This week’s photo theme: CREATURE FEATURES. Ghosts, demons, monsters, aliens, and indefinably uncanny entities, all from the annals of Chinese literature, film and art.
Today’s image comes from a 1995 issue of Science Fiction World (科幻世界), China’s preeminent pulpy sci-fi print rag, as archived by a fan on Chinese streaming site AcFun. Writing for Radii earlier this week, Cameron Ballard explains:
Despite its resilience, science fiction was once again wiped from China in 1983 during a series of anti-spiritual pollution campaigns. Finally, in 1991, Yang Xiao, a sci-fi publisher who had survived the campaigns by changing the name of his magazine to Strange Tales and only publishing nonfiction work, decided to host a sci-fi convention in Chengdu. Driven by the success of his convention, Yang Xiao changed his publication’s name to Science Fiction World, and scaled up production to a peak circulation of 400,000 during the mid-’90s. It was during this period that Liu Cixin rose to prominence alongside other writers like Wang Jinkang and Han Song.
Liu Cixin, of course, would go on to pen the wildly popular Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, which shot Chinese sci-fi to international attention when the first book in the series, The Three-Body Problem, became the first original Chinese novel to win the coveted Hugo Award in 2015.
Read more about Liu Cixin and Chinese sci-fi here:
