SF and the Internet Teahouse: Xueting Christine Ni

Sinophone Unrealities – UiS podkast

In this episode, Xueting Christine Ni introduces the new anthology Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction (out 9 November 2021) that she has compiled and edited, and shares thoughts on the diversification of the genre. She interprets literary internet fora as modern-day versions of the interactive storytelling tradition of the teahouse. We also discuss how popular global and classical Chinese influences that converge in stories like A Que’s “Flower of the Other Shore”, which feature walking dead reminiscent of both Chinese Jiangshi (僵尸 literally “stiff corpse” but often referred to as “hopping vampire”) and Hollywood zombies.

Visiting Storyteller: Xueting Christine Ni has a degree in English Literature from the University of London. After graduating, she began a career in the publishing industry, whilst also translating original works of Chinese fiction. She returned to China in 2008 to continue her research at Central University of Nationalities, Beijing. Since 2010, she has written extensively on Chinese culture and China’s place in Western pop media. Her first book, From Kuan Yin to Chairman Mao, is published by Weiser Books. Her new anthology Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction, is out on the 9th of November. Xueting currently lives just outside London with her partner and their cats, all of whom are learning Chinese.

Teahouse Host: Astrid Møller-Olsen is international research fellow with the Universities of Lund, Stavanger, and Oxford, funded by the Swedish Research Council. She has degrees in comparative literature and Chinese studies and has published on fictional dictionaries, urban forms of memory, and sensory approaches to the study of literature. Her first monograph Sensing the Sinophone is forthcoming with Cambria Press. Her current research is a cross-generic study of plant-human relationships in contemporary Sinophone literature from science fiction to surrealism: https://xiaoshuo.blog/