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A History of the Conquest of the Maya by Ma Boyong
马伯庸 《殷商舰队玛雅征服史》 (2007) Alternate history as comic novel. Ma Boyong imagines a meeting between exiled forces of the Shang Dynasty and pre-Columbian middle America. The book originated online and is...
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Ball Lightning by Liu Cixin
刘慈欣 《环状闪电》 (2005) A man who witnesses both his parents get turned to ash by ball lightning devotes his entire life to researching the poorly-understood phenomenon. His quest takes him to a national...
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Chinese SF writers bid farewell to Arthur C. Clarke
The death of science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke last Wednesday drew reactions from science fiction authors and fans all over the world, China included. Here are some of the commemorations that...
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Running to Neverland
In this article: Run, Dajiao! Run! 《大角快跑》 Pan Haitian (潘海天) 266 pages / 160,000 words 2007.11 I was tapped for the “123 meme” a while ago and fulfilled my duty in the comments section of the Mutant...
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On the Island by Ren Xiaowen
任晓雯 岛上 2008 A mental patient who may or may not have killed her professor, with whom she may or may not have been having an affair, is shipped off to a strange island colony whose handful of inmates...
View ArticleAlai’s Call to Arms for Fantasy Writers
Note: An earlier version of this translation was originally published on ZHWJ in April 2004. Alai, the author of Tibetan-themed fiction such as Red Poppies and a Chinese-language adaptation of the epic...
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Send a reporter!
Not long ago I ran across a microblog post (since deleted) that used the image at right to mock some sort of trendy pseudoscience — possibly Zhang Wuben’s mung-bean miracle cure. In his comment to that...
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College-educated rat-catchers as pawns in a tussle over intellectual property
"Year of the Rat" Every year, China’s colleges and universities pour out more graduates into the work force than can find decent career placement, leaving highly-educated workers to scrape by in...
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Social commentary in Chinese SF: 2013, Han Song, and others
Age of Prosperity 《盛世》 John Chan Koon-Chung (陈冠中) 261 pages 2009 In a prosperous China where nearly everyone is happy, a few individuals attempt to track down why an entire month seems to have been...
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An intimate apocalypse
Xiuzai’s Summer 《秀哉的夏天》 Ge Shuyi (哥舒意) 223 pages 2010.2 As the title suggests, Xiuzai’s Summer draws inspiration from the Takeshi Kitano film Kikujiro (菊次郎の夏), in that it features a man who takes a...
View ArticleOverlooked in 2010
As part of Sina Books’ year in review feature, critic Xie Xizhang (解玺璋) introduces some worthy books that did not receive the attention they deserved last year. The article’s title, “Overlooked and...
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Bob Dylan’s body doubles come to China
“Bob Dylan’s coming,” announced the March 4 edition of the Xinmin Evening News. He’ll perform in Beijing on April 6 and in Shanghai on April 8. Xinmin Evening News, March 4 2011, A17 The page layout...
View ArticleEver vigilant against historical revisionism
An anonymous letter that appeared in this week’s Shanghai Review of Books (a supplement to the Sunday Oriental Morning Post) starts off with a standard “long-time reader” intro before accusing the...
View ArticleWho makes money off digital publishing?
As recounted in this week’s edition of the Southern Metropolis Daily book review, Murong Xuecun posted an “Open Letter to Shanda Literature” on his blog complaining that he had received no royalties...
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Foreignized hanzi
The “Year’s Best 21st Century Foreign Fiction,” 2010 edition, published by People’s Literature Publishing House, embeds several foreign scripts into the series logo: Detail from the cover of...
View ArticleChinese fiction contest ’95
Last week’s Shanghai Review of Books featured a fascinating essay by Qu Muyang on the beginnings of modern Chinese fiction sparked by the publication of A Collection of New Novels from the Late Qing...
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[From Tumblr] 2014-04-22 04:54:54
The Chinese Salt Trade. An Opening for British EnterpriseE. H. ParkerThe Economic Journal Vol. 9, No. 33 (Mar., 1899), pp. 116-125 via JSTOR.
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Capitalist lobsters!
Lobsters 龙虾 is a 1959 stop-motion short directed by Jin Xi 靳夕, adapted from a play by Lu Dan 芦丹. A restaurant proprietor attempts to dispose of his stock of spoiled lobsters by placing an ad for a...
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Some notes on General Nian’s Conquest of the West
I was tagged a while back by @davesgonechina at the end of a Twitter exchange he had with Jess Nevins about the late Qing magical war novel The Pacification of Jinchuan 平金川 (also known as General...
View ArticleWhen editors lash out
There’s a scene in Chapter 4 of Zeng Pu‘s A Flower in a Sinful Sea 孽海花 where Gong Xiaoqi is editing the unpublished work of his late father and strikes the man’s funerary tablet whenever he corrects an...
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