THE winner of the 2014 Xingyun (Nebula) Award for Global Chinese Science Fiction was announced Sunday, with the best saga novel prize awarded to a story about a world trapped in an endless loop.

    “Ruins of Time,” written by Baoshu from the Chinese mainland, tells of a world where everything, except some people’s memories, returns to a fixed point-in-time every 20 hours as a result of a disastrous experiment that distorted time.

    American-Chinese writer Ken Liu won the special contribution prize for translating Chinese science fiction, including best seller “The Three-Body Problem,” into English.

    “Smart Life” by Ping Zongqi from Taiwan won the prize for best short story.

    More than 2,000 sci-fi writers and readers from China and abroad attended the event in Beijing, held by Guokr.com, a website dedicated to popularizing science.

    Though seen as an important way to popularize science and promote imagination, sci-fi has yet to break into the mainstream in China.

    The annual event, the only international award for Chinese-language sci-fi writers, was organized by the World Chinese Science Fiction Association, which is based in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China’s Sichuan Province. It was launched in 2010.

    (Xinhua)