translations

My friend Chen Qiufan’s debut novel, Waste Tide, is finally out in English. I did the translation, and Tor Books in the US and Head of Zeus in the UK are the publishers.

The novel has been getting excellent reviews everywhere. You can see a sample of the reviews and find out more about the book here.

Stan (that’s his English name) and I attended a book launch for him at the Museum of Chinese in America in NYC on Tuesday, organized by Professor Jing Tsu of Yale. Very grateful to the staff of MOCA, Professor Tsu, Lindsey Hall (Stan’s editor at Tor), Desirae Friesen (Stan’s publicist), Eddie Schneider and Gray Tan (Stan’s agents), Russel Galen (my agent), Neil Clarke, Regina Kanyu Wang, Emily Jin, and others who made the English edition possible and the night so memorable.

Big congrats to Stan! (And buy the book!)

The second anthology of translated contemporary Chinese SF, Broken Stars, is out from Tor Books (US) and Head of Zeus (UK).

I hope you enjoy the work of these amazing authors and translators.

“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight,” by my friend Xia Jia, and translated by me, has won an Honorable Mention in the 2013 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards!

I loved this story, and it’s great to see Xia Jia getting some recognition. I think she’s one of the best contemporary Chinese speculative fiction writers. I’m proud to have had a chance to work with her.

She’s also a skilled translator on her own, having translated my “The Man Who Ended History” into Chinese. I think her translation is superior to my own original in many ways. She’ll also have a story in Neil Clarke’s upcoming Upgraded cyborg anthology. (The story is amazing, and I cried while translating it.)

I also talked about translating Xia Jia’s story for Clarkesworld: “Gathered in Translation”.

Tor Books just made the announcement.

It was a lot of work, and it’s going to be a lot more work still. But wow. Happiness.

It’s true. I’ll be translating Volume One of Liu Cixin’s grand sci-fi trilogy 《三体》(SANTI — official title TBD) into English. Volume Two and Three will be translated by famed translators Joel Martinsen and Eric Abrahamsen.

Now, the time frame they’ve given me is aggressive, to say the least. I won’t have much bandwidth for anything else for a few months. I’m really excited by the opportunity to introduce one of China’s greatest sci-fi novelists to the West, and hopefully the sacrifices I make now will be worth it.