Previously: February session
In February, we read "The Snow in Jinyang /《晋阳三尺雪》" (2014) by Zhang Ran / 张冉, translated by Ken Liu and Carmen Yiling Yan (2019).
The author composes a new interpretation of the fire in the city of Jingyang, back a thousand years ago, when the Northern Song Dynasty was destroyed by the Northern Han Dynasty. Modern-sounding "tricks", such as sunglasses, acid, and artificial snowfall, appear in the story's historic era that is usually recounted through myth.
We discussed how many look to speculative fiction to reveal future possibilities, but we sometimes overlook how history, traditions and myths as settings can reinstate these narrative frameworks with interconnected depths across temporalities.
Renowned sci-fi author and translator Ken Liu has created an amazingly "traditional" world in his own Dandelion Dynasty series. Bamboo, kites, silk, and bows and arrows, details usually more valued in historical fiction, come together to define a new science fiction genre that Liu calls "silk punk". Zhang Ran's "The Snow in Jinyang" may also fall into this category.
"The Snow in Jinyang" can be found in English in the June 2016 edition of Clarkesworld Magazine here, and in its original Chinese here.
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Upcoming: March session - our first online meeting!
Sunday 29th March
Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/6183648388
Meeting ID: 618 364 8388
Time: London 14:30, Beijing: 21:30, New York: 09:30
Due to obvious public health reasons, we will be physically distancing and socially gathering online through the video conferencing platform, Zoom, which you will need to download onto your device. To accommodate as many of you all as possible, we have deliberately changed the date and time to Sunday 29th March. It will be the first day of British Daylight Saving Time, with a seven-hour time difference with Beijing's timezone. This also means this month's author and translator may both join us virtually too for a chat!
So! Coming up we will read Chen Qiufan's short story "The Ancestral Temple in a Box" / 《匣中祠堂》, translated into English by Emily Jin (2020).
Bouncing from last month's historic story to this month's futuristic one, "The Ancestral Temple in a Box" illustrates how technology could change the design, production and traditional usages of gold-lacquered wood carvings 'jinqi mudiao', which is a traditional art form of the Teochew people.
The story plays with the challenges for a family business, whose craft go back generations. Debating the survival of their art as a commodity in increasingly technologically-smothered consumerism, the characters work around the Benjaminian problem of art's lost aura in the age of mechanical production... but how is it when it's in terms digital production virtual consumption?
This month's London Science Fiction Group's online seminar will try to take you into the story of "Ancestral Hall in the Box" and explore the deeper social and cultural implications behind it.
Here are some themes in this story that may guide your reading for our discussion:
- adapting / practising traditions
- crafts and digital/virtual design
- artistic taste - cultural or technological
This short story can be found in its English translation by Emily Jin in the January 2020 edition of Clarkesworld Magazine and in its original Chinese here.
Wishing everyone good health, see you online soon!
Join our Zoom Meeting:
https://zoom.us/j/6183648388
Meeting ID: 618 364 8388
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Bibliography
We are gathering our primary titles together with collectively suggested ones on an online database here.
If you mentioned a reference like a book, article, film or podcast during our session, please navigate the tabs at the bottom of the link page to add your suggestion to the relevant month's reading.
You may add to this at any time to enhance our engagement with the stories' themes and the wider literary and cultural analyses.
Alternatively, if you cannot make our meetings, you are also welcome to add your recommendations and catch up with the reading offered.
We hope for this to be a useful and informative documentation of our activity, as well as a resource for everyone involved!
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