Jade Literary Agency 2022 Fiction Rights Catalog (click)

Wild Future(s)

野未来

by WANG WEILIAN

Sci-Fi, short story collection / 352 pages / July 2021 / Chinese

Rights sold: Italian

English sample available, translated by Jack Hargreaves

Chinese PDF available.

A realistic science fiction with a heavy dose of anti-science fiction and post-futurism.

Wild Future(s) is his first offering of stories in which the before now realist author has

applied his dexterous thinking on all things physics, philosophy and anthropology to write about the future. Specifically, to imagine the changes and confusion that await humankind there.

Most of the stories in the collection unfold in the Guangzhou of a not-too-distant future, where we zoom in on a peculiar cast of characters and their eccentric, backward life choices: a man tries to bring a dead relative back to life through the power of technology; a taxi driver recently replaced by driverless cars zones out for a record five hours; a science whizz finds himself at home living in one of the city’s concrete slums, happy in his job as an airport security guard; a stinking rich techno-upstart puts all his resources towards building a nineties town under water…

With these stories, Wang Weilian upends your experience of time and turns your view of life on its head, making you sit and wonder: how do I safeguard myself and my state of mind in an era of such rapid change? Essentially, Wild Future(s) is a love letter to people and to being alive.

Highlights

• Wild Future(s) paints the picture of a future with eye-in-the-sky surveillance, memory back-ups and
• uploadable experiences, and asks: how do science and technology really affect our everyday lives? How might these technologies rock our natural faith in the corporeal and emotional? In the vein of H.G. Wells and Stanisław Lem, Wang Weilian stands aloft his own period in history and surveys the future, showing us how permeable the distinction between security and anxiety can be. What dangers might be hiding in a golden future of peace and flourishing?
• Wang Weilian re-packages the “spirit” of the literary within the “shell” of science-fiction, with eleven stories that reframe our experience of the time we are living through. Subversive, revolutionary and speculative, these vignettes of the future take aim at the misery of life, the struggles of losers, and the mental anguish of the modern person.
• In Wang Weilian’s imagined future, science and technology breed fear, alienation and absurdity. But unlike the Kafkaesque vision of a lonely, wretched and disconnected otherworld, Wang Weilian’s future is a place where the full depth of human nature, in all its complexity and richness, hides in plain sight. Alternative science-fiction and poetry are Wang’s chosen tools for bringing each note of it to light, producing a series of allegories on human survival and reflections on life, death, science, technolog.
• Wang Weilian’s interrogation of this world is full of tenderness and a sincerity that is hard to find nowadays. It is therefore easy to connect with the questions he asks of us, and throw ourselves through one protean story after another into new experiences of time, games, dreams, oneness, multiplicity, truth, and eternity.

Reviews

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“Wild Future(s) makes us think about the relationship between technology, the everyday and the future.”

— Yu Hua (Popular candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and recipient of the Grinzane Cavour Prize and the Prix Courrier International)

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"I feel like many of my junior authors and poets still go about their writing in the same way people have now for generations. Thankfully, I also sense among them the coming of something new. Weilian is one of that younger cohort who convinces me my instinct is right. His stories are nothing like those of my generation or the one before, and it’s such an exciting thing. We all contemplate others’ hardships, our own pain and individual loneliness. But there is no getting around there being some complaints that are “wholesale”, and the fact that too few writers have the problem awareness to point out the problems that really warrant serious attention. I can tell from Wang Weilian’s writing that he is problem aware. That he knows how to discover problems, find the best angle for making the cut and probe. 

Weilian’s brand of science fiction resembles a sort of anti-science-fiction. At the very least it represents a rethinking of the wider genre. The future he is showing us is not a distant future, and nor is it a limited or gloomy one. It is a close future, a future that lies right around the corner. That I think is what is fascinating. 

There is a temperature to Weilian’s stories of this future. The temperature of life. Sometimes of a life struck down with a fever—perhaps thirty-seven point five or thirty-eight degrees Celsius. And sometimes it is a temperature below what our bodies are accustomed to—closer to twenty-four or even sixteen degrees. These are all temperatures. This is why he is nothing like the old guard writers of tradition, and nothing like the majority of science fiction writers I read today. "

— Xi Chuan (A China Book Industry Writer of the Year, winner of the 1999 Weimar International Essay Prize Contest, and recipient of the Lu Xun Literature Prize, the Cikada Prize and the Tokyo Poetry Prize)

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"What draws people to Wang Weilian’s stories is how seamlessly he blends lyricism with philosophy, and how stalwart and inspiring a stance he takes against nihilism and despair. Such is his expansive vision."

— Bi Feiyu (A Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; his work has been translated into over 20 languages)

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"It is hard to define Wang Weilian’s writing in Wild Future(s) using any pre-existing labels. He has managed to resist the traditional infatuation of science fiction writers with grand concepts and order, filling his imagined space instead with wavering meaning and quotidian lyricism, an experience which for a reader manifests as unshakeable homesickness for the future."

— Chen Qiufan (President of the Chinese Science Fiction Writers Association (CSFA) and twelve-time winner of the Nebula Awards) 

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"Dr. Wang Weilian is a man of simple tastes and sensibilities, but his works still never fail to keenly reflect the cutting edge of literature. I look to every one of his books as a marker for the direction I should be headed. 

— A Yi (Over twenty different publications, translated into ten languages; his novel Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning was the Chinese literary work bought by the most libraries globally in 2019)

About the Author

Wang Weilian, born in 1982, has successively studied in the Department of physics, Department of Anthropology and Department of Chinese of Sun Yat sen University with a doctor of literature, has published the novel The Rescued, short story collections Inner Face, Illegal Inhabitation, The Sound of Salt Forming, and more, for which he has won many literary awards. Whether it is his imaginative plot settings or his cold, pure and sharp language,all bring a strange and philosophical coloring to his fiction, lending his writing a very distinct style. His narrativesare full of ideological and artistic tension, with a unique approach that combines the mysterious and theshocking. Some of the works have been translated into English, Korean, Japanese, Italian, Hungarian and otherlanguages and published overseas. He has won the first "Zijin · People's literature star" literature award, October literature award, Huacheng literature award, Mao Dun Literature Rookie Award, Chinese science fiction Competition Gold Award, Chinese excellent publication award, etc.

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