China in Helsinki -- Part 1

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One of the most substantive conversations I had at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki was with award-winning author, translator, and editor Francesco Verso. He is also the founder and editor in chief of Future Fiction, an Italian imprint dedicated to publishing the best SF authors from around the world. We were talking about diversity, in part because he’s publishing an anthology of stories by Chinese SF authors in both Chinese and Italian. So, obviously, he’s in favor of diversity. “But not to be ‘politically correct,’” he said. “That’s pointless.”

I wasn’t taking notes and I’m wary of unintentionally misquoting Verso, so here’s something very similar to what I heard, which he said in an interview on The Earthian Hivemind: “…as a reader, I was tired of going to Italian bookstores and finding always (or mostly) the same kind of story, written by a middle-class, English-speaking, white-man (presumably Christian, Heterosexual and living in the US or the UK). I was missing a huge part of the representativeness of the ‘real’ world, some kind of ‘literary biodiversity’ which in other genres – as paradoxically as it might seem – is not so extreme.”

Exactly! Literary diversity is to be valued not for abstract reasons but because it enriches us. It gives us new insights, new perspectives, and most importantly new ideas. Which is, after all, what this field is all about.

This is why it was so exciting to see a large and active Chinese presence at the Worldcon. There were at least four distinct groups of which I was aware: 

There was Science Fiction World, the publisher of China’s oldest (and the world’s most-read) science fiction magazine (also called Science Fiction World), as well as a great number of SF books, both original and in translation. In addition to their core activities, they were manning a booth in the trade hall (dealers’ room) to promote the Fourth China International SF Conference, which will be held in Chengdu this November.

Then there was Douban Read, the publishing arm of a social networking service. At least two of their people were meeting with science fiction writers and editors in order to expand their presence in the SF market.

The Future Affairs Administration is or began as, if I got this right, a consortium of Beijing-area fans, dedicated to the promotion and development of Chinese science fiction. In a South China Morning Post interview with the Future Affairs Administration's founder Ji Shaoting, the paper characterized their mission as "a start-up in Beijing that wants to ‘administer the future’ by being an incubator for sci-fi talent and integrating resources through hosting seminars and connecting writers with scientists." They are currently getting into publishing in a big way.

Finally, but certainly not least, there was Storycom, which I was told exists chiefly to connect Chinese science fiction writers to the Chinese movie industry. But they are engaged in other activities as well, most notably the Shimmer Program. A partnership between the Shimmer Program and Clarkesworld has been bringing a Chinese science fiction story a month to Anglophone readers for twenty or more months. We have good reason to be grateful to them.

So there was a great deal going on. Most of which, of course, went right over my head. My connection with China is very slim. I've had some stories and novels published there, and I have Chinese friends, but to be honest, I'm a spear-carrier in this epic.

But I'll say a few words more about on this topic in Wednesday's blog.

You can read The Earthian Hivemind’s interview with Franceso Verso here.

You can read the interview with Ji Shaoting here.

And of course, you can always find the indispensable Clarkesworld here.


Above: That's me with my friend Haihong Zhao, an extremely good writer and winner of several Chinese Galaxy Awards.

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