downloadable tho’ not sure of subtitles; brilliant review that is sadly not in English but should be available with a machine translation.
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