A star’s coming of age was the process of slowly getting uglier.

In the eighty first episode of the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast, writer/researcher Yen Ooi and I are gazing up at The Stars We Raised (逃跑星辰 / táopǎo xīngchén), a short story by Xiu Xinyu featured in the all-women + nonbinary anthology The Way Spring Arrives. Once more, a Chinese science fiction story is taking us down to the countryside for melancholy reflections on the pains of growing up. Yen and I dig into the pains of publishing too, from gender to generation and from style to synthesis.

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// NEWS ITEMS //

I will be hosting Sinoist Books’ November 2022 Book Club on Li Peifu’s Graft
Yan Ge’s next book Elsewhere is incoming – and it’s not a translation
New academic anthology Readings in Chinese Women’s Philosophical and Feminist Thought could make for a decent Christmas present, if you’ve got a spare £90

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// WORD OF THE DAY //

(仁 - rén - human kind(ness))

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// MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE //

Yen’s musical pairing: Debussy - Suite bergamasque, L. 75 - I. Prélude
Angus’ musical pairing: Breaking Benjamin - Had Enough (live, acoustic)
Rén 仁 by Yen Ooi
UFO in Her Eyes by Xiaolu Guo
How to Catch a Star by Oliver Jeffers
A Prayer for the Crown Shy by Becky Chambers
The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel
We Could Not See the Stars by Elizabeth Wong
Early publications of translated Chinese sci-fi: Han Song’s The Wheel of Samsara & Zhao Haihong’s Exuviation
Chaohuan 超幻 articles: [The “Ultra-unreal” in Chinese Literature - China Channel] // [Modern China is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre - LitHub] // [Nine sci-fi subgenres to help you understand the future - Quartz]
Brain Mill Press’ Ab Terra series - joint-edited by Yen and featuring my short story Meta-Shanghai
The Leeds Uni Chinese Genre Fiction Symposium & Essence of Wonder Chinese Sci-fi virtual event
A Journey to the Narrative Design in ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ by Yen Ooi & Christy Deno
China’s (now somewhat kibosh-ed) 996 working hour system

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// Handy TrChFic Links //

The TrChFic mailing list // Episode Transcripts

Help Support TrChFic // The TrChFic Map

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