EDITOR’S NOTE: RiverFlow will present an English-language edition of the Hugo-winning Zero Gravity Newspaper at Glasgow 2024. It has been machine-translated from a portion of Zero Gravity Newspaper Issue 10, the Chinese language version of which can be downloaded from a link at the end of this Zero Gravity SF post. Below is a greatly expanded version of RiverFlow’s introduction published last month by the Hugo Book Club Blog. RiverFlow told Chris Barkley that the revision has 2500 words of new content.

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By RiverFlow: Hello! Attending member the 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow, nice to meet you. First I want to ask a question, have you heard of the Chinese sci-fi fan base? If so, what are some examples? Chinese sci-fi fans were thrilled when Zero Gravity Newspaper won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine last year.

In fact, there is a very large group of science fiction fans in China, but few people have organized them before, I started to collect information from 2020 and wrote some articles to introduce them. The earliest fan organization in China was born in the early 1980s, and the earliest science fiction fanzine was born in 1988.

From the perspective of the age composition of the participating members, they are mainly science fiction fans who were the main workers in the 1990s, and mainly students in the 21st century, and most of the workers who were active in the 1990s are busy with life and family affairs, and it is difficult to find time to organize related activities. The thousands of photographs and 300,000 words that I gradually unearthed during the collation process are enough to prove the rich history of this group.

Chinese Science fiction fan associations organize contests for science fiction stories and reviews, run their own fan magazines (more than 200 in history) and establish fan organizations (more than 350 records for student groups and 200 records for social meeting groups). But like most organizations around the world, they tend to have short lifespans, and while there are a lot of them, there are very few that are stable, as I will explain in subsequent articles (which are still to be published).

The English-language edition of the Zero Gravity Newspaper, which will also appear at the Glasgow World Science Fiction Convention, has been machine-translated from a third of Issue 10 of the Zero Gravity Newspaper. This magazine includes many young Chinese science fiction fans’ review and understanding of their own science fiction experience. How do Chinese science fiction fans get in touch with science fiction? What does science fiction bring to them? What have they learned from their exposure to science fiction? The answers to these questions can be found in their memories. Only the time is relatively hasty, only a small number of articles are included, but this is much better than before, so that Chinese science fiction fans are seen by foreign science fiction fans, this matter is very important.

At the same time, we are also collecting science fiction information and materials from all over the world, translating many foreign introductory articles into Chinese, and introducing Chinese science fiction fans to many works, events, and fanzines that have not been translated into the Chinese world. After I finished my self-summary of Chinese sci-fi fans through some articles, I began to want to see the outside world. Chinese scholar Sanfeng said in the first issue of World Science Fiction News, a magazine introducing foreign science fiction information in China, “View the world science fiction and build a science fiction world view”, which I think is very reasonable.

I have found 209 articles from 110 countries and organized Chinese science fiction fans to translate them. Now it is safe to tell you that every continent in the world has a wealth of science fiction conferences, science fiction works, science fiction organizations, science fiction magazines and so on, while most of the remaining half of the countries and regions are either economic and political power is not enough to support their cultural development, national strength is not strong, or the population is very small, or is a special zone of a country.

In the context of the history of different countries, different languages and peoples will unite with each other/accept foreign languages for historical reasons. You can see the competition between Turkish and Russian in Central Asia, the prevalence of French and Arabic in some African countries, the exchange of Spanish in Latin American countries, and the anger of Southeast Asian countries over the loss of their own cultural traditions. The Dutch and Belgian languages are common, and the former Yugoslavia regularly hosts science fiction conventions to unite science fiction fans from several other countries.

When searching for science-fiction articles in non-English speaking countries, many new articles and links are returned each time, and most of the articles were published between 2000 and 2024. But the strange thing is, every time I search in various languages, I think I have reached the end of the search, but every time I search, I may find some new information.

So far, there have been three rounds of searching for foreign science fiction history. August 2022 is the first round, July to August 2023 is the second round, and June to July 2024 is the third round. This is probably related to the search mechanism of the Internet, the search weight of some articles has its own level, this phenomenon should be an old saying: “often read often new”. Non-English-speaking countries do have a lot of material worth translating. They also have studies, communities, conferences, translations, libraries, etc. I hope to find more relevant information and translate it to China. I also hope that more people will get involved and look at the science fiction situation in Third World countries.

A lot of small developing country science fiction is not written by science fiction writers, but by writers and children’s authors or playwrights. Either as a genre to stimulate the imagination of children, or as an art form, they will generally only say that they have written a science fiction, and dabble in science fiction, but most likely will not say that they are science fiction writers. The history of science fiction in many countries may be traced back to a writer who accidentally wrote a science fiction work for some reason, and this phenomenon is suspected to be widespread.

To do the text processing of these articles, you need to repeatedly verify the picture data and then communicate with the local people. The proofreading of an article starts from three days, which is not a cost-free information handling behavior. In the process of moving, I may have seen a better article and finally decided to translate it, so I added the editor’s note, and I will add some local sayings and photos as evidence. Many of the pictures in issues 12 and 13 of the Zero Gravity Newspaper were added by me alone, and most of the articles did not have any pictures. A lot of the writing is vague, so you need to check the source repeatedly, add comments or make some minor changes.

If you had to write a history of foreign exchanges, you could probably write a lot, but it’s not necessary. The final processing of an article may require more than 70 searches, but let’s stick to it. I was very happy when I searched for these materials, and at the same time, I sorted out the data in the process of being happy. Some people are willing to see that it is better, and it doesn’t matter if they don’t want to see it, which can be regarded as their own growth and accumulation process.

Asian countries section. South Korea had a very large online fan base in the 1990s, and they translated many high-quality foreign science fiction novels in the early days and published them on online platforms. In 1993, a North Korean scholar wrote a book on the relationship between science fiction and juche literature in North Korea.

And, you also can retrieve a lot of information about Turkish science fiction history, magazines and research, as well as two articles detailing and interviewing the Turkish Science Fiction Club, an organization that is publishing its portfolio in 2020. There is also the history of science fiction in South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India.

Southeast Asian countries, if not targeted introduction, in fact, it is rare to see articles specifically for the introduction of science fiction in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand, in fact, many historical development trends are not obvious, but we have not seen, for example, there are a lot of magazines in Southeast Asia are not known to us.

Among them, I was deeply moved when translating the self-statement of a Thai science fiction writer, and I could deeply appreciate his review and exclamation on his 30 years of science fiction creation career, and see that what supports him to persist in science fiction creation is science fiction imagination. He would ask any ordinary thing in life, “Can I write a science fiction version?” It also deplores the public’s current “resistance” to science.

Some countries in the Middle East and Africa, as long as they have the desire to express themselves, are willing to declare themselves as a science fiction director or science fiction author, and also give interviews about their views on science fiction, introduce a few of their own works is good, they only mention in the Arabic world and the African world every time they mention “great unity”.

For example, Yemen also has science fiction works. A science fiction director taught himself to shoot on Youtube, and made a seven-minute film in a street scene on a bus for three years and then transferred it to London, England. In order to give children more imagination, UAE editors resist the pressure to write children’s science fiction, and set up their own science fiction publishing house to publish stories. Saudi Arabia bans science fiction, so writers set up their own science fiction publishing house to publish science fiction in Arabic.

Iran’s science fiction community has created a Farsi-language science fiction and fantasy dictionary, as well as hosting many essay calls and offline events. Lebanon can only search for two science fiction works, I hope everybody can find out more information together. One accidentally wrote a science fiction work in 1976, and one is a story of space exploration created by an artist in 2006, in the form of dialogue between heroes and robots. Searching for reports about Lebanese science fiction, most of them say that the imagination of science fiction about war is mostly realized on Lebanese soil. A news story with the headline “Lebanon is the Home of science Fiction” turned out to be a video of a rocket launcher.

Latin America, also see the Costa Rican Science Fiction blog. If not introduced, would you know that Uruguay has a “Uruguayan Science Fiction Anthology” that has been published continuously for ten years? It is OK to tell everyone that something really existed in a certain year, and it is very good to give everyone a hole to explore the wind and increase their own knowledge.

In European countries, there are Macedonian science fiction fans who have been operating the science fiction book center for 40 years and have been stolen three times without tears, there are Portuguese science fiction fans who have been fascinated by a set of books because they participated in a book fair when they were young and determined to catalog science fiction books and completed a considerable amount of work, and there are many Swiss science fiction research works. In 2020, Poland established the Science Fiction Foundation, which holds annual conferences and publishes outstanding works by its members.

One Hungarian science fiction magazine dominated the country’s publishing possibilities in the late 20th century almost arbitrarily. The Southern European science fiction circle, centered in Serbia and Croatia, has recently held a convention in one country every year, uniting neighboring countries such as Slovenia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Not every country is going to enrich the history of science fiction by picking random countries like Europe and Latin America. It doesn’t work in Africa, it doesn’t work in Asia. Africans are more likely to believe in their ancestors, and are now beginning to combine ancestral myths and oral stories with modern technology. At the same time, it seems that the whole world is imitating Afrofuturism. African futurism, Arab futurism, Caribbean futurism, Pacific futurism, etc. Futurism, like punk, has been completely generalized. But Chinese sci-fi futurism, proposed by Chinese scholar Wu Yan in 2022, may breathe new life into the field.

In 1993 Mark Dery’s “Black to the Future” put forward the concept of Afrofuturism, and African American science fiction writers began to rise, reviving African science fiction and imagining Africa, and Nnedi Okorafor and Wole Talabi were introduced as representatives of them. After the Arab Science Fiction Conference was held in 2006, many foreign scholars came to listen to it, and they thought it was a very important conference. Later, the Arab Science Fiction Writers Union was founded in 2013, and Arab Futurism emerged to revive the Arab science fiction world. The first Caribbean Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention was held in 2016, and Caribbean-related science fiction research began to take off, mainly by Cuban writers.

What are these ideas about the nature of futurism? In fact, through self-imagination, I try to use science and technology to revive the cultural traditions of my country. In recent years, many countries have tried to explore the essence of their own country. Jin Xuenie has written about the nature of Chinese science fiction, Muniz has written about the nature of Mexican science fiction and has raised the concept of Mexicanness, and there are people who have raised the difference between British science fiction and American science fiction, and some countries in Latin America have said that their science fiction is mainly a fuzzy concept.

Of course we want the world to be colorful and unique, and we know that many countries are influenced by the Western world and imitate Western science fiction writers. Malaysian science fiction writers’ attempt to revive science fiction in 2016 is also a desire to explore the nature of their own nation, although the movement did not make much waves, but the momentum is encouraging.

Science fiction originated in Europe and the United States, the mainstream discourse in Europe and the United States, most of the science fiction conventions and traditions have adhered to for decades, and naturally there is no need for futurism to revive itself. But countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa all have a history of being invaded by other countries, and at the same time have a long national history, and they also have a late start in sci-fi.

Therefore, science fiction writers in many countries began to create science fiction under the influence of Western science fiction writers or former Soviet science fiction writers, most of which were Verne and Wells. However, I will struggle with whether the things I write fail to reflect the characteristics of my own nation and country.

Since the world science fiction center is in the United Kingdom and the United States, as long as the work is translated into English, it represents entering the internationalization, and almost all science fiction writers on all continents are seeking to publish their works in English, eager to be seen by the British and American world and incorporated into the mainstream discourse system.

It will take a long time to verify and solve whether the world science fiction center will shift, but at this stage, the relationship between science fiction in English-speaking countries and science fiction in non-English-speaking countries is just like the relationship between mainstream literature and genre literature, and genre literature is to be accepted by mainstream literature. This is the situation, and it will not shift just because a World Science Fiction Convention is held. At best, it gives the authorities some reason to try to bring together the previously scattered science fiction institutions and science fiction awards to promote dialogue and cooperation.

In this world, there are many people engaged in science fiction organizations, science fiction conferences, science fiction publishing, science fiction translation, science fiction research, and many small languages are also engaged in. But in most cases, unless there is a British-American nationality/an international speaker of parliamentary English who has connections in the United Kingdom and the United States, it is possible to use their status to make a voice for their own country.

However, when the relevant people are out of office, the situation may turn another way, and there is an old Chinese saying that people take tea to cool, perhaps this is how the world works. But if each person can leave something behind during his or her term, the data will surely be more and more abundant. In other words, the internationalization of science fiction in non-English speaking countries is indeed currently dominated by a certain British-American nationality/a certain congressional English status international communicator.

The transfer of discourse power needs a long process, which requires writers with enough strength, readers and communities with enough strength, theorists with enough power to subvert the discourse system, and science fiction activities for writers, readers and scholars to communicate with each other. None of these things is easy.

It’s just that there’s a chain of disdain that seems to be happening all over the world, first of all defining science fiction as a type of children’s literature, and then defining science fiction as secondary literature, so reading a recent comment from a Nepalese science fiction reader on a collection of their own science fiction, it’s not children’s literature, it’s science fiction, I think this kind of spontaneous awareness is very good. When can science fiction literature really stand up and no longer fall into the cycle of contempt chain, but can be regarded as both adult literature and children’s literature.

Anyway, I hope that the Chinese science fiction fans can be more united, but also hope that the world science fiction fans can be more united, there are really many people in the world who have the identity of science fiction, I hope that we can keep in touch, find each other, in the process of viewing the world science fiction to establish their own science fiction world view. This translation is also an attempt to open up, I hope you can be tolerant.

Have a great time in Glasgow!