CHINA’S push for technological innovation has been accompanied by a widespread fascination with science fiction in recent years, and now the children’s sci-fi industry is booming.

At the 2021 Children’s Science Fiction Conference in Southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality on Friday, prizes were handed out at the first annual Xingyun (Nebula) Awards for children’s science fiction, drawing attention to the sector’s growing economic significance.

The market value of China’s sci-fi peripheral products amounted to 1.35 billion yuan (US$210.83 million) in 2019, according to a report released by the China Science Fiction Research Center of the China Research Institute for Science Popularization, together with the Research Center for Science and Human Imagination at the Southern University of Science and Technology.

The market value of sci-fi-themed peripheral products, mostly children’s sci-fi toys, including toy guns, shape-shifting robots and building blocks, was 850 million yuan in 2019, accounting for 63 percent of the total sci-fi peripheral product market, the report said.

“Children’s sci-fi is becoming the focus for literary creation and incubation,” said Dong Renwei, a sci-fi writer and founder of the Nebula Awards.

Liu Cixin, a renowned sci-fi writer in China and chairman of the awards’ organizing committee, said, “As time advances, the scientific fantasies that people read about in their childhood will become more and more real. Compared with fairytales and other fantasy literature, sci-fi has a more profound influence on the future of young readers.”

Liu said that children’s sci-fi is a literary genre full of vitality, and its position in both sci-fi and children’s literature is irreplaceable.

(Xinhua)