![]() ![]() In recent years, Anglophone science fiction markets such as Apex, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Lightspeed, and others have all published works translated from Chinese. This situation is now being remedied to some degree. ![]() However, until recently, few Chinese SF works are translated into English, making it hard for non-Chinese readers to appreciate them. Beijing’s bid to host Worldcon, though it lost to Kansas City, nonetheless made waves at LonCon 3. Western fandom is starting to pay attention to Chinese science fiction. (I tried guessing the authors during the last couple of contests, and though I failed miserably, I really enjoyed this way of experiencing flash fiction.) The new online publication SF Comet, which hosts a monthly flash fiction contest for invited Chinese and Western science fiction writers (Nancy Kress and Mike Resnick are two recent participants), distributes contest entries to readers via WeChat (a mobile messaging application/platform) and Sina Weibo (a Twitter work-alike).Īlthough the contest is barely a few months old, it already has thousands of subscribers because readers enjoy the challenge of matching the anonymized entries to the names of the participating authors and voting for their favorite story via WeChat. Magazines, some Chinese literary magazines, such as ZUI Found, are also open to SFnal work, and through these markets, the much larger “mainstream” readership is also exposed to science fiction, both translated and native. In contrast, the latest overall circulation figures for the big American SF print magazines are 27,248 for Analog, 23,192 for Asimov’s, and 10,678 for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. For example, China’s largest science fiction magazine, Science Fiction World, has a current monthly circulation figure of around 160,000 (this is down from a peak of around 300,000, but copies are often read by multiple people as many high school students purchase them at newsstands and share with friends). ![]() ![]() China has a vibrant science fiction culture whose sheer size can sometimes surprise Western readers unfamiliar with it. ![]()
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