“Unmasking a universally accepted lie or overturning an irreplaceable idol will produce something akin to a mental collapse.”

In the seventy sixth episode of The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast we are hitting Zero (零 / líng). Joining me on deck are The Hugonauts, as we navigate a dystopian world that might be a postmodern riff on 1984 by amorphous author Huang Fan, or might be something far more sinister. All seasoned rebels know: sometimes you crash the system, and sometimes the system crashes you.

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// NEWS ITEMS //

• READ: Cao Kou’s The Wall Builder, translated by a pair of familiar names
• Can Xue’s Mystery Train now available for preorder in the US
• Yan Ge nears the end of draft 1 of a new (in a sense) Chinese language novel
• SFRA publishes Xi Liu’s Stories on Sexual Violence as “Thought Experiments”: Post-1990s Chinese Science Fiction as an Example
• East Asian astroturf: a flood of “books” on Taiwan, China, and Nancy Pelosi hits Amazon

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// WORD OF THE DAY //

(理 - lǐ - reason)

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// MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE //

• Angus’ musical pairing: Way out of Here by Porcupine Tree
• The ‘four industrial revolutions’ theory
• The PRC’s blocking of Wikipedia and efforts to ‘delete’ Tiananmen 1989 from collective memory
• Postwar Taiwan as a US-backed, far-right dictatorship
• Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing and its win at The Hugo Awards