Set in a part of China that has rapidly moved from rural to industrial, the dense urban setting, with inhabitants of skyscrapers so closely packed together than residents in one tower block can almost shake hands through their windows with their neighbours in the building next door, old sits side by side with new, so that protagonist runs a medicine shop, but also offers hi-tech services on account of his skills from his previous job. There’s a Shaman living nearby, a high-class prostitute with a hi-tech tramp stamp that denotes her husband/pimp, and the vicious husband/pimp himself, and the hi-tech comes to play… Chen Qiufan (aka Stanley Chan) is a representative member of China's new generation of speculative fiction authors. He is known for his stylistic combination of realism and New Wave, and has been called “China's William Gibson”. His works have been translated into many languages and received multiple domestic and international awards including nine Chinese Nebula Awards (China's counterpart to the Hugo Award), three Galaxy Awards and a World F&SF Translation Award. His representative works include “The Waste Tide” (his debut novel, to be published by Tor in Autumn 2018), and the short story collections “Censored” and “Future Disease”. He previously worked for Google, Baidu, and other corporations for nearly ten years. At present, as Vice President of Noitom Ltd., he focuses on the fields of motion capture and virtual reality.
Author
Chen Qiufan was born in 1981, in Shantou, China. (In accordance with Chinese custom, Mr. Chen's surname is written first. He sometimes uses the English name Stanley Chan.) He is a graduate of Peking University and published his first short story in 1997 in Science Fiction World, China's largest science fiction magazine. Since 2004, he has published over 30 stories in Science Fiction World, Esquire, Chutzpah and other magazines. His first novel, The Abyss of Vision, came out in 2006. He won Taiwan's Dragon Fantasy Award in 2006 with "A Record of the Cave of Ning Mountain," a work written in Classical Chinese. His story, "The Tomb," was translated into English and Italian and can be found in The Apex Book of World SF II and Alias 6. He now lives in Beijing and works for Google China.
