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.