China+100: Book Launch & Exhibition (Manchester)
With Manchester Confucius Institute
About the event
Join us for the launch of the China+100 anthology with Comma Press and attend the preview of our exhibition.
The book launch will start at 5:30PM. You will get the opportunity to visit the preview of our exhibition "Building China: Landscapes of Change", also on at The Holden Gallery from 5PM.
About the Book:
What might China look like in the year 2119, a century after the first outbreak of Covid-19? This is the question posed by editor Xueting C. Ni to ten leading Chinese science fiction writers in Comma Press’s new anthology China +100.
Join us to explore China +100 and its themes, including readings from two of the anthology’s authors – Anna Wu (Wu Shuang) and Dan Shi, visiting from China courtesy of the Confucius Institute at Manchester University – followed by a panel discussion with the book’s editor Xueting C. Ni.
Expect stories of future pandemics, surprising new vaccines and love between scientists, as well as a wide-ranging discussion of the book’s creation and its place in the wider context of contemporary Chinese science fiction. Followed by an audience Q&A.
About the Exhibition: ‘Building China: Landscapes of Change’:
This exhibition marks the twentieth anniversary of The Confucius Institute at The University of Manchester. It explores how China has been shaped through construction, infrastructure and everyday life over the past seven decades. Paintings, photographs, drawings and installations move from the 1950s to the present, from neighbourhood streets and urban markets to public parks and the vast landscapes of the Yangtze River, tracing its entanglement with human settlement. Rather than telling a single story of development, the exhibition asks what architecture can reveal about social change, how large systems are lived on the ground, and how connections between Manchester and China may generate new perspectives.
Speakers:
Xueting C. Ni has written extensively on China’s cultures and its place in the Western consciousness. Her nonfiction titles include From Kuanyin to Chairman Mao: An Essential Guide to Chinese Deities (Weiser Books) and Chinese Myths (Amber Books). She is the curator of two definitive anthologies of Chinese genre writing in translation: Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction and Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror (both published by Solaris).
Anna Wu (Wu Shuang 吴霜) is a writer of science fiction for both the page and screen. Her film script, Cloud and Mist, won the Gold Medal of Originality for the Best Science Fiction Film of the Sixth Chinese Nebula Awards. As translator, Anna's work includes stories for the science fiction collection, The Shape of Thought, by Ken Liu. Her novella collection, Twins was published in June of 2017.
Dan Shi 但适 is an emerging voice in Chinese feminist science fiction who has published numerous pieces in the Chinese edition of Galaxy’s Edge, an Eastern Wood anthology, and other platforms. Her short story ‘The Twelve-Piece Puzzle’ was selected for Best Chinese Science Fiction of 2024, edited and published by Science Fiction World.
