interviews

A Q&A with Chinese sci fi author Fei Dao – by Alec Ash

Up on the LRB blog is my new piece about science fiction in China. Whereas more realist Chinese literature is often toothless to convey the realities about China, I argue sci fi can fill the breach – because of less stringent censorship for a more roundabout form, but also because some of those realities in a country that has squeezed so much change into just a few decades can frankly seem a little sci fi.

I've dusted off an old Q&A I did with Fei Dao, a young Chinese science fiction writer, last year, orginally for the LARB China blog. Plus at the bottom I've included a small truckload of further reading, including stories in translation, if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole.

Comedy in China – a Q&A with Jesse Appell

Explorer Jeff Fuchs interviews a mountain trader and guide at 4800 metres

The unbearable lightness of being an expat in China – a Q&A with Tom Carter

Over at the LA Review of Books China blog, I interview Tom Carter in the wake of the collection of true stories from expat China he edited, called Unsavory Elements. Tom is originally from San Francisco and has been living in China for a decade. He also did a book of photography based on trekking 35,000 miles through 33 provinces for two years. I asked him about expat identity issues, to try and get under the skin of those “masochistic” enough, in his words, to call China home.

A Q&A with sci fi novelist Chan Koonchung

Chan Koonchung is the Shanghai born, Hong Kong raised author of The Fat Years, a near-future soft science fiction novel about a China closely resembling today’s. He has now been living in Beijing since 2000. In his book, China has entered a “Golden Age of Ascendancy”, after a second economic crisis has crippled the West. But no-one within China can remember the crackdown that preceded it, and everyone is oddly and unnaturally euphoric.