Jay Lake is visiting China at the moment. He has a variety of reasons for doing so, including visiting the panda sanctuary. However, while he was in Chengdu he also visited the offices of Science Fiction World. He has written a report about that.
It’s an interesting market, staffed by dedicated people most of us would readily recognize as fans even without any common language, working with the largest potential readership in the world.
Science fiction is huge in China. We could do with working together with them more.
Thanks for picking this up!
My pleasure, I’m delighted you went to see those folks.
The interesting question is, how do we progress this? I’ve been in touch with them about getting the Galaxy Award results on SFAW, but we clearly need to do more than that.
The real problem, as expressed by Li Ke Qin, is the lack of qualified Chinese-English translators with the appropriate writing skills, cultural awareness and genre sensibility. If we can identify even a very limited number of those resources (ie, a non-zero value) with availability (and funding if needed), more things can happen.
On a simpler level, improved communication with Mr. Li and his colleagues would help. Chengdu really is the back of beyond in a lot of ways, for all that it is a modern city of 10,000,000. I’m doing my small part for this.
Hmm. You might find this entry interesting….
http://www.gordsellar.com/2009/03/20/my-research-proposal-argh-and-a-new-korean-sf-organization-yay/
obviously different country, different language. But someone comparatively nearby interested on working on similar stuff, although vis a vis Korean SF.
Would be really cool to see another group working on international SF just as that mag of international sf was.