Becoming Martians, translated by Toshiya Kamei and contributed to Multispecies Cities, has been nominated as an overseas short story for the second edition of the Million Fishing Castle Science Fiction Awards, organised by the Diaoyucheng Science Fiction Institute in Chongqing.
Becoming Martians is a short film in the form of a message sent by a father on Mars, where terraforming has failed, to his child who has studied on Earth. From Mars, where there is a 12-minute communication delay due to orbital reasons, the father apologises to his child for destroying the blue Martian sky. The short story consists entirely of this 12-minute monologue. I wrote it with this in mind: how can a generation that has made irreparable mistakes face the next generation?
Becoming Martians was written in one sitting during a 12-hour flight to Lyon in January 2020. It was a time when there were whispers of a threatening and infectious fever in China, but we had not yet anticipated the shadow that the virus would cast over our lives. I gave the outline of the work to Denis Tarrandiere and Xia Jia, whom I met in Lyon, and to my new acquaintances, French writer Olivier Paquet and Roderick Leeuwenhart, who has been a friend of mine since Dublin, and got feedback on it, brushing it up, and discussing the English translation with Toshiya Kamei. Publication was delayed due to COVID-19, but I remember the inexpressible satisfaction I felt when the beautiful cover was unveiled and the book was delivered to my housebound hands.
The first Million Fishing Castle Science Fiction Awards can be found at the following link. I think you can understand the content well enough even with machine translation. Chinese “SF Awards” are often combined with symposia and SF congresses themselves, and this Million Diaoyucheng SF Award was no exception, with a panel discussion (in China it is often called Summit : often referred to as Gaofeng) was being held. It’s a grand event.
The Chinese Science Fiction Awards feature a number of category awards. In addition to long, medium, short and newcomer awards, there are many category awards for translators from foreign languages into Chinese, from Chinese into foreign languages (you have Masako Furuichi, Nozomi Omori and Ken Liu nominated), publishers, editors, manga in the catalogue, teachers, textbooks and research. Every SF Grand Prize has a strong focus on the education category for the next generation.
The nomination was notified by Tachihara Toruaya at X. Thank you for always bringing us news from China.
