He has a great way of observing the situation and coming up with just the right way to get you to see the reality of it. He has this amazing voice-very wry, very mordant, very sharp. Translating him is often quite a challenge.

He tends to make references to contemporary Western theory in sociology, psychology, and science, as well as classical Chinese poetry, sometimes within the same paragraph. When you read his fiction, his being erudite in both Western and Chinese traditions is very evident. So he has a very worldly, cosmopolitan personal background. He’s lived all over the world and worked at big tech companies including Google and Baidu. He’s very linguistically talented, his English is excellent, and he speaks Cantonese as well as Mandarin and his topolect. One author that I like a lot in the anthology is Chen Qiufan. Could you pick out a couple to give people a sense of what’s in there? QZ: You’ve got a really wide range of authors and themes in your collection Invisible Planets. Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn’t terribly helpful. To them, the West is the dominant force in the world, and they have to make do as a peripheral culture trying to reemerge from centuries of historical oppression and colonial dominance to take their place on the world stage. That’s just not how people in China think. We prefer to think of China as a dystopian world that is challenging American hegemony, so we would like to think that Chinese sci-fi is all either militaristic or dystopian. What tends to happen when people talk about Chinese sci-fi in the West is that there’s a lot of projection. I think if you ask one hundred Chinese authors the same question, you’ll get one hundred different answers as well. You know, if you ask one hundred American authors, “What is unique about American sci-fi versus sci-fi written in the UK,” you’re going to get one hundred different answers. Quartz: When people outside of China are introduced to “Chinese sci-fi,” an initial reaction might be to ask, “What’s the difference between Chinese and Western sci-fi?” Is that a useful question?

Invisible planets book