Upcoming: March session
"The Facecrafter" /《捏脸师》(2017) by Anna Wu / 吴霜, translated by Emily Jin (2018)
Video call with the author and the London Chinese Science Fiction Group
Sunday 28th March - London: 14:00 = Beijing 21:00
lasting about 1hr30 (note the BST clock change)
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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"Lost in thought, Ling Bai gazed intently at the tiny plant inside the test tube and muttered. “The ability to navigate between dimensions . . . these great Masters of Art can see the world in a way that we cannot.”
"Ling Xi shut her eyes, only daring to peer again after the blinding light had faded. The long and the feng had both disappeared. The stage was completely empty save for a massive hypercube—the exact one that Ling Xi had saw in the virtual world.
The hypercube disintegrated. From its core, thousands of works of art gradually ascended: paintings, calligraphy, sculptures, literature, and music . . . all of which were the greatest masterpieces of humankind. Bathed in a faint golden halo, the artworks flew toward the audience, dashing past every pair of eyes."
- from "The Facecrafter" by Anna Wu, translated by Emily Jin
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Ling Xi is the underground city's only 'art keeper' in the nuclear winter world. When her art collection suddenly disappears, Ling Xi's experiences in the VR realm also begin to leave her suspicious it is connected to a certain masked avatar, as well as her virtual friend Cang Jie. She consults her brother Ling Bai, to better understand the clues to regain the city's artworks. He is a plant geneticist failing to synthesize the DNA of Purpureus Herba grass, as a survival strategy for humankind, before their underground shelters fail. Together, they attempt to figure how the thief potentially drew dimensions to cross space and time into the virtual storage room.
The artists producing the superstar avatar idols of the VR world are known as the "Facecrafters", earning an incrediable amount of cybercoin. Hun Dun is known as the best of the creators, having produced the “The Zhu Lu Twelve” avatar idol group that envelopes the entertainment industry. Hun Dun's influence is godlike, even under the instruction of the Gods. Angered at humankind's neglect of the art collections underground, as well as their overall toxifying of the earth with radiation, it is unclear whether Hun Dun intends to save or exterminate humanity - until the last performance.
Anna Wu's story is a tapestry of mythology, history of the arts, science and science fiction, in which the course of events threatens to blanket humankind and its creativity under a blanker of darkness forever.
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Anna Wu (Wu Shuang) is a Chinese science fiction writer, film and TV play writer. Her film script, Cloud and Mist, won the Gold Medal of Originality for the Best Science Fiction Film of the Sixth Nebula Award for Global Chinese Science Fiction. Her works have been published in magazines, such as Galaxy's Edge and Science Fiction World. As translator, Anna's work includes stories for the science fiction collection, The Shape of Thought, by Ken Liu. Her own science fiction novella collection, Twins was published in June of 2017.
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Previously: 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
We had a great session with Wei Ma joining us for a discussion with the group. Many thanks to her and everyone's engaging reflections!
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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."
...
"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) .
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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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