My first panel at Chengdu WorldCon 2023 was Decolonize the Future: Strategies and Solutions to Emerge from the Shadow of Anglo SF.
Participants were César Santivañez, Zhui Ning Chang, and Francesco Verso. I was a moderator of this fascinating discussion. This was my first moderating panel on WorldCon, and it was the best panel for me.
The theme of Delocolnizing from the AngloSF is one of the significant theme of Chjengdu WorldCon 2023, in which is participated by 35 countries of SFF writers, editors and publishers.
For icebreak, I pointed out a difference of Chinese title of this panel with English one. Chinese title means just a multi-cultrual world SF, but English one is not, of course. And I called the panel would go ahead on English meaning, de-colonizing.
After introducing participants, I told a episode how we Japanese found Chinese SF. Japanese SFF community was noticed that modern Chinese SFF had started in late 1970s by Mr. Iwagami. Iwagami translated and published many booklets decades for our community, but we did not attention a lot. When we found is 2015 and 2016, Three Body Problem and Invisible Planets translated by Ken Liu in English, and awarded at English convention, turned our eyes to the neighbour country. We had found Chinese SFF by the road pavemened by English. Of course, Ken is not colonizing and WorldCon community are not. But our attention or marketing had been colonized by the English SFF.
After introducing above, I asked them “How had you been colonized by?”
Story was fascinating. I was interested in Andean Futurism, Magic Realism marketing at the Espanior language area by César, the huge Common Wealth English literature hierarchy by Zhui Ning, and the less-anglo-bridge publishing by Future Fictions by Francesco.
The panel is well summarized by Phong Quam on 𝕏.com. Thank you.
wow.. you was here! this is great!