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Calm&Chaos
For the past few days Li Qingda's life has felt like being in a Hollywood action flick ? surviving a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and escaping possible nuclear radiation. Li is a 21-year-old law student at Sendai's Tohoku University, located close to the epicenter of the earthquake that struck off the coast of Japan on Friday. It spawned a tsunami that swallowed up whole villages and towns, killing at least 3,600 people, with more than 7,800 still missing.
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Childcare
Just like new moms, new fathers can be depressed, and a study found a surprising number of sad dads spanked their 1-year-olds. About 40 percent of depressed fathers in a survey said they'd spanked kids that age, versus just 13 percent of fathers who weren't depressed. Most dads also had had recent contact with their child's doctor ?a missed opportunity to get help, authors of the study said.
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A SAD fact
Before finally accepting a position as department head, Wu Ting turned down three promotion opportunities in the past 20 years just so she could avoid giving presentations at large gatherings.
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Key Words
Tea Peking Opera
Confucius
Cultural Heritage
Jade Chinese New Year
Imperial Palace
Chinese Painting
Books
The future is now
By Chitralekha Basu (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-18 10:48
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And even as sci-fi magazines from Italy dedicate special editions to Chinese short stories and French publishers show interest in acquiring translation rights, "most people have no idea about science fiction in the present time", Han says.
"Readers in China are interested in reality, not in the relationship between human beings and nature," he says.
Han's Declarations of Imagination - evidently, he likes playing on existing titles while naming his books, this time borrowing it from the surrealist painter Salvador Dali - was written with the idea of spreading greater awareness about sci-fi writing in China.
There are only about 20 authors seriously pursuing this genre, and two magazines - the Chengdu-based Science Fiction World and Taiyuan-based New Science Fiction - dedicated to publishing what is still seen by a huge section of readers as stories "meant for children".
"But these people have great imagination," Han insists. "They care about China's future and its people, and their hopes and aspirations. I wanted to record the achievements of these writers and connect them to circles in which they are not so well-known."
The edge sci-fi writers perhaps have over novelists of social realism is that they do not need to rein in their imagination.
"They can put the country in (hypothetically) extreme situations to see how people might respond. They can put China to test the way no serious writer can," Han says.
And China's sci-fi writers have wonderful material to work with at this time.
"The future looks more colorful and positive than ever, and more open to the spirit of discovery," Han says.
A society that's vivid, flourishing and modernizing at an accelerated pace creates a happy hunting ground for potential sci-fi writers.
Maybe, one day, people will accept reading about state-of-the-art technology and contemporary politics in the same novel, Han says.
"Living in the times that we do, we cannot help but become interested in technology. When that happens, sci-fi will indeed become mainstream."
Yang Guang contributed to the story.
