Friday, July 02, 2021

Dreaming of electric sheep

I asked my Renmin students, divided into six groups, to come up with works of art which might be illuminating for the Anthropocene: three per group. The specificity of "works of art" got lost in the scramble, but the resulting list is still intriguing - especially the science fiction! 


I'm familiar with one of the three Chinese works proposed, I read and enjoyed Hao Jingfang's "Folding Beijing" when its English translation won a 2016 Hugo award. The Waste Tide, has apparently just appeared in English, too: I'm adding it to my reading list (and maybe to the syllabus of my fall Lang first year seminar!). The third has an English title but I'll need to ask the students more about it; although it seems the author, Hui Hu, has won prizes for several works, English language searches are revealing little. About the author of The Waste Tide, the preternaturally pretty Chen Qiufan (a k a Stanley Chan), meanwhile, there's more, including a factoid to confirm just what a brave new android world some of my students are confronting: 

Chen’s recent short story “The State of Trance,” which includes passages generated by AI, nabbed first prize in a Shanghai literary competition moderated by an artificially intelligent judge [!!!!!!], beating an entry written by Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mo Yan.