Hao Jingfang won the Hugo Award for Beijing Folding： I don’t want the novel to come true.
Yesterday morning, Beijing time, just a few minutes before the China women’s volleyball team won the championship in Rio, good news came back from Kansas City, Missouri, USA. Hao Jingfang, a female writer, won the Best Short Story Award in the 74th Hugo Award for her "Folding Beijing". Hugo Award is known as the Nobel Prize in Literature of science fiction, which is the second China writer to win the award after Liu Cixin’s Three-body. In her speech, she said, "I don’t want my novel to come true. I sincerely hope that the future will be brighter."
acceptance speech
I hope the future is brighter.
Last year, Liu Cixin won the Hugo Award with the English version of Three-body, which promoted the development of the whole science fiction industry in China. This year, Hao Jingfang continued to heat up from being shortlisted to winning the award again. Coincidentally, the English translators of their winning works are both Chinese science fiction writers Liu Yukun. At the end of April this year, Hao Jingfang won the attention of domestic publishers after being shortlisted for the Hugo Award. First, he published the autobiographical novel Born in 1984, and then he concentrated on publishing Lonely Deep, Far Away and Wandering Sky.
In the face of outside enthusiasm, Hao Jingfang himself is relatively calm. In an interview with the Beijing Times, she said that she didn’t want to create a cage for herself. "Too much attention may not be a good thing, which will affect the pace of life." Before the winners were announced yesterday, she was in a normal and tangled state. On the one hand, she felt that "winning the prize was not completely unexpected", on the other hand, she was thinking about going to the loser’s party.
When Hao Jingfang delivered her acceptance speech, she expressed her thoughts on the plot setting in the novel. She said, "Science fiction writers like to consider all possibilities, good or bad, lucky or unlucky. They will discuss what strategies to adopt to deal with aliens and so on. Basically, they live in countless parallel universes. In the novel Beijing Folding, I put forward a possibility of the future and faced various problems. At the same time, I also put forward a solution, which is obviously not the best result, but it is not the worst. I personally don’t want my novel to come true. I sincerely hope that the future will be brighter. "
Inner circle reaction
Liu Cixin: I find it hard to believe that she wrote it.
China’s science fiction literature circle is not big, and Liu Cixin has always appreciated Hao Jingfang. He once compared Hao Jingfang’s style with the works of science fiction master Ray Bradbury, saying that "she sprinkled a poetic sunshine on our common science fiction themes". At the Shanghai Book Fair yesterday, Liu Cixin launched and signed the English version of the trilogy "Three-body", and nearly a thousand copies were signed on the spot, which shows the popularity.
After learning that Hao Jingfang won the prize, he first expressed his congratulations. When talking about the work "Beijing Folding", Liu Cixin said that it was well written: "This work is very different from her previous works. If you just show me this work, I can hardly believe that it was written by her. Jing Fang’s previous works are very beautiful and elegant, and because she has a doctorate in economics, her settings are all based on the economy. " Hao Jingfang once said that her novel wanted to write the "warmth" of this cruel setting.
During the signing process, a reader asked Liu Cixin if he would write short stories in the near future. Liu Cixin said: "At the beginning, I wrote a lot of short stories, mainly because it was difficult to send long stories at that time." In just two years, Chinese people’s enthusiasm for science fiction has rapidly warmed up. Yao Haijun, editor-in-chief of Science Fiction World magazine, believes that Liu Cixin’s award has ignited Chinese people’s enthusiasm for science fiction, while Hao Jingfang’s award will help readers adjust their mentality to normal.
Who’s Hao Jingfang?
Hao Jingfang was born in Tianjin in 1984. At the age of 9, he read "100,000 Why" and decided to become a scientist. In 2002, he won the first prize in the 4th New Concept Composition Competition. When she was shortlisted for the Hugo Award, a Zhihu netizen said, "This girl was a scholar in the class next door that year. The ranking she took in the new concept composition seemed to be enough for the Chinese Department of Peking University to be exempted from the exam, and then she was admitted to the Physics Department of Tsinghua. At that time, I also thought that this kind of learning god appeared in the list of scientific research cows a few years later. As a result, I saw that she was nominated for the Hugo Award. It was really IQ crushing all the time. "
In 2006, Hao Jingfang graduated from the Department of Physics in Tsinghua University and entered the Tsinghua University Astrophysics Center. In this year, he officially began to write science fiction. So far, he has published the novel Wandering in the Sky, the collection of short stories, such as Star Traveler, Far Away and Lonely Deep. Later, Hao Jingfang transferred to Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management to pursue a doctorate, and in 2013, he began to work for China Development Research Foundation.
In the novel "Beijing Folding", she fictionalized Beijing as a triple space, and people in each space were in different situations. The protagonist was a garbage man, Lao Dao, who ventured to deliver letters in other spaces in order to pay the kindergarten tuition for the picked-up children. At present, the novel is included in the new book "Lonely Deep". In addition, the reporter learned from Palm Reading Technology that the electronic version of "Lonely Deep" has downloaded more than 300,000 copies in just two months since it was launched on June 17.
Jinghua Times reporter Tian Chao