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Cheng Jingbo

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

(1983-    ) Chinese author and editor at Sichuan Children's Publishing House, deputy secretary general of the Chinese Association of Science and Technology. Such hefty connections within the publishing world, however, postdated her rise as an author, which began with "Xiang Pingguo Yiyang de Sikao" ["Thoughts Like an Apple"] (1999 Kehuan Shijie). Nominated for the Yinhe Award and winning a Xingyun Award, her works are notable both for the slowness of their appearance (critics have jokingly likened her to a Sichuan farmer waiting for her crop to flourish) and also for their ability to reach beyond the sf ghetto in China into more literary journals. In her role within children's publishing, she has also worked as a translator into Chinese, most notably on Robert Lawson's Ben and Me: A New and Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin as Written by His Good Mouse Amos (1939) and Rabbit Hill (1944). Among her longer fiction works, the untranslated Chuidishou yu Kaitangzhe ["The Piper and the Ripper"] (2015) seems the most accomplished: a heavily stylized detective novel in which a magical city is stalked by a serial killer.

Scattered with obvious references to other works, most notably Robert A Heinlein's The Door into Summer (October-December 1956 F&SF; 1957) (see Recursive SF), "Yonghuochong zhi Mu" (July 2005 Kehuan Wenyi; trans Ken Liu as "Grave of the Fireflies", January 2014 Clarkesworld) is a prolonged exercise in poetic Fabulation, a Far Future tale of impossibly advanced humans fleeing the heat death of the universe (see Entropy), delighting in the likelihood that seemingly everyday words and concepts have mutated so far in meaning across the Time Abyss that separates the reader, that one might as well be reading a Magic Realist fairy tale. [JonC]

see also: Women SF Writers.

Cheng Jingbo

born China: 1983

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