Ep 72 - Han Song and My Country Does Not Dream with the London Chinese Science Fiction Group

‘Because of sleepwalking, over one billion Chinese people have awakened’

In the seventy second episode of The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast I’m facing down a bleak reality: My Country Does Not Dream (我的祖国不要做梦 / wǒde zǔguó bù zuò mèng). But I’m not doing it alone! The London Chinese Science Fiction Group have deployed a team of Han Song aficionados (and one critic) to console my exhausted brain as the daytime hours fall away, revealing a sombre somnambulant city behind the city: Beijing.

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// NEWS ITEMS //

• Article in Sixth Tone: Infinite Scroll: The Making of China's Web Fiction Epics

• Words from Shen Yang in Telegraph article: What life's really like in locked-down Shanghai

• Short story Meta-Shanghai by Angus himself is published in Ab Terra 2021

• Watch/Listen as Jack Hargreaves reads from Chen Chuncheng's Submarines in the Night

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// WORDS OF THE DAY //

(梦游 - mèngyóu - sleepwalking)

(吊儿郎当 - diào'er lángdāng - sloppiness)

(躺平 - tǎngpíng - lie flat, as resistance to the 996 work system)

(闭眼 - bì yǎn - eyes closed)

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// MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE //

• New wave scifi, and emergence of the New Weird in the 90s

• Guangzhao’s writeup of his group’s event on this story

• 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary

• The forthcoming English translations of Han Song’s Hospital trilogy

• China 2185: Liu Cixin’s cyberpunk novel