Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Calling All Fans of Chinese SF - Need Some Help

Since I'm in Hong Kong, I'm wondering if anyone out there who's a fan of Chinese SF can refer me to a bookstore in the area that sells Chinese SF that's been translated into English.

My recent travels around Asia have given me a lot of time to read on airplanes, and as a result I've gone through Dan Simmons' Black Hills fairly quickly, and in short order I'll be done with Douglas Coupland's Generation A.

I was in Kowloon today and went into the Page1 bookstore in the mall near the Star Ferry terminal looking for more to read. They had the usual suspects from the American and British SF scenes (and even a copy of Rob Sawyer's FlashForward to represent the contributions of us Canucks), and I ended up picking up a copy of Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things.

But I was really disappointed to see that the store had no works by Chinese SF authors that had been translated into English. I'd remembered a very interesting discussion of the genre around the world a few months ago on SF Signal, and I went into the store hoping that since Hong Kong has traditionally been the gateway between China and the West that there would be translated versions of local SF available. No luck. At least not at that store. Which is unfortunate because I was hoping to be able to pick up an anthology or a critically-acclaimed novel that would give me a sense of what the Chinese and Hong Kong SF scenes are like.

So we come to my request:

I'm wondering if any of you out there in the blogosphere who are SF fans who live in Hong Kong or China, or who live elsewhere but have travelled to Hong Kong, can recommend a good bookstore here on the island that sells Chinese SF that's been translated into English. Also, are there any particular authors that I should try?

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

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