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在线翻译:
szdaily -> Culture -> 
Exporting sci-fi beyond imagination
    2018-06-19  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

BEST-SELLING science fiction from the West has been exported to China for over a century.

Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin became the first person to interest Western readers in a Chinese-originated story in 2014, when “The Three-Body Problem” was published in English and became the first Chinese sci-fi novel to win a Hugo Award, the Oscars of the science-fiction world.

Barack Obama took it on holiday. Mark Zuckerberg selected it for his Facebook reading club. It became a New York Times best-seller, spent 11 weeks on Germany’s Der Speigel best-seller list, won literary awards in Spain and Germany and sold more than 300,000 copies in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries.

To put those numbers into perspective, selling 100,000 copies is already hugely profitable for the publisher. Most books struggle to reach the 10,000 mark.

The Financial Times also reported that Amazon is in talks to acquire the rights of the book and its two sequels for US$1 billion, to produce a three-season TV show.

“The Three-Body Problem” trilogy tells the story of an alien civilization that happened to learn about the existence of Earth. Facing destruction on their own planet, the aliens invade. The two species try to coexist despite apparently irreconcilable differences.

Not much different from many existing sci-fi stories, this one, laced with references to Chinese history, geography, mythology and martial arts, however, has caught the imagination of Western readers.

While many within China are still puzzled about the instant success of the book, Yao Haijun, chief editor of China’s Science Fiction World, provides some insight. He said the book coincides with the growing trend of Western readers who are earnest to understand China.

Ji Shaoting, founder and CEO of the Beijing-based science-fiction publication Future Affairs Administration, said China’s rapid social transformation has tilled rich soil for fueling the imaginations of the country’s sci-fi writers.

However, publisher Nicolas Cheetham, who brought “The Three-Body Problem” to the U.K. market, believes the key to Chinese science fiction’s international success lies within the nature of the genre itself.

“The simple truth is that science fiction is inherently export-ready. As a literature of possibilities, it embraces the new and different,” said Cheetham, who’s deputy managing director at the U.K. publisher Head of Zeus.

The martial-arts elements in Chinese science fiction do play a role in capturing Western readers’ imagination in the same way Jackie Chan’s movies are big hits in Hollywood. At the same time, the universality of science fiction overcomes the cultural barriers other literature genres face when translated into English.

The success story of “The Three-Body Problem” has been followed by a wave of other books. In 2016, Hao Jingfang’s “Folding Beijing” won the Hugo Award for best novelette, beating none other than legendary horror writer Stephen King to the prize.

Ken Liu is famous for “The Paper Menagerie,” which became the first short story to win the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards. He is also the translator of many Chinese sci-fi novels.

Sci-fi grew in popularity in the late 19th century, spurred by technological advancements. Early best-sellers include H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” (1895) and Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” (1864).

Chinese science fiction began to grow in the early 20th century, according to Nathaniel Isaacson, associate professor of modern Chinese literature and cultural studies at North Carolina State University.

Back then, the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) was collapsing, and some parts of China fell under European control. Within this identity crisis, Chinese science-fiction books emerged to explore the country’s place in the world. Isaacson names Wu Jianren’s 1908 short story “New Story of the Stone” as an example.

The book imagines a world where Shanghai has become a world center of trade and commerce, and hosts a world expo and global political summits.

“Fairly often, what they imagined was a future where China is politically, economically and culturally dominant,” Isaacson said.

Early Chinese science fiction’s appeal was limited. What really made it big domestically and pushed the genre to the world is a new generation of writers and translators represented by Liu Cixin and Ken Liu. Their modern and international perspectives and the convenience of Internet publishing help push them to the front row.

Many of China’s best-known science fiction works did not take the traditional route to the market, which is through book agents and established publishers. Instead, they were published on digital bulletin boards and forums, more for sharing and feedback than wealth and fame.

Early drafts were posted and editing was crowdsourced. Hao’s “Folding Beijing,” for instance, was initially published on a popular bulletin board hosted by Tsinghua University.

The Internet helps these young authors get their names heard, far and loud.

When “The Three-Body Problem” was first published in China in 2006, fans loved it. They composed songs, created homemade trailers for the movie based on it that they hoped for, registered social media accounts using the names of the characters and wrote fan fiction.

The international breakthrough for the book came when the China Educational Publications Import and Export Corp. (CEPIEC) commissioned English translations for all three “The Three-Body” books.

The U.S. publisher Tor Books bought the book’s English rights from CEPIEC and made it big in the United States with more than 700,000 copies sold.

House of Zeus bought the trilogy’s U.K. and Commonwealth countries rights from Tor Books, facilitating its entry into familiar British bookshops such as Waterstones and Foyles.

Globally, it is published in 10 languages, thanks to other publishers who have bought the rights in their own markets. The sales of the French, Spanish and German versions have each exceeded 30,000 copies.

Ji of Future Affairs Administration believes Chinese sci-fi’s international appeal will continue, alongside China’s fast-paced scientific advancement.

“The background of the golden age of science fiction in the United States was its fast-developing science and technology in real world. Similarly in China, science and technology are growing so fast that we see changes in people’s lives every day,” Ji said.

Others, including Cheetham, are more careful when drawing conclusions about why Chinese science fiction is on the rise.

“Science fiction is a diverse scene. I would be careful to make generalizations about whether this is a Chinese trend or not,” he said.

House of Zeus is launching Chen Qiufan’s “The Waste Tide” and Bao Shu’s “The Redemption of Time” in the U.K. market in 2019. Cheetham hopes these books will share some of the proven luck of previously successful Chinese science fiction.

If the author’s voice matters, Liu Cixin has made it clear that although he is Chinese, he hopes his work reflects the concerns of all human beings.

“It is not my purpose to show the reality of China from a science-fiction perspective. This may not meet the expectations of Western readers. My purpose is very simple. That is, to write good science fiction and focus on the genre itself,” he said.(China Daily)

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