Our website has been live for a month already, thank you for all the positive comments so far! We're really pleased it's an interesting and good resource for our followers.
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Upcoming: February session
Formerly Slow / 《从前慢》(2019) by Wei Ma / 未马
Translated by Andy Dudak (2020)
Video call with the author and the London Chinese Science Fiction Group
Sunday 28th February - London: 14:00 = Beijing 22:00, lasting about 1hr30
Online: Zoom - reply to this email with "Count me in for LCSFG's next meeting!" and we'll send you a video call link and password a day before the session.
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"As if separated by time, like two different worlds, Xia Mang thought to himself.
Regardless of how Xiao An would have preferred it, Weiwei’s dormancy issue couldn’t be resolved, in the end. Thus, SIP proposed a compensation plan, while vowing to continue regular examinations and dormancy tests of Weiwei. Shenli City even made exceptions for the family, granting an extraordinary privilege: total freedom of movement."
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"People here lived as in air bubbles in the ocean of time. They followed one of seven non-intersecting trajectories, jumping from one air bubble to another. The lives and times of the other six trajectories were completely cut off from them, had nothing to do with them.
Xia Mang and Weiwei were like fish in this ocean, darting back and forth. Time flowed along their bodies continuously, dense, adhering them to all that surrounded them. Every change in this world left its mark on their bodies."
- Formerly Slow / 《从前慢》(2019) by Wei Ma / 未马, (translated by Andy Dudak, 2020)
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Shenli City is an enviable and competitive place to live, with its cleaner air, less crowded transportation system and comfortable streets. This is thanks to dormancy tech, which allows citizens to sleep for most of the week, waking only on their assigned day for Freedom-of Movement. They carry out their regular lives within the city, but with slower aging, faster brain calculations and closer-knit day communities. However, dormancy rights are not approved for everyone in the city; they are considered an earned privillege.
When the dormancy tech inexplicably fails to induce baby Weiwei into her first certified sleep, her parents are forced to live to their natural, biological clocks to raise her everyday of the week. Her mother, Xiao An, is reluctant to do this, and soon succumbs to the societal and career pressures to return to dormancy, also believing her "privillege" should not be wasted. Xia Mang is left to raise Weiwei, but he feels more optimistic. As the father and daughter live out everyday together, meeting Xiao An and other friends only on their one 'awake' day of the week, they both age faster than those in dormancy. Yet Xia Mang embraces the strange slowness he also feels as a result.
Wei Ma (pen name) writes a compelling story of people living within the same space and time, yet vastly separated by their varying rates of lived experience. Formerly Slow grasps at how this intersects with family life, friendships, impending death and urban living, while speculating the benefits and frictions of what it could mean to slow down and 'live the life to the full'.
You may find it in its English translation by Andy Dudak for The East Asia Special Issue, Issue 9/December 2020 of Future SF here , support Future SF here. The original Chinese version is available here through 不存在科幻 (Weixin ID: non-exist-SF) .
Please read ahead for this month's online video call, but if you don't get a chance to do so, you are still warmly welcome to join in. Share your thoughts and questions, engage with others, and chat with us and Wei Ma about the story in this upcoming session!
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Wei Ma is an anime playwright and SF writer who began her professional writing career in 2008. She spends most working hours on serialized comic playwriting, and writes children stories, screenplays, and SF stories, as well. She is a lifelong SF fan, ever since she subscribed to SF World magazine in elementary school, and hopes to have more time to write SF in the future, meanwhile earning enough to cover the living expenses for her children. She now lives in Shanghai, China, raising two kids.
Andy Dudak is a writer and translator of science fiction. His original stories have appeared in Analog, Apex, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Rich Horton's Year's Best, and elsewhere. He's translated twelve stories for Clarkesworld, and a novel by Liu Cixin, among other things. In his spare time he likes to binge-watch peak television and eat Hui Muslim style cold sesame noodles.
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Previously: January session
Under a Dangling Sky / 倒悬的天空 (2004) by Cheng Jingbo / 程婧波, translated by Ken Liu (2016)
On Sunday 31st January, author Cheng Jingbo joined the London Chinese Science Fiction Group and our readers on a video call to discuss our month's chosen story, her Under a Dangling Sky / 倒悬的天空 (2004). Many thanks to Bo and our attendees for your valued contributions!
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"The sky brightened abruptly. A deafening noise crashed from the top of the fountain. Countless cracks zigzagged from the center of the dark blue welkin. Wind and stars tumbled through the opening and fell into the sea. The dome continued to crack open, as if the beanstalk was pushing, growing, forcing its way deeper beyond the barrier. My head rang from the thunderous noise, and my eyes were filled with fantastic visions that eventually melded into a single blinding brightness.
The crystal sky fell."
- from Under a Dangling Sky by Cheng Jingbo, translated by Ken Liu (2019)
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Under a Dangling Sky floats us from the region of Rainville into a dreamy mapping that spans the breadth of the sky and oceans, to the verticality of two planets' gravitational axes. In search for the dolphin's song, the protagonist whimsically observes the water cycle's interactions with the elements. That is until the crystal sky falls and collides with the sea, and the strange process births new stars to become the Delphinus constellation.
Cheng Jingbo draws inspiration from Greek mythology, the fairytale Jack and the Beanstalk and David Brin's SSF The Crystal Spheres to form this spatially generous speculative short story.
The short story can be found in its original publication in Science Fiction World《科幻世界》in 2004, and its English translation by Ken Liu for his edited collection Broken Stars (2019).
Cheng Jingbo (aka ‘Bo’) represents China’s new generation of female science fiction writers. In 1999, Bo published her first story ‘Think Like an Apple’ as part of the first sci-fi magazine sold to a global audience, Science Fiction World. The story won First Prize in the Teenager Sci-Fi Writers Awards, an accolade which served as an astronomical platform for Bo and cemented an unshakeable connection between herself, science fiction, and the infinite possibilities of the universe’s mysteries.
In 2002, her story ‘Western Paradise’ was nominated for a Galaxy Award. In 2010, ‘Lost in Luoyang’ won First Prize in the Youth Literature Awards hosted by the Chinese Contemporary Literature Research Association, and also went on to win Best Short Story in the First Xingyun (Nebula) Awards for Global Chinese Science Fiction.
In 2013, she won the Best Novelette Award (Fourth Xingyun (Nebula) Awards for Global Chinese Science Fiction) with ‘The Ripper of the City of Peel’. In 2019, Bo won Screenwriter of the Year in the First Chinese International Writer Festival held by the China Youth Press for her sci-fi script ‘Hotel 8’. In the same year, Bo also won First Prize in the Leng Hu Sci-Fi Awards for her sci-fi novelette ‘Host’. Bo’s works have been translated into several languages, including English, Japanese, German, Italian and Spanish.
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