Tag Archives: Zero Gravity Newspaper

Pixel Scroll 1/28/25 One Moon Was A Ghostly Galleon, The Other A Spirited Schooner

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(1) CHINESE FANZINE ZERO GRAVITY NEWS PUBLISHES THREE ISSUES. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Three issues of the Hugo Award-winning fanzine Zero Gravity News have just been published, featuring articles about their personal experiences from a number of Chinese fans. Here is the text of RiverFlow’s two tweets about the issues (slightly edited):

Chinese fanzine Zero Gravity has published a themed special “l With Sci-Fi” across three issues. Issues 25 and 26 contain the views of middle school and college students on science fiction. The 27th issue mainly contains the articles of the memories of working-age Chinese sci-fi fans.  

This comes to a total of 480,000 words across the three issues, which can be said to be another collective voice of Chinese science fiction fans.

The PDFs of the three issues can be downloaded from this Google Drive link – each is around 10MB in size.

(2) EBOOK ALTERNATIVE HELPS INDIE BOOKSTORES. Bookshop.org US now is also selling ebooks.

Every purchase on the site financially supports independent bookstores. Our platform gives independent bookstores tools to compete online and financial support to help them maintain their presence in local communities.

NPR has the story — “Bookshop.org launches new e-book platform that exclusively supports local bookstores”.

…MARTÍNEZ: OK, there are already a lot of online retailers for e-books. I mean, millions of them are sold every year. So why are we focusing on this one?

FADEL: Well, this one exclusively supports local bookstores, and that’s because e-books are a difficult format for smaller booksellers to keep up with, according to Bookshop’s CEO, Andy Hunter.

ANDY HUNTER: Because the publisher requirements are so strict, it requires a huge amount of technical effort to deliver an e-book securely so it can’t be hacked and it can’t be pirated around the web. And that is too much for any individual local bookstore to deal with.

MARTÍNEZ: All right, so that makes sense. So what do indie bookstores think?

FADEL: We checked in with a few owners like Pete Mulvihill of Green Apple Books in San Francisco, and he told us his stores will take all the help they can get.

PETE MULVIHILL: We survive by kind of (laughter) scraping and clawing where we can to find efficiencies or make a little extra income. And this is another significant, if small, stream of income for us. So it’s truly helpful….

(3) ROMANTASY RINGING THE REGISTER. “Bestsellers – Critical Maas: Is this real life? Is this just fantasy?” asks The Bookseller about the UK market. Since the start of the year sff sales are up nearly a third, with fantasy titles driving the train. “Bookshops across the country may soon need to rebalance their space as readers continue to seek to escape from reality.”

You would be forgiven for thinking that bookshops were caught in a landslide of fantasy fiction in 2024 with authors such as Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros dominating the top end of the fiction charts – as seen in our Author Review of the Year in last week’s issue (The Bookseller, 17th January 2025). It was not just the spicy side of the genre represented either, with JRR Tolkien’s sales rising 21.3% year-on-year through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market and Brandon Sanderson appearing inside the top 50 authors of the year for the first time. Is this a trend that’s going to continue into 2025 – and, if it is, which series should we be keeping our eye on?

It is timely to start with Rebecca Yarros, as the third book in her Empyrean series – Onyx Storm – is published this week, while Fourth Wing and Iron Flame are sitting atop the Fantasy charts so far for 2025.

First published in hardback in 2023, the first two books in the series were released in paperback in 2024, with Fourth Wing placing 11th in the full-year chart, selling just shy of 250,000 copies. The paperback of Iron Flame was only released in November and has shifted 78,586 copies in its first nine weeks – 7.4% down on the equivalent period for its predecessor….

…While Yarros tops the fantasy chart so far for 2025, it is Sarah J Maas who dominates it, taking five of the top 10 spots. With TCM volume sales of 1.3 million units in 2024, the author of the A Court of Thorns and Roses series rooted herself into second place in our authors of the year chart with sales of £13.2m.

So far this year, Yarros’ value has already reached £483,676 – up 88.9% against the first two weeks of 2024 – and with fans eagerly awaiting the paperback release of last January’s House of Flame and Shadow, as well as the fifth ACOTAR novel, a surprise 2025 release or two could see Maas’ sales increase further still.

The bestselling fantasy hardback title at the moment could be the start of the next big thing. First published at the beginning of December, Quicksilver – the first instalment of Callie Hart’s Fae & Alchemy series – has sold 34,417 copies, with 17.9% of that coming in the past two weeks. A sequel is due later in 2025 but, so far, no date for the paperback edition has emerged. Another author to keep an eye on is Sarah A Parker, whose When the Moon Hatched is one of just three hardbacks inside the fantasy top 20, despite being first published back in June. It has just topped £1m worth of sales and consistently appears in the e-book charts provided by BookStat. The paperback is due in May, while the second book in the Moonfall series will be published in October of this year.

While 19 of the 20 listed here are romantasy – only Gregory Maguire’s Wicked bucks the trend – they are not the only sub-genre of the market on which to keep an eye. The third bestselling fantasy author of the moment is Brandon Sanderson, whose Cosmere universe has delivered £135,763, while Tolkien’s romance-free books have notched up £109,753 – though it is worth noting even when Tolkien and Sanderson’s sales are combined with second-placed Yarros, they still cannot top Maas’ total…..

(4) CHINESE NEW YEAR GALA BROADCAST. [Item by Ersatz Culture and Prograft.] The annual Chinese New Year/Spring Festival Gala was broadcast by state broadcaster CCTV/CMG on Tuesday 28th.  The full (nearly 5 hour) show can be seen on YouTube, but the links below jump directly a couple of performances that may be the ones of most relevance to File 770:

A folk dance performed by robots and human dancers.  Per this news article, this is “a traditional Yangko dance, a vibrant folk art form from northeast China” where “the robots showcased their ability to manipulate handkerchiefs, a signature element of Yangko dance“.

A friend sent me a link to the Taobao sales page for what seems to be the robots used in this performance.  The link wouldn’t show me the full product list as I don’t have a user account there, but he also sent me a screenshot, which is below, along with a Google Translation.  The prices per unit convert to approximately $69k and $90k USD.

A girls choir performed a folk song with elements relating to the Chinese space program, such as the moon, an astronaut and a space station, which were overlaid onto the broadcast.  This news article has more information about the performers, although it does not really mention the space aspects.

(5) YOUNG ADULTS WRITE NOW. The Horror Writers Association blog today announced the 2024 recipients of the YAWN Endowment — Young Adults Write Now (YAWN).

This endowment is provided by the Horror Writers Association and is aimed at supporting teen writing programs in libraries as part of its ongoing dedication to furthering young adult literacy. We received a large number of excellent applications last year and are heartened by the number of libraries currently prioritizing teen writing programs. 

The YAWN application period runs from August 1st to October 1st, with five recipients selected in October. Each recipient is awarded $250, to be put toward developing or supporting a teen writing program in their library. More about the endowment can be found on the Horror Writers Association’s website, via the Horror Scholarships page. 

Libraries receiving funding will be able to use the monies for anything relating to their proposed or currently active writing program, including but not limited to: books (specifically young adult horror and books on writing), supplies, special events, publishing costs, guest speakers and instructors, additions to the collection, and operating expenses.

The recipients of the 2024 Young Adults Write Now Endowment are:

  • South Fayette Township Library (Pennsylvania)
  • San Benito County Free Library (California)
  • Wharton County Library (Texas)
  • Cuyahoga County Public Library, Garfield Heights Branch (Ohio)
  • Public Library of New London (Connecticut)

(6) KASEY AND JOE LANSDALE Q&A. The Horror Writers Association blog’s “Nuts & Bolts” series has added an “Interview With Kasey and Joe R. Lansdale”.

KASEY LANSDALE

Q: What marketing advice do you have for authors, especially in light of the changing social media landscape?

A: I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Mailing list. Social platforms are too erratic. It doesn’t matter if you have a million followers if, let’s say for example, they ban your audience …

Q: Can you share any insights about publishing that many authors don’t know, but would benefit from knowing?

A: The cream does not rise to the top. The publishers in most cases pick their lead title and put most of their juice behind it, and if something else gets out, it’s by pure magic. There’s no formula or we would all be doing it. There are two kinds of publicists. The ones who shoot out to their mailing list and hope someone answers, and the ones who beat down doors and hope for answers. Unfortunately, the results are usually pretty on par with one another. But that’s not a defeat, that’s a call to action. That means that the author must tell the world about their books, and take the opportunities given to share it and themselves with the world.

(7) LAUREL AMBERDINE (1970-2025). Writer and editor Laurel Amberdine died January 21 at the age of 54. The SFWA Blog has published a tribute: “In Memoriam: Laurel Amberdine”.

Laurel Amberdine (1970–21 January 2025) was a writer, interviewer, and genre editor. She worked for Locus Magazine for ten years, and was an assistant editor for Lightspeed magazine.

Amberdine was known for her kind and thoughtful interviews, yet she also loved to write, both prose and poetry. Her short fiction story, “Airship Hope” was published by Daily Science Fiction in 2013, and in her 2018 essay “Science Fiction Saved My Life” (Uncanny Magazine), she discussed how her chronic illness and disability had affected her, how finding writing gave her purpose, and how privilege inherent in the industry limits voices that readers may need to hear. Amberdine wrote a young adult novel, Luminator, which made it far along in the publication process, as well as an adult science-fiction novel.

Amberdine was known for her kindness and warmth, rooted in her Catholic faith, and extended to all who she encountered….

(8) AL SARRANTONIO (1952-2025). Sff/h writer, editor and publisher Al Sarrantonio has died reported Chet Williamson on Facebook. Wikipedia has a detailed article about his career.

Al Sarrantonio in the Seventies. Photo by and copyright © Andrew Porter.

He began an editing career at a major New York publishing house in 1976. His first short fiction, “Ahead of the Joneses,” appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1979, and the following year he published 14 short stories. In 1982 he left publishing to become a full-time writer.

He established himself in the horror field with such much-anthologized stories as “Pumpkin Head”, “The Man With Legs”, “Father Dear,” “Wish”, and “Richard’s Head,” (all of which appear in his first short story collection, Toybox). “Richard’s Head” brought him his first Bram Stoker Award nomination.

Sarrantonio won a Bram Stoker Award in 2000 for his anthology 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, and a Shirley Jackson Award in 2011 for the anthology Stories: All-New Tales (co-edited with Neil Gaiman; it also won an Audie). Both books also were finalists for the World Fantasy Award.

(9) JEANNOT SZWARC (1940-2025). The Guardian’s writeup about movie/TV director Jeannot Szwarc is almost harshly frank: “Jeannot Szwarc obituary”. “Director whose big screen credits include Jaws 2, Supergirl and Santa Claus: The Movie alongside a 50-year career in television.” He also directed Somewhere in Time.

…His blockbusters, though, were among the most maligned films of their age. When asked about Jaws 2, Szwarc said: “I do believe I deserve some credit for just pulling it off.”

The odds were not in his favour. He had less than a month to prepare when the picture’s original director, John Hancock, quit three weeks into production. Only 90 seconds of what Hancock had shot proved usable. At that point, Szwarc said, “It was the biggest disaster in the history of Universal. They had spent $10m, and they had nothing.”

An unfinished script, bad weather and a malfunctioning mechanical shark only added to Szwarc’s woes as an immovable release date loomed. He was under no illusions about the task at hand. “I knew it wasn’t going to be a cinematic masterpiece. All I went in with was knowing I had to make it scary, and that I had to finish it.”

The film, which features a scene in which a shark chomps on a sea rescue helicopter as it attempts to take off from water, was met with dismay by critics. Riding the wave of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 predecessor, however, it was still a hit, grossing $187m….

…His TV credits in the early 70s included Columbo, The Six Million Dollar Man and more than a fifth of the episodes of the long-running macabre suspense series Night Gallery.

Among his television films was The Small Miracle (1973), which starred one of his heroes, the Italian neo-realist director Vittorio De Sica. “I told him I felt like an art student who had to instruct Michelangelo,” he said.

Szwarc made his big-screen debut in the same year with the Michael Crichton-scripted thriller Extreme Close-Up. He followed this with Bug (1975), a horror film about pyromaniac cockroaches, which became the swansong of the ingenious horror producer William Castle….

…Between 2003 and 2011, he returned to the Supergirl/DC Comics milieu by directing 14 episodes of Smallville, the television series about Superman’s younger years…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 28, 1973 — Carrie Vaughn, 52.

By Paul Weimer: Carrie Vaughn’s urban fantasy series, the Kitty Norville series, is probably very well known to you. A radio DJ turned accidental radio talk show host who is (at first secretly) a werewolf gets involved with other aspects of the slowly revealed supernatural community, bringing them out into the open and having the United States and the world come to terms with them. It’s as if the Masquerade (from White Wolf) was being slowly and steadily lifted, and for everyone all at once.  

Even then and even now, that goes against the grain of a lot of Urban fantasy, which either has the supernatural always out and open, or following the Masquerade model. But a series that considers the problems werewolves, vampires and others have adapting to modern society–and modern society adapting to others? That’s a lovely sociological and anthropological twist.  Those first few novels, as Kitty herself comes to terms with her secret coming out, are really strong and I think they hold up to this day. 

And Norville is and was willing to expand the playground and consider–if supernatural creatures have always been around, what does that, what did that actually mean in historical terms. There’s some really lovely worldbuilding in her nuanced explorations of the idea. 

But a reason why the Norville books also hold a strong place in my heart is that they are, again, some of the earliest books I was given ARCs to read for review (the first three as a matter of fact). Although urban fantasy (except for, say, Seanan McGuire) is not my power chord of reading SFF, the idea that a publisher would give me books if I would review them was a pretty heady feeling.  

Still is. 

I’ve read a couple of novels and work by Vaughn outside of the Kitty Norville books (After the Golden Age, written in that heady period where authors were writing original superhero novels not tied to Marvel or DC). But for me, it may be unfair, Vaughn’s work begins and ends with a DJ turned accidental social heroine.

Carrie Vaughn

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Jerry King knows why the monsters aren’t in their old hiding place.
  • Reality Check has a Dickens update.
  • Cornered misses a friend. [Warning for amazing bad taste.]
  • Thatababy has DIY special effects.
  • The Argyle Sweater should not practice medicine. Even in Hyperborea.
  • Wumo witnesses – different planet, same complaint.

(12) INSIDE DOCTOR WHO. Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat tell what it’s like writing a different Doctor. Watch video at X.com.

(13) STOP THAT GARBAGE TRUCK! “Scans for the memories: why old games magazines are a vital source of cultural history – and nostalgia” explains the Guardian.

Before the internet, if you were an avid gamer then you were very likely to be an avid reader of games magazines. From the early 1980s, the likes of Crash, Mega, PC Gamer and the Official PlayStation Magazine were your connection with the industry, providing news, reviews and interviews as well as lively letters pages that fostered a sense of community. Very rarely, however, did anyone keep hold of their magazine collections. Lacking the cultural gravitas of music or movie publications, they were mostly thrown away. While working at Future Publishing as a games journalist in the 1990s, I watched many times as hundreds of old issues of SuperPlay, Edge and GamesMaster were tipped into skips for pulping. I feel queasy just thinking about it.

Because now, of course, I and thousands of other video game veterans have realised these magazines are a vital historical resource as well as a source of nostalgic joy. Surviving copies of classic mags are selling at a vast premium on eBay, and while the Internet Archive does contain patchy collections of scanned magazines, it is vulnerable to legal challenges from copyright holders.

Thankfully, there are institutions taking the preservation of games magazines seriously. Last week, the Video Game History Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation of games and their history, announced that from 30 January, it would be opening up its digital archive of out-of-print magazines to read and study online. So far 1,500 issues of mostly American games mags are available, as well as art books and other printed ephemera, but the organisation is busy scanning its entire collection. The digitised content will be fully tagged and searchable by word or phrase, so you’ll be able to easily track down the first mentions of, say, Minecraft, John Romero, or the survival horror genre….

(14) OH, THAT’S DIFFERENT. NEVER MIND. “An asteroid got deleted because it was actually Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster” says Astronomy.com.

On Jan. 2, the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced the discovery of an unusual asteroid, designated 2018 CN41. First identified and submitted by a citizen scientist, the object’s orbit was notable: It came less than 150,000 miles (240,000 km) from Earth, closer than the orbit of the Moon. That qualified it as a near-Earth object (NEO) — one worth monitoring for its potential to someday slam into Earth.

But less than 17 hours later, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) issued an editorial notice: It was deleting 2018 CN41 from its records because, it turned out, the object was not an asteroid.

It was a car.

To be precise, it was Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster mounted to a Falcon Heavy upper stage, which boosted into orbit around the Sun on Feb. 6, 2018. The car — which had been owned and driven by Musk — was a test payload for the Falcon Heavy’s first flight….

(15) PREPARE FOR THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] See the Orchard Machinery Corporation’s imposing Hedgehog tree trimming machine hacking along to Zombie as covered by Bad Wolves. Could this be a subtle hint that we should prepare for the zombie apocalypse?  If so, such a machine might come in handy. 

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Ersatz Culture, Prograft, Daniel Dern, Jim Janney, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

RiverFlow: United Sci-Fi Fans Around The World

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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.

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!