Astron'art

Films watched in 2015.

Film 184: Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

Nota: 8.5/10

“What you’re trying to say is you don’t want me to love you.”

Chinese sci-fi writer beats Stephen King for top fiction prize

Hao Jingfang wins Hugo award with dark story of social inequality and injustice in Beijing

“A futuristic tale of urban life in Beijing has won a Chinese novelist a top international prize for science fiction, beating out heavyweight Stephen King for the honour.

Hao Jingfang, 32, won the Hugo Award for best novelette with Folding Beijing, a year after another Chinese writer, Liu Cixin, won the best novel prize for The Three-Body Problem, Xinhua reported on the weekend.

Receiving her award in Kansas City, Missouri, Hao said she was not surprised she had won but had also been prepared to lose.

“In Folding Beijing, I have raised a possibility for the future and how we face the challenges of automated production, technological advances, unemployment and economic stagnation,” she said.

Hao said her book offered a solution to those challenges, but she hoped the situations she described would not become reality.

Hao is from Tianjin, and graduated with a physics degree from Tsinghua University in 2006.

The Hugo Awards, established in 1953, are regarded as the highest honour in science fiction and fantasy. They are named after Hugo Gernsback who was the founder of the American science fiction magazineAmazing Stories.”

Read the full piece here

Congratulations Hao Jingfang!

Me: I feel optimistic about life as a concept and about humanity and our place in the cosmos. Yes, the universe is vast and indifferent but that fact doesn’t have to be inherently terrifying and doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything out there that means us harm. There’s reason for hope. 

Liu Cixin: 

……那是他大学生活中最阳光明媚的一天。

——刘慈欣《三体3：死神永生》

“There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naïveté and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct.

I think it should be precisely the opposite: Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth and build up the trust and understanding between the different peoples and civilizations that make up humanity. But for the universe outside the solar system, we should be ever vigilant, and be ready to attribute the worst of intentions to any Others that might exist in space. For a fragile civilization like ours, this is without a doubt the most responsible path.”

Cixin Liu, Author’s Postscript to the American Edition of ‘The Three Body Problem’.

The Chart of Cosmic Exploration.

Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest is a mind-bending blend of splashy SF and serious science. A review on The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog.